Re: Tracking mac address

On Sat, 18 Sep 2004 21:47:31 -0800
Fielder George Dowding <fgdowding@iceworm-enterprises.net> wrote:

> As I understand it (subject to change), this is true of IPV4. When IPV6
> comes into widespread use (if ever) the source mac address is part of
> the source IP address, so it never gets lost.
>
> Correct me if I am wrong.

As I understand it you're mostly right - normally the MAC address is combined with the network information to create the entire IPV6 address, similar to the way Novell Netware addresses are built. This is how the "plug and play" self configuration on an IPV6 network works. However the whole thing can be set manually, so an IPV6 address would not necessarily reflect the hardware MAC address of the host.

I haven't played with IPV6 much, but I understand that spoofing network addresses is much harder to do. I don't think it relies on preserving the MAC address though.

And the MAC address is still used the same way for layer 2 traffic, regardless if the network is IPV4 or IPV6 or something else. The MAC address is used for datalink traffic, where two hosts on the same subnet (broadcast domain) want to talk to each other - no routing required. The network protocols are all layer 3 and are used for routing between subnets.

Cheers,

James
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Received on Sun Sep 19 09:48:02 2004