No reason at all. Novell Netware did *exactly this*. The host portion of your ad...

neild · on July 25, 2012

That's pretty much exactly what IPv6 with stateless autoconfig does--network address in the upper 64 bits, MAC address (slightly modified) in the lower 64.

astrodust · on July 25, 2012

This is one of the reasons why IPX was a bad idea and never took off. Automagical discovery is always great until it doesn't work.

bdunbar · on July 25, 2012

and never took off.

IPX was everywhere NetWare was.

NetWare got into everything, like dust, in the 80s and part of the 90s.

astrodust · on July 25, 2012

Being prevalent, which it no doubt was, and being pervasive are two different things.

IP has a way of worming itself into every little thing. IPX never really escaped from the desktop network environment.

bdunbar · on July 26, 2012

I did not know that pervasive was synonym for 'took off'.