MAC address confusion

Has anyone else had problems with US Robotics wireless pc cards and MAC
addresses?

Last night I finally managed to work out why I couldn't get one of my cards
(a USR2210) to talk to my router whenever the MAC access security feature
was enabled. With my first card, I had taken the MAC ID of the card from
the BSS/IBSSID number that appears in the configuration utility of the card
and this had worked fine.

When I tried this with my second card, it refused to play ball and I was on
the point of returning to the shop when I spotted that in very tiny print on
the back of the card, it had a different MAC ID. When I punched this number
into the router, everything worked fine.

So, a couple of questions, are BSS/IBSSID and MAC different terms for the
same thing? Secondly, given that on my second card there is this mismatch,
how is it possible for the hardware to report an incorrect address? I would
have thought that any address that appears in the configuration utility
would have to be the right one and if there was going to be a discrepancy,
it would be far more likely that it was the printed address on the label
that would be wrong.

Tim

--
Remove the obvious to reply by email.

On Fri, 26 Sep 2003 08:56:06 +0100, "Tim Downie"
<timdownie2003*obvious*@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

>Has anyone else had problems with US Robotics wireless pc cards and MAC
>addresses?
>
>Last night I finally managed to work out why I couldn't get one of my cards
>(a USR2210) to talk to my router whenever the MAC access security feature
>was enabled. With my first card, I had taken the MAC ID of the card from
>the BSS/IBSSID number that appears in the configuration utility of the card
>and this had worked fine.
>
>When I tried this with my second card, it refused to play ball and I was on
>the point of returning to the shop when I spotted that in very tiny print on
>the back of the card, it had a different MAC ID. When I punched this number
>into the router, everything worked fine.

I've just bought Netgear AP and I'm getting strange results with MAC
addresses.

When I use WEP security my WiFi PC card reports a different MAC
address for my AP.

One Netgear representative said it was a security feature, well, I'm
not sure how that helps as far as security goes and I cannot see that
documented anywhere so, I think it may be a software glitch.

Geoff Lane