Re: [Xen-users] uniq mac address generator

["James Youngman" <jay@xxxxxxx>]

> It only needs to be unique to your local network
Not always true, really.   For example if you run software thar
generates version-1 UUIDs you could create yourself a lot of difficult
to solve problems (and possibly cause data corruption) by assuming
that.  See for example
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/sandbox/id/uuid.html

> - anything outside that
> will not be using MAC addresses to determine the routing of the packet
> anyways [AFAIK]
MAC addresses don't determine routing anyway, they're at the wrong link layer.

> so it's meaningless to aim for uniqueness outside your
> own network (although it is of course practical to know that ALL MAC
> addresses used in the entire known world are unique).
Quite a bit of software assumes this, and will do the wrong thing in
very subtle ways if this assumption is not true.  But the chances of
getting bitten by this bug are quite small.


> Of course, if you're on a large corporate network, you may still have
> the problem that someone else uses the same easymac script to generate
> MAC addresses...
True.   And Ethernet card manufacturers have been known to ship
Ethernet cards with conflicting MAC addresses anyway.

James.

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