How is the Ethernet MAC address for usb0 defined?

[michael at crosscode.org]

On Tue, 7 Aug 2007, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote:

>> Linux and also the various BSDs do not have this problem; I use it
>> on OpenBSD and it is always cdce0.
>
> They may simply not have the auto-config feature of MacOS X that relies on
> well-behaving devices...
>
>> Of course, the phone is open source, so if you want it done that
>> way, you could submit a patch to make it work that way. That's the
>> idea of Phase 1, after all!
>
> Yes, that is the idea of open source. Everybody can do it - but in practice
> you can't until you have found how to do this correctly and managed
> to recompile the kernel. Since I am not a Linux kernel specialist,
> it will become Phase 3 or 4...

 	This isn't a kernel problem - or at least it doesn't require a kernel fix.
The usb driver's mac address can be set from userland, like so:

ifconfig usb0 down
ifconfig usb0 hw ether 45:23:ED:23:98:34

 	Setting it to match the BT address (or the BT address plus one, which is
what I'd more likely expect; all my computers with multiple on-board ethernet
cards use consecutive mac addresses for each card) is fairly trivial *except*
that to get the BT mac address you have to load the BT modules and turn BT on,
so you'd be better off setting up a routine that does that if necessary but
then saves the new MAC address to disk and uses that disk cached value in the
future. It can all be done with a little bit of shell scripting on boot.

- Michael