Re: [RAM] Re: Ramblings about "locator"

RJ Atkinson wrote:
>
> On  14 Jun 2007, at 15:30, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>> I have a hard time figuring out what "locator" means
>> to you all if you think a MAC address is a locator.
>
> Noel,
>
>     You were the person who persuaded me, after some
> resistance on my part, that since the IEEE MAC address
> is used in a lookup table (either a bridge table or an
> IPv6 ND table) to forward the frame/packet, therefore
> the MAC address must have location semantics and so
> could not be a pure Identifier.

Names such as MACs can be used to point to a location in the network
topology. However, the important question is not whether they can be
used, or even if they are used for such a thing. The important
distinction between two types of names is whether the names themselves
carry topological significance.

In the case of IP addresses, the name itself carries topological
meaning. In the case of MACs the names carry no topological meaning. The
network, however, uses those names to make a map of the network topology.

The difference between these two cases is that in the former, the name
itself carries part of the topological information, where as in the
latter all the information resides in the bridge.

-Mikko

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