IPv4 address length technical design

Fri Oct 5 23:34:14 UTC 2012

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.

There have been various schemes for UUIDs, intended to be unique, for
both hosts and disks or file systems, some quite widely deployed IBM's
System-36 in the early 80s but also Linux extN, others, see RFC
4122.

On October 5, 2012 at 16:47 johnl at iecc.com (John Levine) wrote:
 > In article <72A2F9AF18EC024C962A748EA6CF75B90ED2BA40 at W8USSFJ204.ams.gblxint.com> you write:
 > >Wouldn't that implicate the routing system to have, in essence, one routing entry for every host on the network?
 > >
 > >That would be the moral equivalent to just dropping down to a global ethernet fabric to replace IP and using mac addresses for
 > >routing.  I'll give you one guess as to how well that would work.
 > 
 > It works well for the 12 computers in my home office.  Therefore it's
 > a solved problem and trivial to implement.
 > 
 > HTH, HAND, &c.
 > John

-- 
        -Barry Shein

The World              | bzs at TheWorld.com           | http://www.TheWorld.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD        | Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada
Software Tool & Die    | Public Access Internet     | SINCE 1989     *oo*