[157083] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: IPv4 address length technical design
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Siegel, David)
Fri Oct 5 11:23:46 2012
From: "Siegel, David" <Dave.Siegel@level3.com>
To: Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com>, "nanog@nanog.org" <nanog@nanog.org>
Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2012 15:23:33 +0000
In-Reply-To: <20590.7539.491575.455977@world.std.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
Wouldn't that implicate the routing system to have, in essence, one routing=
entry for every host on the network?
That would be the moral equivalent to just dropping down to a global ethern=
et fabric to replace IP and using mac addresses for routing. I'll give you=
one guess as to how well that would work.
Dave
-----Original Message-----
From: Barry Shein [mailto:bzs@world.std.com]=20
Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2012 5:36 PM
To: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: Re: IPv4 address length technical design
In Singapore in June 2011 I gave a talk at HackerSpaceSG about just doing a=
way 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 rout=
e on the network portion etc.
Routers themselves could hash them into some more efficient form for table =
management but that wouldn't be externally visible. I did suggest a standar=
d for such hashing just to help with debugging etc but it'd only be a sugge=
stion 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 a=
llow a lengthening of host name max, 1024 right now I believe? So 2K max fo=
r 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 replace=
ment for a set of RFCs!
--=20
-Barry Shein
The World | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.c=
om
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD | Dial-Up: US, PR, Cana=
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