MAC Bridge Miniport

I was looking at the thread: Home Network

And was struck by the fact that the MAC addresses were wrong in the IPCONFIG. Hardware NIC MAC addresses start 00*. Neither of them started 00. I then noticed the MAC Bridge Miniport network interface desciption. I hadn't noticed this before when working on XP machines. I've checked a couple on my network and they don't have this setting (they are all Pro versions - is this a Home "innovation ").

A search on the internet trawled up this:
Ethernet MAC Address help

Has anyone found problems with this Miniport config?

Masking the hardware MAC address seeems like a silly idea to me.

I am not a fan of XP and all my own Windows PCs run Windows 2000 Pro. So I only "play" with XP system when a fault occurs. Hence my ignorance on this.

*I've been told that when the MAC standard was put into place they were thinking well ahead and the first half of the addess identified the NIC manufacturer in the following way <planet no>-<country no>-<company no>. Earth is 00! This explains why MAC addresses start 00 and NICs from the same manufactures often have the same first half of the MAC address. Of course the 00 Earth story could be a networking myth - perhaps I shouldn't be so synical )

 

Not all MAC addresses start with 00:

aa:00:04 DEC (digital equipment corp)
08:00:69 Silicon Graphics (SGI)

and there are quite a few others although 00: does seem to be the most common. If you are interested, the web page Here lets you put in the company ID part of a MAC and will give you the vendor.

And for a quick what/why on the Software Bridging (XP only) you can look at the page Here.

 

Thank you Newt, very helpful.

So a technique that results in larger broadcast domains! Brilliant! Looks to be another reliable Microsoft networking solution to be put up there with internet connection sharing.

 

x.x.x.255 is your friend.

 

Surely in this respect:

FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF

Is your layer two friend.