They cannot have a MAC address because they don’t exist independent of a device. Imagine any program installed on your phone or laptop. When you’re talking about Alexa, you are talking about software, like Siri. MAC address of Alexa or Echo?Īlexa cannot have a MAC address on its own because it is not a device. Thus, if your device has two network interfaces, it will have two MAC addresses. The MAC address is not only related to the device, but also the network interface of your device. To make it easier to read, the number is separated with a colon or hyphen after every second digit. To give you a better picture of what your device’s MAC address should look like, it’s a 12-digit number. Like an address tells you where your home is located in the city, a MAC address tells you where your device is on the network of devices in your home or office! Each device has its own unique MAC address. The MAC address for your device is the same as a physical address for your home. The acronym stands for Media Access Control. Whatever caused this problem did so in a temporary way.Your MAC address is the address of your device. The NIC must get power even when the rest of the machine is powered down in order to allow the wake-on-LAN functionality. While I had power cycled the computer several times, I had not removed the power cord. Īfter physically removing the power cord from the computer, the MAC address returned to the original. How and why the hardware MAC changed is still a mystery. Inet6 fe80::fd62:c737:4f9c:80fe/64 scope link noprefixrouteĬlearly, the hardware MAC has changed and it isn't Ubuntu setting this address each time the system boots. In addition, I booted the system using SystemRescue. $ sudo cat /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/*Ĭat: '/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/*': No such file or directory $ sudo ls -l /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/ Inet6 fe80::82a3:395:882b:844a/64 scope link noprefixrouteĬat: '/etc/netplan/*': No such file or directory $ ip addrġ: lo: mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000 The new address has no vendor and looks to be completely random.ĮDIT: As requested, the output of several commands. The original address shows Giga-Byte Tech as the vendor (as expected, it is a Giga-Byte motherboard). The two are not even close to one another and hard to explain by a bit flip in EEPROM.
It has been a solid backup system-monitored but otherwise ignored because it just works-the kind of reliability I've come to expect from a Ubuntu machine.Īny ideas on what might have caused this? Could some update have caused this? A hardware issue? If so, how would I find out?ĮDIT: The original MAC address was 00:1a:4d:5e:7e:85 and the new address is aa:4c:ca:15:7e:97. It hasn't moved or had hardware modifications in years. The computer only runs for 20-60 minutes a day and does nothing else. The Ethernet port is build into the motherboard. At some point eth0 became enp2s0 but I can't imagine why that would have changed the MAC. This computer has been running Ubuntu and getting updated since 16.04. While I know the MAC address can be changed, I didn't think this could happen without asking. This morning something happened that caused the MAC address to change. I have a computer used for backups that does a wake-on-lan to run backups and then turns off.