On Oct 5, 2012, at 4:34 PM, Barry Shein wrote:
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.
You need a memory refresh. XNS used a three part address: network number, host identifier, and socket number. "Socket" was in essence the TCP/UDP Port Number. the host identifier was as you say a 48 bit number and generally took as its value the MAC address on one of the interfaces - and the same MAC address was used on all interfaces. Hence, no need for ARP/ND. The network number was a 32 bit number assigned to a LAN subnet. A multihomed host essentially implemented ILNP. The issue with the network number was, of course, that it couldn't be aggregated in any useful way. But XNS was not ethernet bridging on a wide scale.