Hi There! #

MAC Addressing and you #

So… every device on your network has a physical address.

Did you know that you can, for a not eggregious cost, reserve a swath of device identifiers for your systems?

I didn’t either! but, it turns out this is fairly straight forward. One Simply registers with The IEEE¹ to get allocated a chunk of hardware device space to distinctly identify your systems.

Yeah, I know, it’s nerdy, and may seem a little odd. There’s a few places / reasons why this might be interesting though.

Distinctifying Devices you’ve made #

Many low-level microcontrollers provide a low-level way to rewrite the hardware address of the device. Using this feature permits you to have your devices identify themselves predictably, arguably marginally reducing administrative ease, and elevating the ‘coolness’ factor of a device you’ve made.

Pushing more context into Layer 2 #

as sort-of advocated over above, the other neat thing that having a pre-determined, unique section of hardware addresses is that you can leverage switching hardware’s filtering to classify your devices a helluvalot easier.

I’m not gonna hang onto this opinion this terribly strongly, but it’s a legit reason nevertheless.

What made you decide to explore this #

So… I was playing around with assigning my devices distinct and neat mac addresses, and discovered that there are actually some reserved addresses which are treated differently by switching gear.

Admittedly, I prolly should have known about this, but I didn’t… and it messed with me… so I did some research and found out about this, and figured I’d share.

Why should I care? #

hell, I dunno… I’m not even sure I should care… but… well… that ship’s sailed so… here we are ;)

anyways… lets carry on shall we?

Whats the differences in assignments #

I’m glad you asked!

there’s three different block allocations:

The IEEEs Website has a bunch of information, and tutorials⁵

Check it out!