IPv4 address length technical design

Thu Oct 4 23:50:03 UTC 2012

In message <20590.7539.491575.455977 at world.std.com>, Barry Shein writes:
> 
> In Singapore in June 2011 I gave a talk at HackerSpaceSG about just
> doing away with IP addresses entirely, and DNS.
> 
> Why not just use host names directly as addresses? Bits is bits, FQDNs
> are integers because, um, bits is bits. They're even structured so you
> can route on the network portion etc.

It's the worst idea I've heard in a long time.  Names have nothing
to do with physical location or how you reach a machine.

> Routers themselves could hash them into some more efficient form for
> table management but that wouldn't be externally visible. I did
> suggest a standard for such hashing just to help with debugging etc
> but it'd only be a suggestion or perhaps common display format.
> 
> About the only obvious objection, other than vague handwaves about
> compute efficiency, is it would potentially make packets a lot longer
> in the worst case scenario, longer than common MTUs tho not much
> longer unless we also allow a lengthening of host name max, 1024 right
> now I believe? So 2K max for src/dest and whatever other overhead
> payload you need, not unthinkable.
> 
> OTOH, it just does away with DNS entirely which is some sort of
> savings.
> 
> There are obviously some more details required, this email is not a
> replacement for a set of RFCs!
> 
> -- 
>         -Barry Shein
> 
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