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A comment on Why couldn't MAC addresses be used instead of IPv4|6 for networking?.

Re:Why couldn't MAC addresses be used instead of IPv4|6 for ... by 0x0 on Wednesday July 25, 2012 @05:29PM (#4293173)
Routing packets based on MACs would be impossible. That's why.

My laptop has the same MAC whether it is connected at home, at work, or in the airport. How would ISPs and the internet backbone routers know where to send the packets to reach me?

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Re:Why couldn't MAC addresses be used instead of IPv4|6 for ... by tptacek on Wednesday July 25, 2012 @06:05PM (#4293333)
It's not impossible, just untenable; it would be the equivalent of advertising every IP address today as a /32 prefix.
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Re:Why couldn't MAC addresses be used instead of IPv4|6 for ... by cllunsford on Wednesday July 25, 2012 @08:23PM (#4293743)
Routing at layer 2 (via MAC) is already implemented in the data center. See TRILL or Cisco's FabricPath.

At Internet scale, LISP (http://www.lisp4.net/) takes on the problem of a 'static' host address being reachable at any location.

Both of these rely upon the idea of encapsulation (mac-in-mac or ip-in-ip) to separate the location and host identity.

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Re:Why couldn't MAC addresses be used instead of IPv4|6 for ... by wmf on Wednesday July 25, 2012 @07:03PM (#4293522)
There's some interesting research in this area, but the current state of the art is pretty inefficient. http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/~caesar/papers/rofl.pdf http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2010/CoNEXT_papers/20...
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Re:Why couldn't MAC addresses be used instead of IPv4|6 for ... by sneak on Wednesday July 25, 2012 @05:39PM (#4293224)
Thank you for summarizing the answer in the linked article.

You may now proceed to posting solutions to FizzBuzz in Jeff Atwood's blog.

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Re:Why couldn't MAC addresses be used instead of IPv4|6 for ... by 0x0 on Wednesday July 25, 2012 @05:46PM (#4293255)
Well, what kind of discussion would you expect for an article like this?

Perhaps you should spend your time revising your HN bio instead.

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