] I'd go a bit further. I messed around with a large bridged ] network for some years, and this included messing with ARP ] proxies and all the troubles they cause. Basically, making ] a level 2 device simulate level 3 functions is a kludge, and it ] gets even worse when attempting to "bridge" different LAN ] technologies.
Lately I find myself wondering if there's not room for a uniform layer 2.5 interface that is designed to work over a set of bridged 802-style layer 2 networks, but presents a slightly different interface to the host. So for instance hosts would be explicitly required to announce presence on a link (no more passive waiting for ARP requests), there would be an explicit L2.5 multicast join/leave (no more sniffing for L3 multicast requests), and there would be a uniform way for a host to authenticate to the link (no more PPPoE), with hubs having a way to know whether a particular host/port/address was authenticated and the ability to switch that host's traffic differently depending on that bit. The same authentication interface could be used as a gateway to control access to a larger network. The point is to explicitly design such an interface rather than resorting to more and more tricks. (has this already been worked on and I just don't know about it?) Keith -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List IPng Home Page: http://playground.sun.com/ipng FTP archive: ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng Direct all administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------
