Re: [Hampshire] Buying MAC's for organisation wide VT

On Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 01:16:55PM +0100, Damian Brasher wrote:
> Andy Smith wrote:
> > What's wrong with just making up your own and keeping a local
> > registry? MAC addresses don't pass between collision domains which
> > for any sizable network is a single VLAN.
>
> Depends on the size of an organisation: if you had roaming laptops with
> VM's then a large organisation would want to have some control if staff
> moved between VLAN's.

If I had large numbers of staff with laptops and virtual machines
then their laptops would be NATting through one virtual machine as
it would otherwise be very difficult to get the networking correct
for any of the types of connection they may use (wired ethernet,
wifi, 3G, dialup). Therefore MAC addresses would not be an issue.

> Bringing devices into a VLAN may cause problems with made up
> MAC's.

Yes hence the need to have a local registry. However, bringing any
devices into a VLAN may have the same problems.

> Creating the wrong kind of traffic on a VLAN might cause problems
> with firewalls or old network equipment.

Not a MAC issue..

> To have a pool of MAC's with central management available for R&D would
> seem to make sense?

If you have all the infrastructure required, you can make up your
pool; that is my point. I definitely agree that you need a local
registry. What I don't agree is that you need to get your own
allocation of globally-unique MAC addresses.

Private networks also do fine with private IP ranges which are not
globally unique. That is a worse problem than MAC addresses since
IPs are seen outside the broadcast domain, yet still enterprises
manage.

Cheers,
Andy

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