Netonix Forums

Possibly a silly question. Didn't seem to find anything about this topic in a search of the forum though.

Is there a way to change the mac address of the netonix? I suppose it's a feature not needed by many, but it might save me some time on a one-off project I'm working on. Only need to change the mac address of one netonix (WS-Mini6), and it'll only be used in this way for about a month for some testing.

No this is not a feature and at this time we are not planning on implementing this, sorry.

Out of curiosity could you explain the application where this function could be used and why?

It mainly has to do with how we've setup our network. A customer/employee's router is being told by some source on our network to drop it's lease, and it's happening in a few areas. We're setting up a wireshark on an intel NUC so we can try to catch where it's coming from when it happens again. The way our network is setup for vlans (especially limitations of some backhauls we're using.), we are filtering mac addresses at our tower to separate infrastructure devices from customer routers. and put them on different vlans going to our core. A limitation of our router is how many filter entries we can have, and we happen to be at the limit of our filters for this particular area I'm setting this up for. The limitation of this ridiculous design is negated by switching to QinQ, which we're starting to in all our networks. But this particular has not been switched yet, and is not yet ready for that change. If the network were setup for QinQ I could easily bypass the limitation of our backhauls, and I could just assign the netonix a vlan to get the traffic to the private ip space vlan.

To give the Netonix, and the NUC a private IP, they must have certain mac addresses to filter properly. The NUC I can change since it's centOS and an intel NIC. The Netonix was the only question.

I'm sure I'm probably over complicating this a bit, but the basis was: if I can change the netonix mac, it would just simplify the process of working with our mac filters.

Or, I could put the netonix on a public IP, I suppose since this is so short term that wouldn't be a terrible option.

tried doing a grep -r of the filesystem, all I found was the first half of the netonix mac in the macvendors.txt file. haha

I have found a filter entry that can be replaced with the netonix mac range. I'll go that route since it's the easiest.

But I also did find a way to temporarily change the mac using the "ifconfig eth0 hw ether aa:bb:cc:aa:bb:cc" command. Of course, this command does not carry over after a reboot. I did find that crontab entries carry over, so it could be possible to execute the ifconfig command on boot.

Might be something I play with more another time. Mostly for the sake of knowing that I did it.

You have to be careful messing with the switch MAC.

What you do not understand with a smart manageable switch is each port has a different MAC address.
You see the primary MAC but for things like RSTP, LAG, Loop Protection to work each port has a different MAC address.
At the Linux level you can only change the 1 primary MAC.