Also: - MAC addresses are unique. - LANs won't be bridged. - Spanning tree will converge quickly. - Quickly enough that it will beat BIOS getting to DHCP for netbooting. - There will only be one circuit in the network so you can disable spanning tree. - The path MTU will be at least 1500 (or 9000, or x). - Path MTU discovery will work. - Packets with DF bit set won't be fragmented. - ICMP won't be dropped. - Network…
> MAC addresses are unique Or at least they're unique on a single machine... except for the various OSes and hardware platforms that have deliberately made all MAC addresses the same for a given machine.
So I've got the cluster set up, and it's mostly working. There's two nodes though that behave funny. Imagine my surprise when I try pinging one of them and get two responses per ping! Sure enough, two ISA NICs pulled randomly out of a box of garbage indeed had identical MACs. I learned a lot about IP and the MAC layer from that project!