Re: No Place Left to Hide on Tomorrow's Net?

[der Mouse <mouse () rodents montreal qc ca>]

> IIRC, certain bits of DECnet (or at least, certain bits of DEC
> hardware we had implementing critical pieces of our DECnet) would
> only talk to MACs that started with (one of) the DEC manufacturer
> prefixes,

It's been a while, so I may have this wrong (and it may depend on which
DECnet Phase we're talking about), but as I recall, it was actually
that DECnet tried to reach a machine at a MAC address derived directly
from its DECnet address (the DECnet node number got a fixed set of bits
prepended to it).  I don't remember exact details, but it was something
like node 14:711 (binary 001110 1011000111, hex 3ac7 after regrouping)
being assumed to be at 0a:00:00:01:3a:c7, the 0a:00:00:01 part being
constant and part of the spec for that phase of DECnet.

Yes, this put them in a part of the MAC address space assigned to DEC,
but it didn't depend on having a DEC card, just on having one whose MAC
address could be set by software (these days that's all of them, but
back in the earlier days it wasn't).  Of course, it also required
software that knew how to set the MAC, but that was just part of having
a DECnet stack that could handle that interface.

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