DHCPv6 and MAC Address inclusion

[Simon Hobson]

Ted Lemon wrote:
>Why would you attach more than one NIC to the same wire?

Many reasons !

Run Windows servers and Hyper-V ? You need multiple NICs or you find 
the networking breaks (according to one of my colleagues). Some of 
our servers have 2 or 3 NICs on the same network to work round this 
"feature".

Load sharing. We have a couple of iSCSI boxes at work which have 
multiple Gbit NICs. By judicious use of multiple NICs in servers and 
consideration of what's patched to which switch, we can avoid the 
need to go to 10G networking.

That's just two we've got at work.


I know it's an old "discussion", but for many people, a workflow 
based around MAC addresses is what they require. It may not be the 
optimal solution*, but if someone already has a workflow based on MAC 
addresses then it's a major upheaval to change that.
Not supporting that is another hindrance to adoption of IPv6.

* Personally (and this is another old discussion), I still believe 
that in the absence of a consistently available and globally unique 
machine serial number, a NIC MAC address is the nearest thing we have 
to an immutable ID. My experience is that we multiboot or re-install 
OSs more often than we replace NICs.
Except for the virtual machines where the Windows guys at work won't 
fix the virtual MAC addresses - which screws up my network monitoring 
as well.

-- 
Simon Hobson

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