At the risk of being declared off topic

Iljitsch van Beijnum iljitsch at muada.com
Wed Jan 12 19:59:57 UTC 2005


On 12-jan-05, at 19:26, Owen DeLong wrote:

[...]

> I'm thinking along the lines of a new protocol which could look up an
> End System Identifier against a local server and receive a response
> which was a list of valid Routing Tags for that destination.  Sort
> of a cross between DNS and ARP.  I don't want to ignore security and
> would like to see at least the option if not requirement to crypto-
> sign the information.

> Ideally, I'd like to find a couple of people in the Bay Area so we
> can get together for a white-board discussion.  I've got a few ideas
> rattling around in my head about how it might work, but, I'd like
> to collaborate with some others before proposing something to IETF.

The IETF multi6 wg has been looking at stuff not unlike this. If 
everything goes well, multi6 will be shut down, and a new wg will be 
formed to actually start building a protocol. This is supposed to 
happen at the next IETF in Minneapolis two months from now. If you've 
never been to an IETF meeting this might be a good time to start.  :-)

However, there is a big difference between what you're saying and 
what's on the table at multi6: currently, the idea for multi6 and its 
successor is to take a bunch of regular addresses, and promote one of 
them to end system identifier (in your terminology). This has the 
advantage that you're compatible with existing TCP/IP and you can 
connect first and negotiate stuff afterwards. A true identifier/locator 
separation is harder, but would be a natural evolution of this, as it's 
basically nothing more than doing the same with an identifier that 
"happens" to be unreachable. (There are some additional complexities, 
of course.)

HIP (see Jeroen's message) is a very different take on a problem area 
that greatly overlaps, but isn't exactly the same.

If/when you have a softcopy of your ideas I'd be interested in reading 
it.




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