Changing MAC Addresses

[Sam Johnston <samj@aos.net.au>]

Afternoon all,

I'm not sure if this is the best forum for this question as it is not 
necessarily directly related to Netfilter, but I can't think of anywhere 
else I might find anyone capable of answering it, so here goes.

I have a bunch of xboxes running linux which all have the same MAC 
address: 00:00:00:00:00:00. This causes obvious problems when more than 
1 machine is on any one segment. I'm led to believe I can work around 
the problem by putting something like:

/sbin/ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:50:f2:ab:cd:ef up

fairly early in the boot process (specifically, I've chosen the pre-up 
directive in /etc/network/interfaces as they're running Debian).

When I do this I'm able to see the MAC<->IP mapping in the ARP table of 
another machine, but it doesn't respond. I figure that something 
somewhere is remembering the old MAC address and dropping anything that 
doesn't match, although I don't know enough about low level networking 
in linux to be sure.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Sam