[56689] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: 69/8 is harder to fix than it looks at first glance
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Abley)
Wed Mar 12 12:24:39 2003
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 12:24:03 -0500
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
To: Michael.Dillon@radianz.com
From: Joe Abley <jabley@isc.org>
In-Reply-To: <OFD94FFA16.545370F1-ON80256CE7.005C4461-80256CE7.005E6CDE@radianz.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On Wednesday, Mar 12, 2003, at 12:11 Canada/Eastern,
Michael.Dillon@radianz.com wrote:
> The fact is that are operating these 21st century networks using 19th
> century business technology. This does not scale. The net is too big
> to be
> managed by person to person exchange of information. That's why we have
> DNS protocols instead of issuing updated copies of the hosts file. And
> that's why we need an automated system to publish current status of IP
> address ranges in a format that would be acceptable to firewall admins
> and
> firewall vendors.
The DNS is managed by person-to-person exchange of information, and it
scales. HOSTS.TXT was an example of a centrally-managed database, which
didn't scale. Your examples seem to be backwards in some way.
Most of the Internet operates on the basis of person-to-person (or
router-to-router, or AS-to-AS) information exchange, a characteristic
which has *allowed* it to grow. Information which cannot be distributed
in this manner frequently becomes troublesome to administer and mired
in policy discussion with little forward momentum (e.g. the contents of
the root zone, IP address assignments).
Saying that the Internet is too big for distributed information
processing to scale (and promoting centralised management of
information as a preferred alternative) is just odd.
Joe
