What do you call four X550 NICs with the same MAC address?

[Wolf-R1]

I'd call them fake but I'd like to hear what someone else has to say.

We bought them off of Amazon but I didn't pay attention to whether or not they were a marketplace vendor or Amazon itself. Just looked to see if they were Prime or not. Anyway after installing them we started having a ton of network problems. Discovered that one of the cards is definitely bad. Removing that one from the network immediately resolved connectivity issues. Mind you all during this entire time there have been zero port errors on any switch we connected these cards to. Not on the 10G switch or any 1G switch we tested with.
Anyway we were still having connectivity problems, packet loss and whatnot but what finally started to tip me off was that none of the machines with these cards in them could ping each other. They could ping other devices, though throughput was lossy but not each other. I disabled all but two of these one port cards and set them both to DHCP. They each kept getting the same IP address. That's where I finally discovered they all have the same MAC address.

Correct me if I'm wrong but as I understand things it's highly unlikely to get two cards with the same address let alone four of them.

I'm on the phone with Amazon right now and they're thankfully giving me a refund despite these cards being out of the return date. Hopefully the new cards we get will be legit.

 

[Aluminum]

Chinesium clones, grey shift parts, etc.

The intel chips themselves are likely real, the other parts may or may not be substandard.

You might be surprised but it is likely they came out of the same factory/group of factories as the legit ones.

 

[Mr. Baz]

If they are going into a Linux box just use macchanger and be done with it.