Router MAC-Addresses @ IXs

["Christian Panigl, ACOnet/VIX/UniVie" <]

    Dear Exchange Point members and operators,
    
    I have a small inquiry today:  could you please have a look at the
    low-order bit distribution of (Cisco) router MAC addresses at your
    exchange point(s) and tell me the result ?
    
    Background: port-grouping algorithms (like Cisco FastEtherChannel on
    Cat5xxx) on switches tend to use low-order bits of MAC addresses (XOR of
    source/dest, or similar) for load-sharing purposes.
    
    Now it turned out, probably because "Vienna is different", that more
    than 90% of all (Cisco) router FastEthernet interfaces connected to the
    Vienna Internet eXchange have MAC addresses ending with Hex 0 !!!  And
    nope, it's not Halloween today (for those who understand German ;-)
    
    This of course does break port-group load-balancing on any such switch
    with only routers connected ... :-(
    
    Any ideas, similar experiences, workarounds (other than to assign MAC
    addresses to exchange point routers) ?
    
    Kind regards
    CP
    
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