Working with virtualisation I find myself occasionally needing to generate a random MAC address for use with a virtual machine. I have a stupid little local script which spits one out, which is all fine and dandy for my purposes. However this week one of my colleagues was writing a wiki page and needed to include instructions on how to set the MAC address on the Arndale board. He wanted to include a shell snippet to generate one and I suggested that there must be websites which will generate you a suitable address. But when I came to look we found that not a single one of the half a dozen site which I looked at handled the locally administered or multicast bits correctly, meaning that they would randomly generate either multicast addresses or addresses using assigned OUI (or both). Using a random OUI may not cause too much trouble in practice but using a multicast address is sure to lead to strange behaviour, and in any case it's kind of lame.

So last night I sat down and wrote a quick hack cgi script to generate random addresses and tonight I deployed it at: http://www.hellion.org.uk/cgi-bin/randmac.pl.

This is where the world and his dog leaves a comment pointing me to the existing service my searches missed...