The invention relates to a method for operating a network, wherein at least two network devices are connected to one another in the network via a data line and exchange data via this data line, wherein each network device is fixedly assigned an independent MAC address, wherein a network management station also controls the configuration and/or the operation of the network, characterised in that a query is sent from the network management station by multicast by means of the SNMP protocol to the network devices so as to query the configuration parameters of the network devices and/or configure the queried network device by SNMP.