In message <199911052044.UAA27019@orchard.arlington.ma.us>
Bill Sommerfeld writes:

>I'd be interested in hearing from anyone else besides Jonathan who
>thinks that allowing for hot-swap replacement of a removed, possibly
>failed, interface with a card with a different MAC address is
>fundamentally broken.

Bill, where on *earth* are you coming from?  I never said we should
rule it out; I said it was the wrong *default* behaviour.


You want to visit Stanford, I can show you desks with PCMCIA cards
still connected to Cat-5, left there by people hwo have another card
at home or in a different office.  Where I am, thats much more common
than swapping cards to replace a failed card. How often does hardware fail?

The hot-swap proposal doesn't quite work, either: for real hot-swap
failover, you'd want to change the new card to use the MAC address of
the failed card. (or send a gratuitous ARP, plus enough broadcasts to
persuade any switches to update their topology).
Think Ethernet, not 802.11