On Thu, 2008-05-15 at 10:26 -0400, James Knott wrote:
A lot of people get confused on this and think a MAC address has to be unique world wide. No so. It only has to be unique on the local lan. Once a packet goes through a router, the original MAC is discarded and replaced by the one for the router interface. And of course, some interfaces, such as a PPP link don't even use a MAC address. BTW, some NIC manufactures have duplicated MACs, instead of obtaining a new blo0ck. Also, at one time MACs would be used for routing purposes and thus needed to be changeable. There were some networks, such as Arcnet, where there wasn't a fixed address, but instead 8 switches, to set the NIC address. IIRC, the 48 bit MAC addresses, that we all know and love, came in with ethernet and token ring networks. There is also a difference in the MAC address ranges assigned to those two network types.
That's my MAC Address history lesson for the day :) -- Regards, Shawn Holland -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org