[157070] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: IPv4 address length technical design
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mark Andrews)
Thu Oct 4 19:50:25 2012
To: Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com>
From: Mark Andrews <marka@isc.org>
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 04 Oct 2012 19:36:19 -0400."
<20590.7539.491575.455977@world.std.com>
Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2012 09:50:03 +1000
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
In message <20590.7539.491575.455977@world.std.com>, Barry Shein writes:
>
> In Singapore in June 2011 I gave a talk at HackerSpaceSG about just
> doing away with IP addresses entirely, and DNS.
>
> Why not just use host names directly as addresses? Bits is bits, FQDNs
> are integers because, um, bits is bits. They're even structured so you
> can route on the network portion etc.
It's the worst idea I've heard in a long time. Names have nothing
to do with physical location or how you reach a machine.
> Routers themselves could hash them into some more efficient form for
> table management but that wouldn't be externally visible. I did
> suggest a standard for such hashing just to help with debugging etc
> but it'd only be a suggestion or perhaps common display format.
>
> About the only obvious objection, other than vague handwaves about
> compute efficiency, is it would potentially make packets a lot longer
> in the worst case scenario, longer than common MTUs tho not much
> longer unless we also allow a lengthening of host name max, 1024 right
> now I believe? So 2K max for src/dest and whatever other overhead
> payload you need, not unthinkable.
>
> OTOH, it just does away with DNS entirely which is some sort of
> savings.
>
> There are obviously some more details required, this email is not a
> replacement for a set of RFCs!
>
> --
> -Barry Shein
>
> The World | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com
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--
Mark Andrews, ISC
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PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742 INTERNET: marka@isc.org
