Re: Drawbacks of using BYTEA for PK?

On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Alex Satrapa wrote:

> David Garamond wrote:
> > Remember that /sbin/ifconfig output usually include MAC address too. Not 
> > that MAC addresses are 100% unique, but that should increase the 
> > uniqueness.
> 
> How do you increase uniqueness?  Either a value is unique or it isn't - 
> if you've got multiple hosts on the network with the same network 
> address, you're in big trouble!

It's easily done; you've misread it. David said _MAC_ address. Of course your
comment still stands if you've got the same MAC address on a segment more than
once.

> 
> 32 bits for an IP address is a huge number space... but why you'd really 
> need that much space as a base for your GUID is beyond me. The "host" 
> part of the address (eg: the last 8 bits in a /24 network block) would 
> be enough to uniquely identify the 254 hosts on your network.

I might have more that 256 hosts.

I can't comment on the real content of this discussion though since a) I
haven't be reading it and b) I probably wouldn't know what it was on about if
I had been.


-- 
Nigel J. Andrews