North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Reality Check

  • From: Jim Dixon
  • Date: Wed Mar 14 16:03:10 2001

On Wed, 14 Mar 2001, Timothy R. McKee wrote:

> Let's have a reality check here.
> 
> Our job as **OPERATORS** is to provide our subscribers with simple and
> reliable access to what they consider as the Global Internet.  They have the
> following 2 reasonable expectations:
> 
> 1) That they can access any publicly acessible web, ftp, email, etc server
> anywhere in the world by using the destination's published textual address.
> Without, I might add, having to know that certain locations require loading
> a special plug-in, changing their resolver, or artificially padding the
> name.

Bear in mind that in many cases, this is an illusion.  They aren't 
accessing the same machine at all.  Someone is using round robin DNS
to map one name into several IP addresses, or a Local Director to 
map one IP address into many IP addresses, or there is some other such
substitution being employed.

In some cases the party serving the data is involved in the illusion.
In others, as in transparent proxying, someone along the way is 
intervening.  This is often silent and may have the consent of neither
the user/client or whoever is running the intended target.

> Remember that, regardless of theoretical arguments, _WE_ are the ones that
> have to deal with the messes that result from things like this...  _WE_ are
> the ones who will have to pay for the increased NOC and Tech Support staff
> and phone charges...

My point is that we are already in the world that you are warning us
about.  People are happily using one address space within their 
company and quite another to talk to the outside world, with NAT
mediating between the two.  Their internal DNS is also different from 
the DNS seen on the global Internet.  And it all seems to be working
exceedingly well, despite the fact the games people play with IP 
addresses and domain names are becoming very subtle indeed.

--
Jim Dixon                  VBCnet GB Ltd           http://www.vbc.net
tel +44 117 929 1316                             fax +44 117 927 2015