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Imaging MAC addresses

What

The MAC address of Windows devices for imaging purposes can be specified manually by the user from FileWave Admin. Unfortunately, this field will then be overwritten by the actual MAC address(es) reported by the client in inventory. This is an annoying problem when the MAC address specified by hand is the one of a USB-ethernet adapter that is not always connected to the device. A more robust solution would be to store separately the MAC address specified by the admin so that it never gets overwritten by what the client reports to inventory.

When/Why

On Windows-based systems, vendors have created the concept of a pass-through MAC address that is used with USB Ethernet dongles so that the MAC address of the dongle itself isn't used, but rather the pass-through MAC address of the device is used with the dongle. This overcomes the issue of the same MAC address showing up for many devices as the dongle is used on different devices, but creates a new challenge because that address isn't stored in FileWave inventory because it's not normally active.

How

With FileWave 14.6.x a new editable column "Imaging MAC Address" is available on Clients View and other views, where clients are visible (Imaging View, Associations View, etc.). This column shows a manually specified MAC address that is not changed by device inventory reports. Whenever the user specifies the MAC address of a Windows client in FileWave Admin, the value is stored in a new separate field. This can happen in the following use cases:

  1. When a placeholder is created
  2. When a placeholder is imported from a text file

When "Imaging MAC Address" is specified for an added client, the column "Serial/MAC" is unchanged. The new field cannot be the reason for enrollment conflict, as imaging is Windows only and serial/mac conflicts are macOS only.

ImagingMACaddress

The IVS recognizes all MAC addresses from Windows clients, including the ones reported to inventory and the manually specified one if any.

You can also mass-import Imaging Mac Addresses using the import tool within the FileWave Web Admin Console.

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