When doing some research for connection my Netduino to the local network (using the Connect Shield) I stumbled upon the fact that I not only need to set the IP adress, network mask and gateway, but also the device’s MAC address – something that you normally don’t need to do because the vendor of the network device burned a globally unique MAC address into the device.
While it should not be a serious problem to randomly generate a MAC address (which might interfer with a real device’s MAC address somewhere on the planet) I wanted to do it “the right way”. There are many hints on the internet how to choose a private MAC address, mainly for use in virtual computers and many information about the pattern how MAC addresses for vendors are built.
So, to cut a long story short, I’ve come to the conclusion that it can be considered safe to use a MAC address starting with 01 followed by a random combination. I’ll give it a try and if it doesn’t work, then I’ll do some more in-depth research on the topic ;)