IPv4 address length technical design

Sat Oct 6 18:59:01 UTC 2012

My money is on an epic troll. Four out of five network engineers surveyed
agree their individual IP headers are best served without condiments.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jay Ashworth [mailto:jra at baylink.com] 
Sent: Friday, October 05, 2012 2:06 PM
To: NANOG
Subject: Re: IPv4 address length technical design

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Barry Shein" <bzs at world.std.com>

> Don't change anything! That would...change things!

Your man; he is made of straw.  :-)

> Obviously my idea to use the host name directly as a src/dest address 
> rather than convert it to an integer is not a small, incremental 
> change. It's more in the realm of a speculative proposal.

Speculative is orthogonal to small or incremental; they are different
measurement axes.

This is also true of the difference between addresses and names.  Addresses
are an engineering artifact; names are a business/administrative artifact.

*The entire point* of DNS vs IP is to uncouple those; necessary changes in
the engineering artifact *MUST not* cause changes in the business artifact.

> But I'm not sure that arguing that our string of bits (e.g., ipv6) is 
> inherently superior to your proposed string of bits (a host name) is 
> an immediately compelling objection.

And, unsurprisingly, no one made an argument that trivial.  To the extent
you think we did, I think we were merely giving you the benefit of the doubt
of already understanding this dichotomy, which is pretty much Networking
201, and taken as read on NANOG.

Extraordinary changes require extraordinary justification.

> The objection which puzzles me the most is the implication that a 
> numeric address locates a host or network directly or geographically 
> rather than, as I understood it, by the tuple (address,route).

I didn't see anyone make that implication.  Could you quote?

> "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, 
> then you win" -- Mahatma Gandhi

Yeah; that approach didn't work out well for Jim Fleming.  :-)

Seriously, Barry; my appraisal of this after three decades is that this is
first year stuff, and you are not a first year guy, by any stretch.

So, is this just the epic troll of the year?  Or is there something we're
missing?

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink
jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC
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