Saturday, January 25, 2020

MAC-conflict theoretical question

Imagine the following stupid scenario. (I am aware that this should be avoided in the first place, but I am curious about the theory and behaviour)

Two hosts connected straight to each other:
host-A: 192.0.2.1/24
host-B: 192.0.2.2/24

Now, both hosts consider their own MAC address to be 01:02:03:04:05:06, i.e. there's a MAC conflict.

Would they be able to communicate to each other at all? (would it just fire out as if point-to-point? leaning towards "no" because the subnet is defined as /24)
Or would the frames-to-be-egressed just get swallowed somewhere in the stack internally (where? why? This is where my understanding is lacking) What would be the technical basis of the "don't do that, you dumbass" answer?

What would (or should?) happen if we introduced manual ARP table entries to give each host the information that the other one's MAC is 01:02:03:04:05:06 (still identical)?

Apologies if this is a bad channel to ask such qustion. I've considered /homenetworking and /homelab, but this place just felt like a better fit.



No comments:

Post a Comment