2010/4/4 Scott Howard <scott@doc.net.au>
On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Matthew Kaufman <matthew@matthew.at> wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address
The IEEE expects the MAC-48 space to be exhausted no sooner than the
year
2100[3]; EUI-64s are not expected to run out in the foreseeable future.
And this is what happens when you can use 100% of the bits on "endpoint identity" and not waste huge sections of them on the decision bits for "routing topology".
Having around 4 orders of magnitude more addresses probably doesn't hurt either...
Although even MAC-48 addresses are "wasteful" in that only 1/4 of them are assignable to/by vendors, with the other 3/4 being assigned to multicast and local addresses (the MAC equivalent of RFC1918)
Scott.
Wasteful in many ways. While most of end user devices work with temporarily assigned IP addresses, or even with RFC1918 behind a NAT, very humble ethernet devices come from factory with a PERMANENTE unique mac address. And one of those devices are thrown away – let’s say a cell phone with wifi, or a cheap NIC PC card - the mac address is lost forever. Doesn’t this sound not reasonable? A.b. --