Re: Re: Is Ganymede suitable for DHCP

[Matt Bush <xomox@netlag.com>]

On Fri, Feb 12, 1999 at 10:42:04AM -0600, Jonathan Abbey wrote:
> 
> | I read with great interest your announcement of Ganymede.  The server
> | is a very impressive piece of work.  As it happens, we are looking for
> | a way to allow network administrators in various deparments to update
> | their portions of a central DHCP database.  We were thinking of using
> | Sybase with a web front-end, but I'm wondering now if Ganymede might
> | be a better solution.
> | 
> | We would like to use static IP address assignments in DHCP, which
> | means that we need to know the ethernet address of each machine, and
> | enter that along with some other information into the database.
> | Would it be possible to make ethernet address an internal data type
> | in Ganymede, like IP address is now?  Ethernet addresses do require
> | fairly complicated editing, as do IP addresses.
> 
> The reason that Ganymede doesn't use a special data type for
> ethernet/mac addresses is that there is no need for being able to
> break a mac address down hierarchically the way that you can with ip
> addresses.
> 
Actually, there is some utility in the formation of the MAC, as it specifies
the network equipment vendor, and for many vendors the equipment models.
See http://www.dt.takuma-ct.ac.jp/~kmanabe/ethers.html for a partial list.
This can be very useful for equipment tracking.

  Cheers,

   -Matt

PGP signature