HP871xC LAN Address Missing!

[n3lee]

Hey everyone -- been beating my head into a wall for a few weeks; but am trying to move into the path ahead and want to make sure my methodology is sound...

I had an 8711A for a long time; and have always wanted the "C" version to get the LAN port function for convenience; as ethernet even at 10mbps is much faster than a floppy disk drive will write -- images to the disk.  I have considered swapping the floppy drive with some sort of SD/CF option in that regard....  or looking into the GPIB bus; but that seems to be a whole other sea unto its self.

I finally got a decent 8713C; which gets me into the multi-ghz response (not that I need it right yet) but also provided me with the valued LAN port.    I found the goodies I needed to front-panel enable the LAN option; upon reboot, I was greeted with a message "LAN ethernet address not set."

I went into the LAN settings; set an IP address, gateway, subnet mask etc -- rebooted, and still same error occurs...  hmm.
I started looking at all of the options, and it appears that the "LAN" Address it's complaining about is actually the MAC address -- nothing shows up on the screen when you go to 'show' the data.   
Firmware was on 4.01 and upgraded to the latest 4.52 hoping something would 'click' but alas, not the case.

I saw in other posts here that some others have had success in reading the AM28F020-120JC PROM's and hex editing certain things.  I have attained copies of their prom dumps; and have ordered the appropriate PLCC32 to DIP32 converter so I can read/write this chip;  I saw a snippet from another post that had a portion of the hex dump stating that the newer AM28F020-120JC's have an extra 32 bytes for the MAC address of the ethernet adapters (Guessing this is "C" and later revisions)

BFX had posted in 2018 that:

"The entry further from the end of the flash should look like this(in decimal):
!\C87*C.........US38060349. ..0060B08785C2.
In my case US38060349 is my serial #.
You simply want to change the 4 bytes before your serial # to all zeroes. Once that is done program the flash memory and put it back in your 8714C and you will have every possible software option enabled."
There is to change to zeroes an now you wrote to put FB.

I'm guessing that this last set of octets has something to do with the MAC; but can't otherwise verify or correlate....   I am digging around for software to open the binaries I downloaded and see the before/after's but perhaps someone else has seen this before?

Appreciate any insight anyone has here.... 

[aeg]

00:60:B0 is one of HP's OUIs, so I think there's a good chance that's the MAC.

[TheSteve]

00:60:B0 is one of HP's OUIs, so I think there's a good chance that's the MAC.

Agreed.

I'd also think that the error displayed is IP address, not hardware(MAC) address.

[optotester]

I guess the extract he posted is not from his scope but from the 2018 message, so he might actually have an issue with empty MAC.
0060B08785C2 is actually a MAC address, if it is missing from your device you can try to readd it at the same position as BFX in your EEPROM.
Normally yours shall be written on a label at the back of the device. It is likely 0060B0xxxxxx.

[n3lee]

The actual screen shows "LAN Ethernet Address not set" -- not to be confused with the initial IP address not set error which does appear when you initially install the feature....   It has an IP; however, will not respond to any network traffic, likely due to some primitive function of the NIC not having a MAC address...      I also saw some weird notes in the supplement for that option code; where it says "setting the subnet mask to anything other than 0.0.0.0 will subdivide the network and may not work" so, per it's own suggestion, tried setting the SNM to 0.0.0.0 and still had no luck (not that I expected that to work).

Again, when opening the LAN screen, the bottom option shows the "LAN Address" which is the MAC address -- it's blank (not even all ZERO's) which was kind of what lead me down this path of believing it's a separate issue.

I concur with the MAC address; just hoping that when I open some of the other firmware it's evident just how much spacing there is between the MAC and the EOF; otherwise I'll need to work that out backwards...     Appreciate the insight.  PS:  Interestingly enough, no MAC on the back, nor anything on the board near the NIC equipment....   I am sure at this point, whatever MAC I come up with will work just fine -- if there's a conflict on my instrumentation VLAN, I'll go out and play the lottery