On Tuesday 23 January 2007 18:07, Greg Wallace wrote: [...]
Ok. I found it. I picked "Use This Mac Address" which already had an address in it but was grayed out until I selected it. Is that the Mac Address of the modem, or of the router? I don't know. You might be able to tell by comparing that value with the MAC address displayed by 'ifconfig eth0' on your workstation (assuming you use eth0 to connect to your LAN and router. Choosing the "Default MAC Address" would definitely have used the router's MAC address on the WAN interface.
Thanks, Greg Wallace
I've been doing some googling on this and I'm still a bit confused. When you choose, for example, "Use This Mac Address", if that's not the mac address that the modem picked earlier (from, say, a different router) will it be accepted, or wouldn't you still have to re-boot the modem to get it to use that new address? Probably the latter. Unless you have all routers that you might from time to time connect to your cable modem using the same MAC address on the WAN interface, you'll have to reset the modem on each change.
Or am I still not understanding this process? You're getting there. In your case, this is probably just a learning exercise but not really necessary, since you were able to connect to your ISP after resetting the modem. This feature of most routers is essential, however, when an ISP requires that packets arriving at the cable modem be from some known (to them) MAC address, often one registered with them when signing up for their service. This way it looks like the original computer NIC is still connected directly to the modem, even though there's a router between the two.
Jim Cunning -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org