Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!kwe From: kwe@bu-cs.BU.EDU (kwe@bu-it.bu.edu (Kent W. England)) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: Subnetting [struct Enet addr] Summary: Why not have structured Ethernet addressing? Message-ID: <22596@bu-cs.BU.EDU> Date: 13 May 88 15:54:50 GMT References: <8805100150.AA07641@braden.isi.edu> Reply-To: kwe@buit13.bu.edu (Kent England) Followup-To: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Organization: Boston Univ. Information Tech. Dept. Lines: 30 In article <8805100150.AA07641@braden.isi.edu> braden@VENERA.ISI.EDU writes: >I disagree. The Internet standard approach for a host: pick any >gateway and let it redirect you... is simple and effective. You REALLY >DON'T want hosts to know about routing, even subnet routing!! I agree in principle, but in practice we are talking about hosts on Ethernet LANs with flat address space internetworked on IP wide area networks with hierarchical address space. I don't see any alternative to ARP and gateways. The host has to know when to look directly on the flat address spaced LAN and when to hand off to the gateway for forwarding. This brings me to a question I have been dying to ask for a long time, but just didn't quite know what context to ask it in... It seems so obvious to me that a hierarchically structured address space in Ethernet (read 802.x) 48 bit addresses would be a great improvement over the current kludged 48 bit flat vendor-assigned address space coupled with the 32 bit IP address space that I wonder why the issue never comes up. I know all the obvious problems with structured Ethernet addresses, but everytime I look at the issue it seems to me that structured Ethernet/IP (read 802.x) addresses would be a great improvement over flat address space. I think the 802 spec allows structured addressing, yes? Why is there no hint of movement in this direction? Waiting for ISO? Or have I failed to grasp some essential difficulty with this? Comments, please. Kent England, Boston University