Configure unique MAC addresses on multiple interfaces

Contributed by qmchenry October 13, 2003  
Tagged: Solaris system administration

The same ethernet hardware (MAC) address is used by default on Sun systems with multiple ethernet interfaces. This works fine for failover load balancing or failover groups. It presents a problem when the two interfaces are connected to the same subnet.

To enable uniqe MAC addresses on multiple Sun ethernet interfaces, the BootPROM variable local-mac-address? needs to be set to true. This can be done from the ok prompt or by issuing the following command from the Solaris shell as superuser:

eeprom "local-mac-address?"=true

The quotes escape the question mark which would otherwise be interpreted as a wildcard by the shell.