Well, XNS (Xerox Networking System from PARC) used basically MAC addresses. Less a demonstration of success than that it has been tried. But it's where ethernet MAC addresses come from, they're just XNS addresses and maybe this has changed but Xerox used to manage the master 802 OUI list and are assigned OUIs 000000...000009. Not insignificant in their effect. There have been various schemes for UUIDs, intended to be unique, for both hosts and disks or file systems, some quite widely deployed IBM's System-36 in the early 80s but also Linux extN, others, see RFC 4122. On October 5, 2012 at 16:47 johnl@iecc.com (John Levine) wrote:
In article <72A2F9AF18EC024C962A748EA6CF75B90ED2BA40@W8USSFJ204.ams.gblxint.com> you write:
Wouldn't that implicate the routing system to have, in essence, one routing entry for every host on the network?
That would be the moral equivalent to just dropping down to a global ethernet fabric to replace IP and using mac addresses for routing. I'll give you one guess as to how well that would work.
It works well for the 12 computers in my home office. Therefore it's a solved problem and trivial to implement.
HTH, HAND, &c. John
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