Hello all...

It's my understanding that makers of network cards buy up blocks of MAC
addresses to use on their finished cards. (I also understand that some NIC
makers have seemingly reused the block they purchased with the--sometimes
mistaken--belief that no two adapters would ever "see" one another on the
same network segment.)

With the way technology moves on, I got to wondering if there is ever a time
when a network card's MAC address is considered to be "free" because the
hardware that it was originally assigned to should be long since out of use?

(Why am I wondering about this? Because I run a lot of older networking gear
(much of it token ring) and it seemed like something to think about.)

William