Re: Fwd: Minutes / Notes

[Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>]

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> > But don't mistake these questions for the first question - of whether you
> > do the separation.
> 
> I would contend that modern applications already separate identity and
> location. Take three different example, the web, SIP, and P2P file sharing
> networks. In web applications, the objects are identified by an http URL; in
> SIP, end points are identified by a SIP URL; in P2P networks files are
> identified by their names and attributes. All of these applications treat IP
> addresses strictly as locations -- some place from which you can get a web
> page, to which you can send voice packets, from which you can get a slice of
> a file. The specific IP addresses vary over time, depending upon load
> balancing in web farms, transient registrations in SIP, or which of the file
> publishers happens to be on-line with P2P file sharing networks. P2P and the
> web, combined, represent the bulk of current Internet traffic.

The examples you cited have identifiers for resource names that are in a
separate space from that used for identifiers for locations.  This isn't at
all the same thing as separating host identity from host location.  Neither 
the web nor SIP do this, and the p2p file sharing networks with which I'm 
familiar don't really do this either (though some have a hack that attempts 
to tolerates the endpoints having different views of IP addresses).  Offhand
I don't recall that either the web or SIP need to identify hosts, as opposed
to resources, so it seems that both of them are irrelevant as examples.

So your conclusions do not follow.  

Having helped write an application that does this, it's a major pain to expect
apps to define their own set of identities for hosts.  Unfortunately, neither DNS 
names (as deployed) nor IP addresses (as deployed) are up to the job - both are 
ambiguous, both are often only usable from limited realms, DNS names are slow 
and too-often unreliable.