vmtools
NAME
vmrndmac — generate a random MAC address
DESCRIPTION
Generate a random
MAC address.
Such address can be used to manually update a virtual machine network settings.
prefix must be a valid prefix for the
MAC address. It must contain up to six groups of two hexadecimal digits separated by colons. A final colon may be present or omitted. It is not possible to break a group of two hexadecimal digits.
Moreover, care should be taken for the address to be valid from a network perspective. It is recommended to use valid Organizationally Unique Identifier (
OUI). At the very least the multicast bit must be set to zero to avoid frames drop and the locally administered bit should be set to one.
Addresses fulfilling both of these recommendations have their first byte ending with either
2,
6,
A or
E (see
EXAMPLES below). Addresses with the multicast bit set to zero have an even first byte.
If no
prefix is provided,
vm_networking_default_mac is read from
vmtools.conf(5).
OPTIONS
The options are as follows:
-
-h
-
Show usage information summary then exit.
ENVIRONMENT
-
XDG_CONFIG_HOME
-
Location of user’s configuration files, by default ~/.config.
FILES
-
/usr/local/lib/vmtools
-
Libraries shared by the vmtools project utilities.
-
/usr/local/share/vmtools/vmtools.conf
-
Virtual machine default settings, see vmtools.conf(5).
Moreover, the content of
/usr/local/share/vmtools can be overridden in the following locations (in the order of precedence):
-
~/.config/vmtools
-
User overrides (if cfg_include_userhome is set to “yes”).
-
/etc/vmtools
-
System-wide overrides.
EXIT STATUS
The vmrndmac utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.
EXAMPLES
-
Example 1:
-
Generate a random MAC address using the default prefix:
vmrndmac
-
Example 2:
-
Generate a random MAC address with a fixed prefix (the first byte ending with a 2 denotes a locally administered, unicast MAC address):
vmrndmac '12:34:ab:cd'
