Re:'NSA addition to ifconfig'
by trothamel on Saturday May 28, 2016 @12:36PM
(#11792258)
The joke being, of course, that 00:20:91 is the OUI (3-byte MAC address prefix) assigned to the NSA.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
NSA has a MAC address prefix??
Re:'NSA addition to ifconfig'
by Sanddancer on Saturday May 28, 2016 @01:14PM
(#11792395)
The NSA is one of the largest hardware purchasers and designers on the planet, and has a ton of custom hardware, etc. It only makes sense or them to have their own oid.
They used to be. I dunno if they are in the age of Google, Facebook, and Amazon datacenters.
It seems like I recall in the past that NSA would rather do business under some Department of Agriculture pseudonym, or as some dummy corporation.
I remember talking to one of the engineers from DEC who worked on the original ethernet spec. He said they had a visit from some very smart guys carrying dept. of Agriculture business cards, to talk about what the spec would look like.
I don't know. Bumblehive seems rather big and modern compared to the usual suspect's datacenters: https://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/ You can find numerous articles about that particular one around. One can only wonder what kind of technological wonders are in there. That's the public one too. Now, imagine the rest.
http://standards-oui.ieee.org/oui.txt
00-20-91 (hex) J125, NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
002091 (base 16) J125, NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
9800 SAVAGE ROAD
FT. MEADE MD 20755-6000
US
> An OUI {Organizationally Unique Identifier} is a 24-bit number that uniquely identifes a vendor or manufacturer. They are purchased and assigned by the IEEE. The OUI is basically the first three octets of a MAC address.
Makes sense I guess.