Re: Some Comments on ID/Loc Separation Proposals

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

Perhaps there are bigger fish to fry, but it's absolutely necessary to 
make that distinction before we can make significant progress in 
separating IDs from LOCs.  You need both kinds of identifiers.  I 
informally think of them as "initial identifiers" vs. "connection 
endpoint identifiers", the former being an identifier associated with 
the (perhaps virtual) host that you initially attempt to contact; the 
latter being an identifier associated with the particular host that 
maintains the state necessary to continue conversations in progress.  
Such state may be at the kernel or the application level.

> Several folks have asked us how NOID would work with respect
> to "hosts" that appear to be a single entity yet are
> implemented using load-balancers and multiple actual servers.
>
> In this case, what does an "identifier" bind to?
>
> Noel is trying to make a semantic distinction between an
> identifier that might be bound to one particular server in
> the group and a different identifier that would be bound to
> the entire "entity" of a balancer and servers supporting
> a particular address.
>
> While I think that this is an interesting and useful distinction,
> I also think that we have bigger fish to fry at the moment.