RE: No Place Left to Hide on Tomorrow's Net?

[Nick FitzGerald <nick () virus-l demon co uk>]

Richard M. Smith wrote:

> Perhaps operating systems should generate a new random MAC address on each
> reboot.  Just a thought.

And if they don't, it should be pretty easy to lash something like this 
up yourself...

Don't most NIC's (or, technically, I guess, their drivers?) still 
support arbitrary MAC assignment?  It was necessary in the dark, evil 
days of -- ummmm, mind goes blank as I've tried to repress the 
memories...   D-D-D-D-DECnet

IIRC, certain bits of DECnet (or at least, certain bits of DEC hardware 
we had implementing critical pieces of our DECnet) would only talk to 
MACs that started with (one of) the DEC manufacturer prefixes, so to 
hook up an arbitrary PC, Mac, Sun, etc to such a DECnet config required 
either that your PC, Mac, Sun etc had a DEC NIC (rare to impossible) 
_or_ a NIC that could fake the MAC under s/w control (very common).

Last I looked (a few years back) all versions of Windows still 
supported this functionality, but I can imagine hardware design that 
would prevent it working...


Regards,

Nick FitzGerald

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