Re: An alternative to 6to4 and teredo

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

On Mon, 20 Jan 2003 13:33:39 +0100
Gert Doering <gert@space.net> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On Mon, Jan 20, 2003 at 06:37:02AM -0500, Keith Moore wrote:
> > address selection is fundamentally broken.  it only works with two-party
> > apps.
> 
> Could you elaborate this a bit more?  Everything that uses TCP or UDP
> is a "two-party connection" - otherwise, you use multicast, which has
> a completely different set of "address selection" issues.

many applications involve more than two parties, even if the interconnections
between components of those applications are two-party connections.  a >2
component app often needs to be able to provide referrals from one component
to another - e.g. to say "if you need to access this component, contact it at
address A port P".  

if the network requires address selection in order to allow one component to
reach another, then it hinders operation of this kind of application. 
and for a variety of reasons, DNS is often too ambiguous, too slow, or too
unreliable for DNS names to be used as general-purpose names for hosts. 

actually DNS is a good example of an application that uses referrals, both for
its own use and for use by other applications.  but DNS is not the only app
that does this.