Re: Address allocation revisited

[John Day]

At 19:45 -0400 8/4/00, Anthony Atkielski wrote:
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>
>> How many Ethernet address blocks has 3com gone through?
>>[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>
>> How many Ethernet address blocks has 3com gone through?
>
>MAC addresses do not affect routing.  They are just numbers.  IP addresses
>cannot be randomly assigned, as they are correlated with routing.  This
>severely restricts the allocation of the address space.
>
>> If you allow 48 bits for hardware address blocks, and
>> assuming 8G people on the planet, each one can own some
>> 8,000 things that have addresses.
>
>Not if all those things are routed to based on their address.

Anthony,

You are absolutely correct in your analysis.  But this partly, why
addresses are supposed to be location dependent, not route dependent.  They
may have information embedded in them to tell you *where* they are, but not
*how* to get there.  This may be what you meant, but I wanted to clarify
it.  It may seem I am splitting hairs but it makes a big difference when
you get down to doing it.

Take care,
John