[AusNOG] The occurrence of duplicate MAC addresses

[Paul Brooks]

On 8/02/2013 1:24 PM, Mark Doorey wrote:
> The major thing that worries me about Huawei and the duplicate MAC addressing of its
> NIC's, is that it is trying to push it's devices into IP core. I'm sure if this lazy
> MAC manufacturing gets into this level duplicates will occur.
> I know this next subject is a little off topic, but with Huawei also manufacturing a
> lot of Cel phone equipment and Telco equipment, a lot of this has IP connectivity.

...remembering that duplicate MAC addresses aren't actually a problem unless you get
two of them on the same broadcast-domain LAN. Within  an 'IP Core' there usually
aren't many high-node-count broadcast domains. Many many point-to-point real or
virtual links with 2 addresses, many VLANs with less than 20 nodes perhaps.

If you managed to get duplicate MACs into the same broadcast domain in a cellular
control node or something, I'd hope that it would be found during testing when
everything failed to operate properly, and be fixed before the node went into production.

On the other hand corporate/enterprise LANs and cube-farms, with hundreds or thousands
of devices per floor...(shudder)

P.

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