Phantom MAC address

acb95978
New Contributor II

Hi everyone,

This is more of a curiosity post than anything, but I was wondering if anyone might be able to shed any light on where a MAC address is coming from. I work at a university that still dual boots (I know, I'm working on that). We use Winclone to load WinPE from macOS to boot MDT. We also use an address manager control hardwired connections by MAC Address - pretty standard there.

Last week we received a load of 2018 Mac Minis (with T2 chips). I went through the normal workflow - enter MAC into address manager, wait for IP assignment, setup mac through DEP and Jamf, deploy Winclone package via self-service - but I was not able to get a network connection once in WinPE. It took me longer than I'm proud to admit to find that WinPE was using an entirely different MAC address than was printed on the box which was the one I used to setup macOS with. It's not a huge issue - I just enter the alternate mac into our address manager and continue on - it's just strange. This MAC address only appears in WinPE. Once Windows loads it shows the same MAC that macOS does. Running "networksetup -listallhardwareports" from macOS and "ipconfig /all" from Windows shows the same list of hardware addresses with no mention of the phantom MAC address that appears in WinPE. The mac address is also nowhere to be found in the Jamf inventory profile. I've set up 10 so far and this has been the case each time, each with a unique address in WinPE.

Again, not really looking to solve anything, just trying figure it out for my own understanding. I realize WinPE is outside the scope of this forum, but we dual boot several different models of Apple hardware, including older Mac Minis, and I've never seen this behavior. Has anyone else experienced this or is someone more knowledgeable with MACs able to help explain where this other one might be coming from?

1 REPLY 1

nomaan87
New Contributor

Hi Just curious if anyone else had this issue? We have the same issue and I was wondering is it because of a driver that is being used?