Point to Point Ethernet

Fred Baker fred at cisco.com
Wed Jul 8 23:16:16 UTC 2009


if it does away with MAC addresses, in what sense is it an Ethernet  
link?

I'll go with EPON or a variety of those. Not sure what messing with  
the Mac frame actually buys.

On Jul 8, 2009, at 3:01 AM, Andre Oppermann wrote:

> A few time already I've wished for a fully standardized and vendor
> interoperable way of doing a true point to point ethernet link.
>
> It would work just like an old leased line or synchronous serial
> interface and completely do away with ARP, MAC addresses and all
> that stuff.  Obviously no switches in between would be allowed.
> Each side would run in "promiscuous mode" where every ethernet
> frame is received and passed up to the network stack (just like
> on a serial link).  Since MAC addresses are useless they can be
> scrapped and only the ethertype field remains.  This increases
> the effective MTU by 12 bytes.
>
> The framing overhead goes away and the packet can directly be
> directly placed on the wire without taking a detour through L3->L2
> lookup and encapsulation step.
>
> More importantly one can specify the just the outgoing interface
> again instead of the next hop:
>
> ip route 10.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 g0/1
>
> Do you think this is useful?  Maybe vendors will hear me/us.
>
> -- 
> Andre
>





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