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Routing packets based on MACs would be impossible. That's why.

My laptop has the same MAC whether it is connected at home, at work, or in the airport. How would ISPs and the internet backbone routers know where to send the packets to reach me?



It's not impossible, just untenable; it would be the equivalent of advertising every IP address today as a /32 prefix.


There's some interesting research in this area, but the current state of the art is pretty inefficient. http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/~caesar/papers/rofl.pdf http://conferences.sigcomm.org/co-next/2010/CoNEXT_papers/20...


Routing at layer 2 (via MAC) is already implemented in the data center. See TRILL or Cisco's FabricPath.

At Internet scale, LISP (http://www.lisp4.net/) takes on the problem of a 'static' host address being reachable at any location.

Both of these rely upon the idea of encapsulation (mac-in-mac or ip-in-ip) to separate the location and host identity.


Thank you for summarizing the answer in the linked article.

You may now proceed to posting solutions to FizzBuzz in Jeff Atwood's blog.


Well, what kind of discussion would you expect for an article like this?

Perhaps you should spend your time revising your HN bio instead.




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