> I believe cisco holds patents on the concept behind using a virtual
> mac address shared between multiple systems to provide a single
> service.

For what it may be worth, I saw a presentation from Auspex (a past
workplace of mine was a customer of theirs at the time) that described
one of their hot-failover setups as using a multicast MAC address as
the MAC address for a server.

I don't know whether they licensed, or decided cisco's patent was
invalid and told them to take a long walk off a short pier, or this was
before the patent was issued, or what.  Perhaps even the description
was mistaken; I never actually played with it myself, only heard/saw it
described.

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