3 ms·
> The correct answer is simple: The Internet doesn't use MAC addresses, and Internet packets don't have MAC addresses. At all. > A typical packet found on a ty
by ranger_danger 1y ago
> The correct answer is simple: The Internet doesn't use MAC addresses, and Internet packets don't have MAC addresses. At all.
> A typical packet found on a typical network has a structure like this:
> Destination MAC address
> Source MAC address
- userbinator 1y agoThat jumped out at me too and seemed an "LLM-ism", but the article looks entirely human-generated.
- jeannot12 1y agoThe fact the wrong ethertype is used in the packet at the beginning (0x88dd, IPv6 instead of 0x0800 for IPv4) made me think of an AI generated article too.
- userbinator 1y agoIt is consistent with the rest of the fields for IPv6, but normally one would write IPv6 explicitly, and implicitly IP to mean IPv4.
- kstrauser 1y agoIP packets and Ethernet frames are separate animals. Ethernet doesn’t know IP, except for a flag saying “interpret my payload as an IP packet”. It doesn’t have src or dst IP addresses. And an IP packet doesn’t know about its physical transport. It doesn’t have src or dst MAC addresses. You can put other things than IP packets inside Ethernet frames. You can put IP packets into non-Ethernet carriers. The short version is that small LANs route frames by MAC addresses and don’t know about IP addresses, and the Internet cares only about IP addresses and not MAC addresses.
- ranger_danger 1y agoYes I am aware, I was just pointing out that they are claiming that MAC addresses exist in "packets" (not frames) while simultaneously saying they don't.
- kstrauser 1y agoAh, got it. Yeah, they could’ve been clearer about that. I still call them packets sometimes when I’m talking with someone in person and we both know what we mean, but I try to be a stickler when writing docs.