Bridges

[Ceri Davies]

On Fri, Sep 30, 2005 at 07:56:49PM +1000, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-Sep-29 08:44:09 +0930, Wilkinson, Alex wrote:
> >What is the difference between a "per-host MAC address" and a "per-NIC
> >MAC address" ?
> 
> All NICs have a unique MAC address.  This address can be over-ridden by
> the host if it needs to have the same MAC address appear on multiple
> interfaces.
> 
> Of the two cases I mentioned: DECnet changes all MAC addresses to one
> beginning AA0055 where the low bits are the host's DECnet address.
> This removes the need for IP's ARP since the source host can determine
> the destination host's MAC address without needing to ask the network.
> 
> Some versions of Solaris with some NICs (definitely Solaris 8 with
> Cassini NICs) associate a MAC address with the host, rather than the
> NIC.  I'm less certain of the rationale for this.

That's a setting in the SPARC eeprom: local-mac-address? set to true uses
the MAC addresses on the NICs.  The rationale is not clear to me either.

Ceri
-- 
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm
not sure about the former.			  -- Einstein (attrib.)
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