Understand Advanced Networking

There are day-to-day networking activities, and then there are advanced networking topics. These are the features that help us add more functionality, help us troubleshoot, or help us grow. Take, for example, the topic of customizing MAC addresses; this is clearly networking but not something that needs to be done on a regular basis. However, it may help you provide a software-based key for some specific applications while avoiding a hardware key (think USB dongle). Let’s take a look at this and other advanced networking topics.

Customize MAC Addresses

In what instances would you customize MAC addresses? There are more than a few applications out there that require some sort of license file to work, and some of them bind to the MAC address on the server. In some cases, it is possible to get a software vendor to give out a software-based license instead of a hardware-based USB key; but they will only do this for a vigilant and determined VMware administrator who won’t take no for an answer. Virtual machines by default do not have static MAC addresses; therefore, if one is needed it must be assigned.