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

Mon Oct 17 13:47:01 UTC 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: swmike at swm.pp.se