Andy Smith wrote:
> 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.
Depending on how they set up their own VM's, it's a very small chance that
there would be a conflict - I agree.
>> Creating the wrong kind of traffic on a VLAN might cause problems
>> with firewalls or old network equipment.
>
> Not a MAC issue..
I'm not sure about that, could accidentally enabling the mulitcast bit in
a MAC cause problems with non mulitcast aware hubs connected on the same
media segment?
>
>> 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.
>
The chances of problems occurring are probably about the same as winning
the lottery,
The other question is that can you consider a bridge diving media, does a
software bridge on a VM server constitute a collision domain?
thanks for the response
Damian
--
Damian Brasher
www.interlinux.co.uk
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