This MAC address is already in use (while it's not)

[izykopa]

Hi!
I've got quite surprising for me issue at hand.
There are three assets, let's name it 1 (id=214021), 2 (id=50030) and 3 (id=69607). 
Asset 1 with old MAC was replaced by another device, with MAC address a0:bd:1d:82:16:c0.
When I'm trying to put that MAC to asset 1, I get following info: This MAC address is already in use. (as You can see, it points to asset 2.

Asset 2 has currently no MAC, as setting it up to correct one was impossible too. Because when I try to insert its MAC address (08:ed:ed:5e:f0:3e) it states that This MAC address is already in use. (it points to asset 3).

And Asset 3 is finally the only one that's fine, with MAC 38:AF:29:DC:94:40. Please note that these three MAC addresses are unique, so should not cause any issues. Inserting fictional MAC on any of these works fine too.

Where does the "Already in use" comes from? I trunkated DB, rebuilt the indexes, even shrank the DB via Lansweeper DB tool. Is there a way to clear it without actually deleting and recreating all three assets? I'm almost certain that indeed the hardware of asset 3 was put in place of asset 2, and asset 2 was put in asset's 1 place some time in history during some infra cleanup and maintenance, but wondering why it's impossible to straighten it out in Lansweeper.

I've checked the community and found two other similar topics, but they does not describe exactly same issue, hence the new one. We are talking 11.4.0.4 now, but previous versions had it same (as issue was first noticed at the beggining of this year on V. 11.1.7.1 and 11.1.5.1).

[McDeth187]

I'm actually getting this error right now with 2 VMWare esxi hosts and LanSweeper On-Prem 11.4.1.4. The MAC Address field for the colliding assets do not contain the same MAC, yet LanSweeper won't let me make any changes to either asset as a result.  I've deleted and re-added the entire vSphere environment, including VCSA and all 3 esxi hypervisors, but the issue persists.

Think I'm going to open a support ticket for this one after updating to v11 if the issue persists.

[izykopa]

If you deleted both colliding assets and recreated them anew, MAC address shouldn't collide, unless they collide in real life (meaning, per ESXI hosts you could hypothetically modify MAC addresses especially for the virtual interfaces, so they can collide in the network), but that would most likely cause an array of issues in virtualisation and networking, so I believe that's rather unplausible. If that helps, none of my 4 ESXI hosts ever had that kind of issue, i'm updating all fields I needed freely, even tried now with the MAC address, no questions asked (but I'm already on v. 12.5.6.2).
Support ticket seems to be the best option for now.

[izykopa · Accepted solution]

This is considered edge-case and won't require a fix from Lansweeper.  As stated above, workaround is to fix it from cloud instance or delete colliding asset (even though it has different MAC in reality) then recreate it. For all these wondering, the MAC in question was loaded from table tblAssetMacAddress, but I'd not recommend digging in too deep into it since workarounds exists. I'll accept this response as a solution and leave it for the anyone having similar issue.
Szerokości misiaczki!

[izykopa]

But then again, cloud instance isn't that much better for MAC checking:

[izykopa]

Still happening in v. 12.5.1.1.
However, I noticed I can still edit it in the cloud instance and they promptly appear correct in onprem - maybe that will help someone.
Since that discussion is open quite long with noone else reporting, I'll write support to check.