Subject: RE: Solving the right problems ...

From: Dan Lanciani <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2003 16:00:36 -0400 (EDT)

"Jeroen Massar" <[email-masked]> wrote:

|The stack/API then maintains a list of routing IP's that
|are associated by that "IdentifierIP" and then replaces it
|before it enters the network with the routing IP that is
|to be used for actually routing the packet.

I've made this proposal several times over the past few years.  It was
generally met with violent objections that we have no idea (and--it seems--
can have no idea) whether the mapping infrastructure is even a design target
or a research project.  Most recently I believe the objection was that hosts
have no business computing routes (and that is what you are talking about--
your mapping is just another way of looking at source-based routing) since
they do not have full knowledge of the entire network topology.  Of course,
I consider the latter a huge advantage because distributed routing scales so
well:  the resources available (including both CPU power and aggregate
bandwidth) increase with the increasing number of nodes which in turn grows
with the number of identifiers.  The last time I tried to point out the
desirability of such a scalable solution, I believe it was dismissed with
something along the lines of, ``the application sees zero bandwidth while
its host is trying to compute a route to the destination''.  In any case,
I wish you better luck with the approach than I've had.  But I don't think
you will get very far for the simple reason that a working identifier scheme
destroys the economic value of stable addresses and would allow customers to
switch ISPs too easily.

"Tony Hain" <[email-masked]> wrote:

|So you prove my original point, 'there is a sacred invariant, and we must
|avoid messing with the app / transport interface at all costs'.

As a practical matter, this is probably true.

				Dan Lanciani
				ddl@danlan.*com
--------------------------------------------------------------------
IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List
IPng Home Page:                      http://playground.sun.com/ipng
FTP archive:                      ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng
Direct all administrative requests to [email-masked]
--------------------------------------------------------------------

---

From: "Tony Hain" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2003 14:08:09 -0700

Dan Lanciani wrote:
> |So you prove my original point, 'there is a sacred invariant, and we 
> |must avoid messing with the app / transport interface at all costs'.
> 

Are you saying that for existing apps we can't change (in which case I
agree), or that the IETF can't change (in which case I might still agree,
but it has noting to do with practicality).

Tony