Mountaineer Ethernet - MAC Address

Archive
1

The Mountaineer Eth I am using came with a mac address label on the RJ-45 port. This did not match the actual address.

Label = 0050C2F89107
Actual= 0050C2F80000

I have a couple questions:

  1. Should the mac address match the label?
  2. Will boards always be shipped with a unique mac?

I ask this because I am using the mac as a kind of unique identifier and I’d rather not have to update the address. Further I could have 2 devices on the same network.

Finally, when I try to use MFDeploy to change the mac address I get an error saying “Unable to write to Device” and in the console window I get:

Checking Connection…
Getting Connection Response…
Memory: OUTOFMEMORY!! 13336

I have an empty program loaded and I am using 4.2 QFE2. This was the case with QFE1 as well.

Thanks -AP

2

If you really want a unique identifier for these boards, consider using the mcu’s 96-bit unique ID…the firmware should expose that somehow.

3

To me the Label seems like the right address… the “actual” you mention shows really only a manufacturer portion of an address, the last portion is the unique adapter address.

So the answer to 1 I believe is yes, they should match.

For 2, it is typical for some portion of the ethernet network components to supply a MAC address. It is done to give uniqueness. (there are some hardware providers out there who do not go to the expense of doing this which can leave an end-user to guess and hope they don’t conflict with an existing device).

I don’t know whether the Mountaineer boards are meant to fall into the category of supplied unique addresses or not; lets see if one of the mountaineer team can answer that. What I can say is that 0050C2 seems to be the “ieee registration authority” MAC address vendor.

I don’t know what the behaviour of MFDeploy on this board is meant to be, but perhaps it’s not possible to set MAC address via MFDeploy. I suspect that has to be set up when the firmware is created, so it may not have been done.

One more way of getting a unique ID for a board is to use a OneWire device connected to it and use it’s address as the ID.

4

[quote=“Brett”]
I don’t know whether the Mountaineer boards are meant to fall into the category of supplied unique addresses or not; lets see if one of the mountaineer team can answer that.[/quote]

We bought a MAC address range for Mountaineer boards and provided them to GHI. So yes, the addresses are unique (among the “official” addresses).