@benjojo how close is the MAC address space to exhaustion?

@benjojo how many did you get? ;)

I got a single 12-bit block, quite useful for giving links, especially at IX, a stable MAC that one additionally can then easily recognize. https://massars.net/oui/ is my allocation list at the moment, also use it for internal links as I use IPv6 Link-Local for that, makes debugging a wee bit simpler at the cost if maintaining the list (alternatively one could just use ff80::abcd:xy everywhere of course)

@benjojo 1KiB EEPROM for 64 bits seems a little excessive

@q @benjojo the EEPROMs with MAC addresses cost very similar to the EEPROMs without IIRC. If you need a small config EEPROM anyway, it becomes close to free

@benjojo genuine vintage mac addresses cost a lot more, perhaps due to the rarity
https://www.ebay.com/itm/163977664492

@benjojo i wanna lick the yellow one and see if it tastes like banana

@benjojo a lot cheaper than Analog’s equiv https://www.analog.com/en/products/ds2502-e48.html#documentation

@benjojo the original bitcoin mining

@benjojo I heard a story that cost of MAC addresses was a factor that caused IPv4 multicast to be designed to use only 23 bits from group id in the MAC address.

@benjojo i guess they really want to cut down the number of orders they have to process with this kind of price structure. maybe they process them manually or something.

do you happen to know if they have anything against sharing / resale of blocks from an allocation? usb-if forbids reselling parts of the pid-space for example.