Re: what about 48 bits?

[Larry Sheldon <LarrySheldon () cox net>]

On 4/5/2010 15:36, Jon Lewis wrote:
> On Sun, 4 Apr 2010, 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?
>
> Since they only really need to be unique per broadcast domain, it doesn't 
> really matter.  You can I could use the same MAC addresses on all our home 
> gear, and never know it.  For manufacturers, it's probably reasonably safe 
> to reuse MAC addresses they put on 10mbit ISA ethernet cards...if they 
> were a manufacturer back then.

Seems like they have be unique within a DHCP "domain".  And you'd have
to pretty much outlaw mobiles.

Wouldn't you?  (Is there an accepted bit of nomenclature for all of the
networks that forward DHCP traffic to a given cluster of servers?)
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