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Random Mac Address On System Boot Seen by Fing Box
Ever since the upgrade from Windows 1809 to 1909, around the beginning of January 2020, my computer produces a random generated mac address from my NIC (not wireless but wired) as seen by my Fing Box. The Fing Box monitors my network for suspicious activity as well as a slue of other features. Including the ability to auto block new wired and wireless connections on the network. I have used this device since its debut a couple years ago and it's never shown this issue before. What is happening is, when my computer boots up Fing notifies me of a new mac address and it is consistent with every boot. And then, only moments later it will disappear, Fing stating it was online for about a minute then it went offline. I first dove into the Fing community and even though there are some reports of this problem happening with other Fing users, I tried the supposed fixes and it has not worked for me, making me think it is an OS issue. As is I believe my OS is somehow for some reason creating a random mac address every time it boots. Here is what I have done so far to troubleshoot...
1. Turned off virtualization in the BIOS and Windows features
2. Disabled the onboard NIC and installed a 3rd party NIC
3. Disabled all hyper v related services
4. Tried a wireless adapter (which does not replicate the problem, only hard wired NIC's seem to cause the issue)
5. Uninstalled onboard NIC drivers and installed original drivers from ASUS and newer drivers from realtek. Also used Microsofts drivers
6. Disabled the onboard NIC which then fixes the problem but then no internet
7. Ran virus scans using Malwarebytes and Windows Security
8. Performed a Windows repair install
I looked over mac address randomization within Windows and it appears to apply to wireless connections only the problem happens over wired connections. The randomly generated mac address's are always different and, do not match my NIC's actual mac address. And the problem does not seem to appear when waking the computer from sleep. It only seems to occur starting from a fresh boot. My network has not changed for a couple years now. I am using Google Wifi (mesh) with Fing Box and a couple unmanned switches.
At this point any guidance would be helpful as to what I should do next. Thank you.
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For anyone who is interested,
The problem was with the beta desktop Fing software. It had installed a service called Fing.Agent. And when I removed the Fing software it did not remove the service. So I cmd "sc delete Agent.Fing" which removed the service, rebooted and now no more phantom mac address.
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