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Null secondary MAC addresses

John,

Thanks for your previous email on the topic of
unowned (effectively NULL) 48-bit MAC addresses.

This topic was discussed at the IEEE/RAC meeting
last week. Conclusions included:

1) Xerox has declined the request to transfer
   ownership the zero-valued MAC address to the
   IEEE/RAC.

2) Standards cannot use MAC addresses owned by
   others, even if these numbers are not believed
   to exist in product. This is the concept of
   one-number one-owner, as phrased by Geoff Thompson.

As such, the parts of P802.17 that rely on zeros
to connotate a not-present MAC address should be
changed, from an IEEE/RAC perspective. Feel free
to call either Geoff Thompson or myself if this
is unclear.

Please consider other alternative for encoding
of nonexistent MAC addresses, such as a distinct
tag bit or perhaps the broadcast address.

Respectfully,
DVJ, IEEE/RAC member

David V. James
3180 South Ct
Palo Alto, CA 94306
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