[SWLUG] "invalid" mac address... (just curious)

[Mark Summerfield]

Hi,

(1)

I have a Netgear router (N150 DGN1000), and (7 months after my Dell
Hell) I've now bought an Acer Aspire One 255 (every bit of which I've
tried so far works fine out of the box with Ubuntu 10.10).

The router correctly works with the netbook and correctly detects its
MAC address as: 88:AE:1D:8F:AD:AA. However, when I try to reserve a
fixed IP address on my LAN for it, netgear says the MAC address is
invalid. It isn't a bother---ssh still works fine etc., some I'm just
curious as to why it is "invalid". (All my other machines have MAC
addresses starting 00: although I don't know if that's significant.)

(2)

I find that wireless networking is very frustrating. It works on my new
Acer and on my old Toshiba (both running Ubuntu). However, on both
machines (which have completely different Network cards), the same
behaviour occurs: they find my router and connect to it automatically at
start up and the connection works fine., But some time later, they drop
the connection. They then try to reestablish the connection, frequently
prompting me to confirm the WPA2 password (even though they both know it
and used it to automatically connect in the first place), and in almost
every case, fail to connect. This is only a mild inconvenience since I
usually use them in the same room as the router and use physical cables,
so again just asking out of curiosity.

:-)

-- 
Mark Summerfield, Qtrac Ltd, www.qtrac.eu
    C++, Python, Qt, PyQt - training and consultancy
        "Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt" - ISBN 0132354187
            http://www.qtrac.eu/pyqtbook.html