I have some Compaq Deskpro EN’s with PII/400 or PIII/500 processors and Compaq/Intel Pro 100 PCI NIC’s. Recently, some PC’s where restored to the original, factory image. The factory image used a Compag/Pro 100 NIC driver. All PC’s with the restoredimage reported to have the same MAC address. To make matters even more interesting, the vendor prefix of this address has not been released by the IEEE.
If I replace the Compaq driver with a current Intel driver, the correct, individual MAC’s are initialized and the problem is solved.
I must assume that the erroneous MAC address is used in manufacturing but I haven’t been able to find any references to this problem anywhere. Can anyone shed some light on this?
