Re: And Now for Something Completely Different (was Re: IPv6 news)

[Per Heldal <heldal () eml cc>]

man, 17,.10.2005 kl. 15.47 +0000, skrev Mikael Abrahamsson:
> On Mon, 17 Oct 2005, Per Heldal wrote:
>
> > Well, let's try to turn the problem on its head and see if thats
> > clearer; Imagine an internet where only your closest neighbors know you
> > exist. The rest of the internet knows nothing about you, except there
> > are mechanisms that let them "track you down" when necessary. That is
> > very different from today's full-routing-table.
>
> Yes, it's true that it's different, but is it better?

This thread, as well as most messages on this mailinglist in the last 2
days says so. Everyone uses all their energy trying to work within the
limits of the current scheme. Common sense says it would be to eliminate
the problem. What happens to policies if there's no limit to the size of
the routing-table?

> > It does not provide 100% provider-indepence to begin with. Depending on
> > who you ask that alone is a show-stopper.
>
> Well, the reason for people wanting to stick to their "own" IP adresses 
> are administrative and technical. If we solve that then hopefully, it wont 
> be such a big hassle to renumber to go to another provider.

I'm not so sure it will be that easy to get the flexibility you want.
How do you for example enforce rules of flexibilty on *all*
dns-providers.

> Also, if everybody got their equal size subnet delegation from each ISP 
> then it shouldnt be that much of a problem to run two "networks" 
> side-by-side by using the subnet part of the delegation equal to both 
> networks, but keep the prefix separate. If you switch providers you change 
> the prefix part. This means we need new mechanisms to handle this, but I 
> feel that's better than doing the routing mistake again.

True, but it creates unnecessary complexity for end-systems. It still
doesn't help for scaleability on the next level up.

> > The internet shouldn't need to know anything about individual users to
> > begin with, provided there are mechanisms avilable track them down. By
> > that I mean that algorithms to locate end-nodes may include mechanisms
> > to "interrogate" a large number of nodes to find the desired location as
> > opposed to looking it up in a locally stored database (routing-table).
>
> So what is it you're proposing? I understand what shim6 tries to do (since 
> it basically keeps most of todays mechanisms) but I do not understand your 
> proposal. Could you please elaborate?

What I've got can't be called a proposal. There's no solution to
propose. I just think that network complexity should be handled in the
network and not by exporting the problem to connected clients. BGP and
its related path-selection algorithms have served us well for many
years, but there's a need for alternatives and somebody have to get
involved. 

> > I thought DNS only provided a name for an address ;) How does DNS tell
> > us that e.g. 193.10.6.6 is part of a subnet belonging to AS2838 and how
> > to get there?
>
> Should end users really care for that level of routing information? 

I never said so. Their equipment, their upstream, or the upstream's
upstream may need to know to get there though.

> Also, your proposal seems to indicate that we need something that sounds 
> like a proxy server that actually do know more about the internet and who 
> needs to keep state, this doesn't sound scalable?

There's no proxy server involved unless you count forwarding of route
location requests between inter-domain routers as proxy. If so, all
intra-domain routers would be proxies. Data transport along an
established forwarding path would not change. 

This mailinglist isn't really the place to discuss future concepts and
further discussion should move to the IETF Inter-Domain-Routing
working-group or other suitable forum. 

//Per