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Comment by gresrun | Hacker News Reader

We have used a similar dongle at our company for a 2nd ethernet adapter on our Foxconn-built boxes and found out that they usually don't have unique MAC addresses. This made our lives very difficult because Cobranet audio network uses level-2 addressing. We eventually found a supplier with real MAC addresses.

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You know it is usually pretty trivial to assign whatever MAC you want to them.

(I have an unbranded Android phone that assigns a random MAC address every time I turn WiFi on/off. Apparently this happens since they didn't bother to initialise the EEPROM and just left it at all zeroes. But this means being harder to track, so I consider it more a feature than a bug...)

Does it have a legit IMEI? I've read about phones with IMEI set to all zeroes and/or configurable in a secret menu. What model is the phone?

To clarify, my interest in whether the IMEI is zeroed and/or programmable is about how the various mobile networks use IMEI, particularly: - China Unicom uses them to detect continued use of subsidized handsets on their network (and will send the customer a text if they're not using it (eg if they've sold their subsidized phone) - I believe T-mobile USA use IMEI to limit access to their 'free data for life' promotion to specific tablet models - Several UK mobile networks have different data tariffs for phones vs. tablets vs. dongles vs. mi-fi devices I'm wondering whether there is any/widespread use of these android devices to bypass restrictions and, eg use a cheaper tablet data plan on a mobile phone with tethering to multiple devices.

Were you able to get reliable performance sending CobraNet over USB Ethernet adapters? I once wrote a simple audio recording program for the Linux console for diagnosing CobraNet issues, but haven't tried it over a USB adapter.

Yeah, we still use them. They work without any problems on Ubuntu.

It's a shame this thread about CobraNet was lost in the HN crash over the weekend.

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