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

["William Herrin" <bill@herrin.us>]

On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 9:47 PM, Randall Atkinson
<rja@extremenetworks.com> wrote:
> Earlier Bill Herrin wrote:
> % In theory, we could redesign IP from the ground up so that the
> % hostname was king and the network addresses assigned to a
> % particular machine could change at any time without disrupting
> % communications. In practice, we're not going to and if we
> % were going to it would be far beyond the scope of this working
> % group. This leaves us at your conclusion.
>
> There are various practical ways to make it possible to change
> a node's IP address(es) without disrupting communications.

Sure. And I have a really clever one that dynamically carries IP
address assignment and reassignment with the routing protocol so that
you get as near as possible to perfect aggregation in the routing
system and "IP address manager" ceases to be a paying job. 20k FIB
coexists with multihoming for the masses. Dead serious by the way.

The hitch is, it requires that all applications abandon the TCP and
UDP protocols and APIs, in favor of an API where the app requests
communication by name instead of by address and lets the host keep
track of which addresses currently associate with that name. The
network addresses become strictly ephemeral. Not only can they change
regularly, they do change regularly as a result of reassignment due to
the changing demand for addresses in the nearby portions of the
network.

I'm sure, of course, that Internet will abandon address-based UDP and
TCP sometime after hell freezes over. We might possibly do it before
pigs fly.

Regards,
Bill Herrin



-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004

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