Mathias Zenger wrote:
Usually you need to obtain your own MAC addresses at IANA (your
own OUI costs about $160).
I can't see any
mention of OUIs or MAC addresses at IANA.
The official
registry for allocating MAC addresses is run by IEEE, and no other
organisation is allowed to on-sell them.
It costs US$1650
to register an OUI, which reserves 16 million MAC addresses permanently
for your use. (This is a one-off fee.) If you don't want your allocation
listed in the public registry there is an additional annual fee of
US$2000.
You can also
register an individual address block for US$550, which reserves 4096 MAC
addresses permanently for your use. (This is a one-off fee.) If you don't want
your allocation listed in the public registry there is an additional annual
fee of US$1000.
If you are
eventually going to need more than 12000 MAC addresses, it is
cheaper to get an OUI.
You need to do
either of these before your device can be sold or connected to anyone
else's network (except in limited testing situations).
The only other
semi-legitimate way to get a small number of MAC addresses would be to get
hold of sufficient existing Ethernet devices, note down their MAC addresses
and then destroy them or at least ensure they are never connected to a
network.
For testing purposes in your private network you probably
just can vary
ETHERNET_CONF_ETHADDR0..5
and
ETHERNET_CONF_IPADDR0..3
It is also worth
mentioning that there is a range of MAC addresses specifically reserved for
local administration, which can be useful for testing purposes. Their intended
purpose is to allow a network administrator to allocate their own private MAC
address to every device on the network, rather than using the
manufacturer-supplied MAC address. In practice I doubt this is used
much.
This means that
the locally administered MAC address range is very likely to be free for your
own use within your network, but you can't use it with devices that you are
supplying for use on other networks. You should check with your network
administrator before using this MAC address range.
See http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/groupmac/tutorial.html for
details, but in short, if you start the MAC address with 0x40 in the first
octet (MSB first) it is a locally administered address and is guaranteed to
not conflict with any universally administered MAC address (one assigned
by a hardware manufacturer).