On 16 Jul 2003, at 4:11, Michele wrote:

> One of the pc's however, will only connect through the 'uplink' connection
> on the router, but I'm assuming that it's because originally I had been
> using that particular pc with a switch. (maybe it thinks it's still
> connecting via a switch? I'm not sure) It really makes no difference
> however, as long as it's going to be a stable connection.(It had better be
> after all this trouble)

  What makes a port an "uplink" port is that it's wired internally as a
cross-over.  So if a PC "only works with the uplink port", odds are quite
good that the real problem is that it's connected using a cross-over cable
and not a regular straight-through cable.


>
> The adapter address FF-FF-FF-FF-FF-FF is the MAC address of the network
> card which is unique to each network PC card.  Some broadband ISP's assign
> their IP addresses to only one MAC address.  That is why most routers let
> you "Clone" your network adapter's MAC address to the router so your ISP
> thinks it is still talking the original network card.  My original ISP did
> that and I had to call them if I changed network cards so they would
> recognize me as an authorized customer.   It may be that your ISP has
> recorded the first PC's MAC address and doesn't recognize the second PC's
> network card MAC address as one of their customers.  If this is the
> problem, you may have to clone your first pc's MAC address to the router.
>
> Doug

  Adaptor MAC addresses consist of two fields:  the first three bytes (6 hex
digits) are assigned to the manufacturer (many popular manufacturers have
needed more than one such prefix...), and the last three are sort of a
serial number.  All of the MAC addresses on a single network need to be
unique; in practice, except when you need to do something like this on a
router, MAC addresses tend to be unique in the world.

  FF-FF-FF-FF-FF-FF, however, is the special MAC address reserved for
broadcast packets.  If something is reporting this as the address of the
adpater in your machine, something is wrong with the hardware or its driver
or something.  This is not a legitimate device address.

David Gillett

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