Re: why same names, was Re: NANOG 40 agenda posted

[David Conrad <drc () virtualized org>]

Ed,

On May 29, 2007, at 12:11 PM, Edward Lewis wrote:
> If you want to read Dilbert on-line and I tell you that it is  
> available at a certain URL, would you rather I give you "http:// 
> www.dilbert.com" or that I send you "if you use IPv4 then http:// 
> www.dilbert.com" else if you use IPv6 then http://www6.dilbert.com  
> else buy a newspaper"?

I would prefer you to give me a mechanism by which I can reach the URL.

We have tried to overlay the same transport and presentation layer  
onto a new network layer, but have not engineered the new network  
layer to facilitate this.  We have new APIs and new naming  
attributes, requiring applications to do the heavy lifting while at  
the same time, not providing any reasonable mechanism to relay  
information back to the applications when it turns out that heavy  
lifting is in vain.

I would agree that in the ideal world, an end user should be able to  
point their browser to a given URL and get back the same content  
irrespective of the underlying network layer protocol being used.   
However, in the world I live in, it doesn't work like this.  Of  
course you can argue that the only way we'll be able to get to the  
ideal world is by forcing people to deal with the breakage so that  
it'll be fixed, but I'd point to Vijay's presentations.  The problem  
is, if you're a large scale ISP, how many calls to your help desk  
will it take until your helpdesk staff says "turn off IPv6"?

Rgds,
-drc