Job Snijders wrote:
Dear IEEE, please pause assigning MAC addresses that start with a 4 or a 6 for the next 6 years.
Disagree that this is an IEEE problem. This is problem that vendors need to work around. There is limited MAC space, and deprecating 1/8 of it due to the inability of vendors to cope properly with it seems like a really bad long term idea. It seems that the problem that cropped up on cisco-nsp is that a layer 2 switch, the Nexus 92160 (and possibly everything else which uses the same forwarding ASIC), cannot forward vpls frames with a 4 or 6 buried at a specific location inside the contents of the frame. This is an extraordinary bug which renders the hardware useless in specific circumstances. What makes it worse is that this is a well known corner case which should have been shaken out during design, if not found during QA. Nick