Wilko Bulte wrote: > > An explanation of > > why users need to reprogram their MAC's - which is rather unusual - > > would help quite a bit. > > Things like DECnet used to do it. And I think some server clustering > solutions might still do it.
DECNet reprogrammed the MACs with the DEC ethernet allocation block, and the last part was the DECNet Node ID. VRRP uses a similar approach for MAC reprogramming for IP address takeover. It does this because not using real MAC addresses for VRRP confuses the hell out of switches (most particularly, L2 switches like those from Extreme, which don't have the ability to cache multiple MAC addresses per port). Using the multicast mask approach (like the FXP version of VRRP for Linux) is a bad idea, since VRRP requires the use of multicast anyway. FreeBSD needs some basic changes for multiple MAC s to be useful, though. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
