Talk:MAC address
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- Excellent work, but nothing on LAA, UAA or BIA and nothing on unicast, multicast, broadcast and functional addresses of frames! I've added all of these things, and some other articles - Ta bu shi da yu 12:18, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Uniqueness
i want to ask one thing...when MAC address is unique for all networked machines...why do they need an IP address at all?
- They are unique (well, almost) but the heirarchy under which they're organised is useless for routing. Your ethernet card's MAC address says "I'm a txp9000, made by XYZ Semiconductor". A machine on the other side of the world that wanted to send you a packet wouldn't know how to route that packet. By contrast, IP addresses are heirarchical by route (very very roughly). So if the remote machine sends a packet to 66.1.94.133 its router can look up a table that says "send all 66.1.x.x packets to router at 66.1.0.1". This way the remote router doesn't need to know the (impossibly long) list of exact IP addresses in your company or school - it only needs to know who is responsible for that "block" of IP addresses. It can do this because IP addresses are heirarchical by location in the wiring plan, whereas MAC addresses are only heirarchical by manufacturer (and don't tell you where on the network a given node is). -- John Fader (talk | contribs) 18:13, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
OS X
Can someone figure out if you can actually change a MAC address in OS X and update that section? Right now it looks quite silly. It says something like 'theoretically this should work, but i don't know nor am I motivated enough to check'
Burned in addresses
Currently, the article states
- MAC addresses permanently attached to a product by the manufacturer are known as "burned-in addresses" (BIA) or sometimes as "Universally Administered Addresses" (UAA). The BIA can be overridden with a "Locally Administered Address" (LAA).
Does this mean that if one uses one of the methods to change the MAC address explained later in the article, one is using a LAA? Also, the article on burned-in address seems to disagree with the above statement; it states that there are two types of BIAs, namely UAAs and LAAs. AxelBoldt 22:24, 27 May 2005 (UTC)
- No, it means that if one changes the MAC address, one is supposed to use an LAA instead of a UAA. I doubt it ever occurred to the designers of MAC-48 at the time that one would deliberately use the BIA of one station on a different station; after all, ‘they are just numbers and have no commercial significance’. 121a0012 01:52, May 28, 2005 (UTC)