Determining MAC address from OpenBoot Prom

The following tutorial covers obtaining your MAC address (physical address) of your network interface on a Sun Sparc machine. Obtaining your MAC address is often necessary when you are using JumpStart and need boot off a non-default network interface.

At the Open Boot Prom issue the following commands to list the devices on the system:

show-devs

You should see output similar to what is below. This output is from a v420r system. You might have more or less hardware depending on the system type.

/SUNW,UltraSPARC-II@3,0
/SUNW,UltraSPARC-II@2,0
/SUNW,UltraSPARC-II@1,0
/SUNW,UltraSPARC-II@0,0
/counter-timer@1f,1c00
/pci@1f,2000
/pci@1f,4000
/virtual-memory
/memory@0,0
/aliases
/options
/openprom
/chosen
/packages
/pci@1f,2000/pci@1
/pci@1f,2000/pci@1/network@0
/pci@1f,4000/pci@4
/pci@1f,4000/scsi@3,1
/pci@1f,4000/scsi@3
/pci@1f,4000/network@1,1
/pci@1f,4000/ebus@1
/pci@1f,4000/pci@4/network@0
/pci@1f,4000/scsi@3,1/tape
/pci@1f,4000/scsi@3,1/disk
/pci@1f,4000/scsi@3/tape
/pci@1f,4000/scsi@3/disk
/pci@1f,4000/ebus@1/flashprom@10,0
/pci@1f,4000/ebus@1/eeprom@14,0
/pci@1f,4000/ebus@1/fdthree@14,3023f0
/pci@1f,4000/ebus@1/ecpp@14,3043bc
/pci@1f,4000/ebus@1/su@14,3062f8
/pci@1f,4000/ebus@1/su@14,3083f8
/pci@1f,4000/ebus@1/se@14,400000
/pci@1f,4000/ebus@1/sc@14,500000
/pci@1f,4000/ebus@1/SUNW,pll@14,504000
/pci@1f,4000/ebus@1/power@14,724000
/pci@1f,4000/ebus@1/auxio@14,726000
/openprom/client-services
/packages/sun-keyboard
/packages/SUNW,builtin-drivers
/packages/disk-label
/packages/obp-tftp
/packages/deblocker
/packages/terminal-emulator

From the device output we can see that we have the following three network interfaces on the system:

/pci@1f,2000/pci@1/network@0

/pci@1f,4000/network@1,1

/pci@1f,4000/pci@4/network@0

To obtain the MAC address for a single interface we can issue the following:

cd /pci@1f,2000/pci@1/network@0
.properties

So in the command above we simply navigated into the device directory and issued .properties. We should get the following output:

assigned-addresses       82810010 00000000 00600000 00000000 00200000
                         82810030 00000000 00800000 00000000 00100000
entropy-dev              vms110
d-fru-len                00 00 00 00
d-fru-off                00 00 e8 00
d-fru-dev                eeprom
s-fru-len                00 00 08 00
s-fru-off                00 00 e0 00
s-fru-dev                eeprom
compatible               70 63 69 31 30 38 65 2c 61 62 62 61 2e 31 31 00

reg                      00810000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
                         02810010 00000000 00000000 00000000 00200000
                         02810030 00000000 00000000 00000000 00100000

address-bits             00 00 00 30
max-frame-size           00 00 40 00
device_type              network
name                     network
local-mac-address        00 73 7a 37 77 77
version                  Sun PCI Gigaswift (w/ 21154) Base-T FCode 2.10 02/05/16
phy-type                 mif
board-model              501-5902
model                    SUNW,pci-ce

We can see the MAC address under "local-mac-address" You can then take this address and use it in your /etc/ethers file to allow JumpStart to recognize the NIC.