It *is* frustrating that there is no official way to read a macintosh motherboard ethernet's MAC address without having the machine already on a network. On many Windows machine, that isn't an issue.

Granted, you can connect the mac up to a hub, and then read the MAC address from the either the Appletalk or TCP/IP control panels. But you've got to have that hub first.

Apple even has a program called "Apple LAN Utility 1.0b4" which supposedly can read the MAC address on macs that aren't connect to an ethernet network. The problem is that it doesn't support all models, and hangs the machine more than half the time. They need to update that utility. Apple could remedy this.

I don't like BA's approach (customer service, as well as 'one computer' per ADSL connection), but they have a point about non-iMacs being somewhat harder to support when it comes to the MAC address. I doubt they would issue hubs to all the service techs doing installs just to take care of this problem.

Of course, if you already know the MAC address of your mac, or you have a hub, they shouldn't just leave and charge you for the visit either.

-brendan