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Re: And Now for Something Completely Different (was Re: IPv6 news)

  • From: Mikael Abrahamsson
  • Date: Mon Oct 17 09:50:07 2005 
On Mon, 17 Oct 2005, Per Heldal wrote:


Well, let's try to turn the problem on its head and see if thats
clearer; Imagine an internet where only your closest neighbors know you
exist. The rest of the internet knows nothing about you, except there
are mechanisms that let them "track you down" when necessary. That is
very different from today's full-routing-table.

Yes, it's true that it's different, but is it better?


It does not provide 100% provider-indepence to begin with. Depending on
who you ask that alone is a show-stopper.
Well, the reason for people wanting to stick to their "own" IP adresses are administrative and technical. If we solve that then hopefully, it wont be such a big hassle to renumber to go to another provider.

Also, if everybody got their equal size subnet delegation from each ISP then it shouldnt be that much of a problem to run two "networks" side-by-side by using the subnet part of the delegation equal to both networks, but keep the prefix separate. If you switch providers you change the prefix part. This means we need new mechanisms to handle this, but I feel that's better than doing the routing mistake again.

The internet shouldn't need to know anything about individual users to
begin with, provided there are mechanisms avilable track them down. By
that I mean that algorithms to locate end-nodes may include mechanisms
to "interrogate" a large number of nodes to find the desired location as
opposed to looking it up in a locally stored database (routing-table).
So what is it you're proposing? I understand what shim6 tries to do (since it basically keeps most of todays mechanisms) but I do not understand your proposal. Could you please elaborate?

I thought DNS only provided a name for an address ;) How does DNS tell
us that e.g. 193.10.6.6 is part of a subnet belonging to AS2838 and how
to get there?
Should end users really care for that level of routing information?

Also, your proposal seems to indicate that we need something that sounds like a proxy server that actually do know more about the internet and who needs to keep state, this doesn't sound scalable?

--
Mikael Abrahamsson email: [email protected]