[124876] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: what about 48 bits?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roland Perry)
Wed Apr 7 06:45:35 2010
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2010 11:43:41 +0100
To: nanog@nanog.org
From: Roland Perry <lists@internetpolicyagency.com>
In-Reply-To: <201004071023.o37ANtww018405@aurora.sol.net>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
In article <201004071023.o37ANtww018405@aurora.sol.net>, Joe Greco
<jgreco@ns.sol.net> writes
>>interoperability and backwards compatibility were the tipping points.
>
>Ah, yes, backwards compatibility: implementing the fantastic feature of
>breaking the network...
By "backwards compatibility" I mean the ability to use the new LAN from
a laptop that didn't have an Ethernet connection built in, and didn't
have an optional [proprietary] internal Ethernet card available either.
Later on, of course, you would get PCMCIA cards and USB dongles rather
than Centronics-port dongles. But the market for these remained
dominated by the Ethernet standard, rather than others.
>we all remember the fun of what happened when
>someone incorrectly unhooked a 10base2 network segment; D-Link managed
>to one-up that on the theoretically more-robust 10baseT/UTP by
>introducing a card that'd break your network when you powered off the
>attached PC.
That tale of woe doesn't really sound like it's the fault of backwards
compatibility. Didn't the operational status of the LAX immigration
department fall to zero for almost a whole day, once; as a result of a
rogue network card crashing the LAN?
--
Roland Perry
