Re: [RRG] Consensus? End-user networks need their own portable address space

[Robin Whittle <rw@firstpr.com.au>]

Hi Randall,

You wrote:

> %  End-user networks need their own portable address space.
> 
> Users care greatly about capabilities (e.g. ability to multi-home
> for improved resilience/availability, ability to change the set of
> contracted upstream providers to reduce communications costs,
> traffic engineering, mobility).

Sure.

> Users do NOT generally believe they want or need "portable
> address space" -- except as an engineering mechanism to
> achieve the other higher-level capabilities.

OK - but there is no other engineering mechanism than portable
address space which enables them to switch to another ISP without
unreasonable costs and disruption.


> So if there are alternative architectures that provide those
> capabilities without requiring "portable address space",
> then users will not *care* whether they have "portable
> address space" or not (provided they can have the
> capabilities in some other way).

Sure, but there are no other alternatives.


> Users care about capabilities, not the engineering mechanism.
> 
> Discussions here are indicating that there are several
> different ways to provide those desirable user capabilities
> -- and also that some of those approaches do NOT require
> "portable address space".

What mechanisms other than portable address space are there which
would enable any decent sized network to change ISPs without a great
deal of error-prone manual work?

> So I don't think your consensus claim here is reasonable,
> given the set of architectural options available to the RG.

Can you cite an example of techniques in use today which make any
end-user network easy to change from one PA prefix to another?  I
wrote about how IP addresses turn up in config files for IMAP
servers, but they also turn up in web servers, in DNS zone files,
and in all sorts of other servers.  If the network includes a bunch
of printers and other IP-enabled devices which don't work on some
private address range, they will need to be identified and their
configuration altered too.

I wrote a specific argument about why I think there is no prospect
of there being reliable automated system for changing all this stuff
for most end-user networks.  If you think there is one, or that
there will be one, then please provide specifics.

  - Robin


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