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rubo77
Asked: 2012-12-08 02:04:59 +0800 CST

MAC and IP address text-identicon as avatar

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I would like to create something like identicons but not with images but with a unique word for each IP-Addresses and MAC-Addresses.

create an easy to remember alias for a mac address, that is unique and reverse lookupable, for example:

IP 123.456.789.132 will result in an alias for that IP, that is connected to an existing word from a wordlist, that is unique.

Background of this idea: this way we could identify our Routers in our Opennet in Hamburg easily in a graphical NodeGraph.

There are a lot of sites, that generate graphical avatars:
gravatar (Identicon, MonsterID, Wavatar), Retro, vanillicon, VisiGlyphs or unicornify

Is there some site already, where I can convert MAC-Adresses to unique human readeable synonyms?

mac-address

1 Answers

  1. As Hennes notes above, a MAC address is a 48-bit number; an IPv4 address is a 32-bit number. Let's not think about IPv6 yet.

    Amazon.com says that the stock paperback Merriam-Webster dictionary contains "over 60,000 words", which is about 16 bits of space. That means that you can do this mapping yourself, by getting a list of 65,536 English (or your preferred language) words, and mapping them on a one-to-one basis with pairs of octets.

    A 16-bit list means that an IP address will need two such words, and a MAC address three.

    If the full English (or other) dictionary includes words that are too difficult to remember ("my MAC address is capybara nephtyids oleaginous") then you could get a list of the 16,384 most common words, and map into that 12-bit space; that means 3 per IPv4 address, and four per MAC address.

    All you need to do is choose your word list, and start counting down it. Wiktionary might be a good place to get a reasonably-usable list with tolerable conditions on its use.

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