20402 routing entries (renumbering)

Hans-Werner Braun hwb at upeksa.sdsc.edu
Sat Apr 16 00:53:15 UTC 1994


Look, guys, get real. CIDR is a big kluge and it was predictable as
such. But as a second or third best "solution" it is necessary to use
it, as the powers of anarchy screwed the Internet royally two years ago
when the Internet community should have elected NSAPs. Remember the
IESG solicitation for IPv7, to then be all done and settled by November
1992 (or was it 1991?). CIDR is just a bandaid because the community
does not have its act together, and varieties of things are not driven
by operational requirements. I don't particularly like CIDR, as
compared to cleaner choices, but believe we have no choice but to use
it as much and as best we can. Until the IETF/IESG/IAB/whoever get
their stuff in gear and define and follow through on a process that
pragmatically looks at requirements, defines a reasonable subset as
strategic direction and people go off implementing and deploying it.
>From what I have seen so far, despite them I**3 claims, there seems to
be a neverending target with really no end in sight.  Like it or not,
as several have pointed out already, router still, as already for the
last ten years or so, get blown away by the routing table sizes. If you
have a well defined funding stream you may be able to upgrade, otherwise
you may be screwed. There is no routing plan on a global level that
also goes down to the capillaries and their interconnectivity, and
people naively believe that arbitrary interconnections have to work for
generations to come. And if I create a 2400 bps dial up link to London,
it has to be possible for the whole US to use it as a fallback, as a
solid requirement, right?  You have no choice, gang, reality says there
are too many routes, routers break, and arbitrariness doesn't scale.
Amplifying this will be the dismantling of the NSFNET, resulting in
much more of an interconnection weave than a backbone or core. As much
as I dislike CIDR by itself, I see no choice at this point of time to
move ahead with it as much as we can, even if it causes some pain, or
problems will continue, until we find a long term sulution and quit
this bickering about the IPng protocol details.

Hans-Werner

PS: May be Microsoft *should* make the choice for us. Then even Marty
gets his clean slate.





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