Error inspecting MAC Address

Last updated: Tuesday, February 12, 2008

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This article contains information about the 'Error inspecting MAC Address' network status code.

Article Details

'Error inspecting MAC Address' is one of the possible status values that a machine can have after running a machine audit or a network scan. It indicates that, when auditing a machine, ENT was able to connect to the the WMI service on that machine and authenticate properly, and the machine audit was started, but while collecting information about the MAC Address on the remote machine, an unknown error was encountered.

We have had customers report problems obtaining information about the MAC address on machines that had the Intel ProSet software installed. In these cases, this problem was resolved by uninstalling the "WMI Support" feature for the Intel ProSet software (by changing the installed features for this product from the add/remove programs control panel applet in windows).

Similar issues have also been reported on machines running Broadcom software, the presence of which can either block access to the classes that store information on the Win32_NetworkAdapter class in WMI or can cause these classes to falsely return no information. This issue has been resolved on these machines by uninstalling the Broadcom software.

Alternatively, this error might also be caused by a corrupted WMI repository and certain customers have been able to resolve this simply by reseting WMI, as described in our knowledge base article http://www.microforge.net/kb/102 .

Finally, such an error might occur if the machine was switched off some time after ENT started an audit on that machine and some time before the audit was complete - but since a remote audit would typically take 3-10 seconds on a 100MB network, you would not expect this to happen very often. If you receive this error message consistently when trying to audit a particular machine on your network and rebuilding the WMI repository as per the article referenced above does not help, please contact Microforge.net Support for further assistance.