installing new ethernet address equipment with VMS 6.1

[Paul Koning]

>>>>> "arcarlini" == arcarlini  <a.carlini at ntlworld.com> writes:

 >> ....  For example, the first three bytes of a MAC
 >> address are the vendor code. DEC used 4, and on a given adapter
 >> they might use any of the 4 possible variants of the MAC address
 >> using the same low order 3 bytes but varying the high order 3
 >> bytes to any of their 4 vendor codes.

 arcarlini> Did anything actually do this? It seems very odd.

Yes, and I am quite sure that DEC did NOT do anything like that.  It
would have been a very clear violation of the Ethernet standards we
maintained internally, and 802.3 wouldn't be happy about it either.

 acarlini> I know
 arcarlini> that gear like the DECnis was assigned a block of
 arcarlini> addresses, but that was perfectly legal (i.e. the CPU card
 arcarlini> had an address of, for example, 08-00-2B-00-AA-00 and that
 arcarlini> covered a range up to (again, for example)
 arcarlini> 08-00-2B-00-AA-FF (i.e. sixteen addresses).

That would be 256, actually... but yes, block assignment like that was
standard in multiport devices.  The address ROM would actually list
the range.

    paul