On Wed, 2003-08-06 at 19:00, Aidan Williams wrote: > Mark Smith wrote: > > > > > > It is even less likely that the MAC address that came from an ethernet > card will be the same in both sites.. >
Ok, I think you might have missed the point of my original email, so I'll try to re-state it : 1) If people have lots of choices, they would rather not make a choice, particularly when they don't have the knowledge to make a value judgment as to what the "best" choice is. In this case, there is no value judgment to be made, but with say 100 - 1000 (or many more) EUI-48 addresses to choose from (remember, each switch has a EUI-48 address per port), it will *feel* like there is a value judgement to be made. And that will confuse them. Too many choices can almost be as bad as not enough. 2) Even if you automate the process of generating a local range address using a EUI-48 MAC address, which device do you perform it on ? For example, with 200 routers, and multiple Internet connections (ie. so you can't say the "Internet" router is the one to get an EUI-48 from), again, you can have too many choices. Which router / interface is the "right" EUI-48 source ? 3) Alternatively, if there was a manual EUI-48 entry prompt, to allow people to select an arbitrary EUI-48 from their set, if they don't know how to find out an EUI-48 address, and / or don't understand the value in selecting a IEEE assigned EUI-48, they will enter 00:00:00:00:00:00, or 11:11:11:11:11:11, etc. These are people / technology issues, not just technology issues. Bob's use of a ntp time stamp and the operator's birthday as the hash input avoids these problems. Regards, Mark. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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] --------------------------------------------------------------------
