[792] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: IETF questions -- Internet growth
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vince Fuller)
Fri May 31 13:59:54 1991
Date: Fri, 31 May 91 10:55:40 PDT
From: Vince Fuller <vaf@Valinor.Stanford.EDU>
To: "Milo S. Medin" (NASA ARC NSI Project Office) <medin@nsipo.nasa.gov>
Cc: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein), fbaker@acc.com,
In-Reply-To: Your message of Thu, 30 May 91 22:46:02 -0700
Personally, I think it's rather silly to extend the notion of Class A, B,
and C nets to add more "natural" masks. It's just easier to do away with
the notion of Class in networks (Mask egalitarianism!) and just support
variable length masks. OSPF doesn't have the notion of Class A, B, and C
nets in it -- every net carries a mask along as well. If we had an
EGP that supported this as well, we could do all sorts of good things to
conserve number space, even including implementing a pseudo-hierarchy
ISO style. But we don't alas... :-(
Those interested in this issue should take a look at a discussion that I
started a couple of months ago on the BGP list. I have proposed that BGP be
fixed *now* to do away with Class A-B-C and to pass netmasks along with every
network route. If this were done, it would be possible to a) hand-out a much
wider range of IP network sizes, lifting the 65536-network limit imposed by
the number of class-B's available (since, at present, class-B is about the
only "useful" sized network for many people) and b) allow the implementation
of limited hierarchy in IP addressing. Some of the BGP designers/implementors
have expressed misgivings over the utility and implementation cost imposed by
this idea.
--Vince
