On Jun 30, 2005, at 6:18 AM, Charles Craft wrote:

> Arguing ethernet bits and bytes with the guy from Cisco. No no no.

Heh.  To be fair, it's no longer obvious that I'm from cisco, since
I moved piclist reception to mac.com...

The "locally administered address" is part of the 802.1 physical
address specification.  I don't think IEEE specs are freely available
online, but there's a good explanation in the wikipedia of all places:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address

The local addresses weren't used much on ethernet; in fact I don't think
they were in the original ethernet specification; it was more along the
lines of something added when there started to be a bunch of 802.x 
specs,
and you needed to do correct transparent or translational bridging 
between
them.  Local addresses were more common on token ring.  I don't recall
whether DECNet originally aimed at using a locally defined range of
addresses, or whether they just turned that into a happy coincidence 
when
IEEE took over ethernet from DEC/Xerox/3com...

I also can't find a way to request a "locally assigned" OUI assignment
from IEEE, although I'm not sure what that means; I didn't see a form
for a multicast range either.

BillW

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