[124751] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: what about 48 bits?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Matthew Kaufman)
Sun Apr 4 16:52:05 2010
Date: Sun, 04 Apr 2010 13:51:27 -0700
From: Matthew Kaufman <matthew@matthew.at>
To: Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net>
In-Reply-To: <20100404180856.GP75640@gerbil.cluepon.net>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Reply-To: matthew@matthew.at
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 04, 2010 at 11:53:54AM -0300, A.B. Jr. wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Lots of traffic recently about 64 bits being too short or too long.
>>
>> What about mac addresses? Aren't they close to exhaustion? Should be.
>> Or it is assumed that mac addresses are being widely reused throughout
>> the world? All those low cost switches and wifi adapters DO use unique
>> mac addresses?
>>
>
> 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".
Of course it comes with a privacy problem if you want to use that
endpoint identifier globally and not change it for every session (as
some protocols that separate routable-address from endpoint-identity do)
Matthew Kaufman
