Re: Notes about identifier - locator separator

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com>]

On Tue, 5 Nov 2002, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

> > > let's follow this reasoning to its logical conclusion and make the
> > > identifier the full host name.

> > It is important to understand that FQDNs are *not* globally unique
> > in identifying a single host.

> This could be considered a feature and not a bug.  :-)

Hm, let's think about this.

A host wants to connect to a specific service tied to a host name. Our
new transport protocol looks up the host name in the DNS or a new
identifier->locator mapping mechanism and starts to establish a session
with one of the locators. Obviously, this locator could belong to the
target host and that's the end of it.

On the other hand, the locator could belong to some intermediate box.
This could be a box that is responsible for server load balancing or
traffic engineering, or it could be a mobility home agent (one of
several). The intermediate box would then negotiate replacement locators
and after that the rest of the session establishment procedure can be
executed.

This provides a very clean solution to the server load balancing and
traffic engineering problems, as the box handling this only has to see
session establishment packets and not _all_ traffic. I'm not sure if
this type of mobility is better than other proposals, but it would be
fairly trivial to implement it.

The more I think about it, the more I like this transportzilla solution.
The only down side is now I have to learn everything there is to know
about transport issues just when I thought I was getting a handle on
this routing stuff.  :-(

Iljitsch