worse than IPv6 Pain Experiment

Thu Oct 10 14:13:43 UTC 2019

> Bits is bits.

A fixed length bit field and a variable length bit field are incredibly different beasts at the hardware level. Knowing exactly after how many bits you can make a routing or switching decision is ... pretty darned useful.

Kevin Menzel
Infrastructure Analyst
Sheridan College

-----Original Message-----
From: NANOG <nanog-bounces at nanog.org> On Behalf Of bzs at theworld.com
Sent: Wednesday, October 9, 2019 5:43 PM
To: John Levine <johnl at iecc.com>
Cc: nanog at nanog.org; bzs at theworld.com
Subject: Re: worse than IPv6 Pain Experiment

OK OK OK.

Can I summarize the current round of objections to my admittedly off-beat proposal (use basically URLs rather than IP addresses in IP packet src/dest) as:

  We can't do that! It would require changing something!

I've no doubt many here are comfortable with the current architecture.

Bits is bits.

URLs are, to a machine, just bit strings though they do incorporate a hierarchical structure which isn't that dissimilar from current network/host parts of IP addresses.

URLs are an obvious candidate to consider because they're in use, seem to basically work to identify routing endpoints, and are far from a random, out of thin air, choice.

Given the vast improvements in hardware since we last seriously thought about this (ca. 1990, IPv6) perhaps this worship of bit-twiddling and bit-packing may be a bit (haha) like those who once objected to anything but machine language programming because HLLs were so inefficient!

P.S. It was from a talk I gave in Singapore to the local HackerSpace and intended to provoke thought and discussion but not just "no, we can't do that because that's not the way we do things."

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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