initiating a discovery process to discover a plurality of internal physical nodes within a computer system, the internal physical nodes supporting one or more ports, the ports of the internal physical nodes comprising a plurality of internal nodes;

receiving a base address for the computer system; and

iterating over the plurality of internal nodes for the computer system, and for each node performing the acts of:

determining a node type from a plurality of node types including a first node type and a second node type, and

assigning based on the node type a node address, said node address comprising a function of the base address;

wherein the node type comprises the first node type and wherein assigning a node address comprises assigning a MAC address comprised of a value arithmetically added to the base address.