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

[Chris King]

On Mon, January 31, 2011 11:02, Mark Summerfield wrote:
> 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.)

That's definitely weird - most ethernet devices start "00:" as you've
noticed and some higher numbers are used for special cases (historically
DEC used AA:00:0[1234] for some of their stuff), but this is legit:

http://hwaddress.com/?q=88%3AAE%3A1D

Compal Electronics is an OEM for Acer and a number of other manufacturers.

> (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.

The DGN1000 router is notorious for dropping wireless connections - so
this is unlikely to be an Ubuntu problem.

Chris
-- 
Chris King
http://www.csking.co.uk/