How is the MAC address on a computer determined?

Posted by Zero Stack on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Zero Stack
Published on 2012-11-12T21:40:14Z Indexed on 2012/11/12 23:04 UTC
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mac-address

While imaging some computers today, I started to wonder... what if two LAN MAC addresses on two different computers matched?... That would cause some problems. I later came to understand that the MAC address' 48-bit address space contains potentially 248 or 281,474,976,710,656 possible MAC addresses. [ in other-words, a lot of networking devices ]

How are these MAC addresses determined?

Will we ever run out of them? ( I know the second question is speculation, but there are a lot of devices that require a mac addresses...)

Do MAC addresses get recycled?

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