[c-nsp] Are multicast MAC addresses allowed in the source field?

[Ingen Schenau, Jeroen van (ICTS)]

On Fri, 2010-10-15 at 14:42 -0600, John Neiberger wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 2:17 PM,  <Christopher.Marget at usc-bt.com> wrote:
> > The I/G bit must be cleared in the source address of an Ethernet frame.
> >
> > Ref: IEEE 802.3-2002, Section 3.2.3(b)
> 
> I'm finding out more about what this firewall vendor is actually
> trying to do. From what I can gather, it's based on Microsoft Network
> Load Balancing and it requires static MAC address table and ARP
> entries.

My experience with MS NLB clusters: it's easier to put them in a small
dedicated VLAN and run them in unicast mode (causing traffic to the
cluster hosts to be flooded) than to keep static ARP and CAM entries in
the right places... ymmv, depending on topology and change procedures in
place :)

Also, when we did run them in multicast mode, the traffic to the cluster
seemed to be process switched on our Cat6k / Sup720-3B. Didn't look into
that, since we went with unicast mode around the same time...


Regards,

Jeroen van Ingen
ICT Service Centre
University of Twente, P.O.Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands