> I would offer that we select the "thing" that looks the most persistent > to be the persistent identity. Actually, you want to select the identity that's appropriate for your purpose. DNS is not inherently better than IP for all purposes. DNS names are often failure-prone, slow to lookup, and/or out of sync with reality. > If the choices are: DNS name vs IP address, I think most people would > recognize that the DNS name is the persistent identity. And if 'most people' treated this as a general rule, they'd be wrong. There are several situations where IP addresses are more usable than DNS - the DNS name may not even exist, lookups may not work outside of a realm, or the name may be bound to an IP address rather than a host. It is highly dependent on the configuration of the network where the hosts are located and the DNS servers that serve them. See draft-moore-nat-tolerance-recommendations-00 for a more detailed explanation. > We should probably try to move the debate from "proof by emphatic > assertion" to analysis. Presumably that also applies to assertions about persistence of DNS names. Keith