North American Network Operators Group
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Re: 69/8 is harder to fix than it looks at first glance

  • From: Joe Abley
  • Date: Wed Mar 12 12:26:28 2003


On Wednesday, Mar 12, 2003, at 12:11 Canada/Eastern, [email protected] wrote:

The fact is that are operating these 21st century networks using 19th
century business technology. This does not scale. The net is too big to be
managed by person to person exchange of information. That's why we have
DNS protocols instead of issuing updated copies of the hosts file. And
that's why we need an automated system to publish current status of IP
address ranges in a format that would be acceptable to firewall admins and
firewall vendors.
The DNS is managed by person-to-person exchange of information, and it scales. HOSTS.TXT was an example of a centrally-managed database, which didn't scale. Your examples seem to be backwards in some way.

Most of the Internet operates on the basis of person-to-person (or router-to-router, or AS-to-AS) information exchange, a characteristic which has *allowed* it to grow. Information which cannot be distributed in this manner frequently becomes troublesome to administer and mired in policy discussion with little forward momentum (e.g. the contents of the root zone, IP address assignments).

Saying that the Internet is too big for distributed information processing to scale (and promoting centralised management of information as a preferred alternative) is just odd.


Joe