IPv4 address length technical design

Fri Oct 5 15:23:33 UTC 2012

Wouldn't that implicate the routing system to have, in essence, one routing entry for every host on the network?

That would be the moral equivalent to just dropping down to a global ethernet fabric to replace IP and using mac addresses for routing.  I'll give you one guess as to how well that would work.

Dave

-----Original Message-----
From: Barry Shein [mailto:bzs at world.std.com] 
Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2012 5:36 PM
To: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: IPv4 address length technical design

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.

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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