Multiple DHCP'd addresses on one NIC

Scot L. Harris webid at cfl.rr.com
Sat Mar 12 02:42:43 UTC 2005


On Fri, 2005-03-11 at 21:17, Rick Stevens wrote:

> Note that some NIC drivers allow you to bugger the MAC address, but I
> wouldn't recommend it (it can wreak havoc on ARP tables and such).
> Witness the unmitigated disaster that is Windows clustering with their
> (rolling eyes) wonderful "virtual" MAC address creation...grrrr!

Actually virtual MAC addresses are used in HSRP and VRRP configurations
all the time.  For high availability systems and clustered systems it is
about the only way to provide fail over reliably since if virtual MAC
addresses are not used all the other systems would have to flush their
ARP caches in order to continue to communicate with the cluster or high
availability system.  

Now I have not worked with Windows clustering so maybe they use a
horrible implementation of this idea.  But the virtual MAC concept has a
place and works well in a variety of equipment.

-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. 




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