Duplicate MAC addresses

[Brian Cluff]

I have a couple of computers that I use as clients to my MythTV server. 
  I was having some problems with them that a bios upgrade fixed, but 
after the upgrade I found that it had hard coded both my machines to the 
same MAC address.  I ended up having to set them back in the network 
config... totally lame.  I have no idea how I would possibly set it 
back, or to something...anything else.

In any case, I suspect that a similar thing might have happened to these 
people.  It could have even been applied a botched BIOS update right 
from the factory.

Brian Cluff

On 02/06/2014 04:50 PM, Daniel Stasinski wrote:
> The past few days I've been trying to solve a mystery.
>
> I've run a disability chat room for 17 years now and the whole time we
> have had our own custom chat client that connects to a customized
> ircd.  For the identd portion of the connect, I have always used an 8
> digit random number but as of v3 of the client, I seeded the random
> number generator with their MAC address so their identd would be the
> same if they re-installed.  I have always been under the impression
> that no two devices would ever share the same MAC.  Note that this
> isn't a security issue for the site, it's just a convenience thing for
> me.
>
> In the last couple of months, 4 people have come in with duplicate
> id's.  This has never happened before.  Finally today a new guy came
> in and he turned out to be a programmer too so we talked about it and
> he gave me his pc's mac address.  58-2c-80-13-92-63. On a whim, I
> googled it and holy crap!
>
> I'm going to switch algorithms but I'm still curious, is it normal for
> vendors to recycle MAC addresses?
>
> Daniel
>