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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 woul

by 0x0 14y ago

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?

sneak 14y ago
Thank you for summarizing the answer in the linked article. You may now proceed to posting solutions to FizzBuzz in Jeff Atwood's blog.
- 0x0 14y ago
  Well, what kind of discussion would you expect for an article like this? Perhaps you should spend your time revising your HN bio instead.
nodrama 14y ago
well.. technically it is possible. The mobile phone network works like this without a problem. You turn off your phone, go to the other half of the planet, turn it on, it updates it's "location" and you are back "online". The reason to use IPs is that you don't have to update and maintain all those "locations". IPs mark the end of a cable. MACs mark an equipment. Equipments can migrate easily (you need updates), "end of cables" less so.
tptacek 14y ago
It's not impossible, just untenable; it would be the equivalent of advertising every IP address today as a /32 prefix.
wmf 14y ago
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://www.cs.uiuc.edu/~caesar/papers/rofl.pdf http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2010/CoNEXT_papers/20-Singla.pdf http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2010/CoNEXT_papers/20...
cllunsford 14y ago
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/ 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.

by 0x0 14y ago

sneak 14y ago

Thank you for summarizing the answer in the linked article. You may now proceed to posting solutions to FizzBuzz in Jeff Atwood's blog.

0x0 14y ago
Well, what kind of discussion would you expect for an article like this? Perhaps you should spend your time revising your HN bio instead.

nodrama 14y ago

well.. technically it is possible. The mobile phone network works like this without a problem. You turn off your phone, go to the other half of the planet, turn it on, it updates it's "location" and you are back "online". The reason to use IPs is that you don't have to update and maintain all those "locations". IPs mark the end of a cable. MACs mark an equipment. Equipments can migrate easily (you need updates), "end of cables" less so.

tptacek 14y ago

It's not impossible, just untenable; it would be the equivalent of advertising every IP address today as a /32 prefix.

wmf 14y ago

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://www.cs.uiuc.edu/~caesar/papers/rofl.pdf http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2010/CoNEXT_papers/20-Singla.pdf http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2010/CoNEXT_papers/20...

cllunsford 14y ago

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/ 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.