Disclosed herein is a highly reliable management communication path to the CPU of a network device using in-band signaling by periodically servicing the Ethernet MAC, such as during system tick and/or watchdog timer refresh interrupts. The servicing selectively processes frames that are uniquely destined to or originating from a managing device. There are several possible techniques to uniquely identify frames as management frames. For example, one technique to identify a management frame involves the addition of an Ethernet MAC address to be used only for management frames, another technique employs a dedicated VLAN to be used only for management frames, a third technique employs a dedicated Layer 2 frame type for management frames, and another technique involves configuring the Ethernet MAC to operate in promiscuous mode and only process frames sent and received as unicast frames using a fixed source or destination MAC address.