On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 07:37:29AM -0500, Keith Moore wrote: > I'm not sure they're the same people in both cases. but here's a > litmus test - if there's not a token for any host A that host B can > hand to host C at some arbitrary location in the network and have C use > that token to quickly and reliably establish a connection to A (modulo > access control) then the architecture is dysfunctional. or to put it > another way - if DNS or a similar name-to-locator (or > name-to-identifier+locator) translation mechanism requires special > knowledge to make it work, that isn't available to "ordinary" apps, the > architecture is dysfunctional. While I would agree with you, I think that horse has left then barn so long ago that the door has rotted and fallen apart. Just to give one example beyond that of NAT's and RFC 1918 addresses --- consider internal/external split DNS arrangements. They are occasionally used as a hack to get around the problem that we don't have a reliable (location-specific) service location service that all applications can be trusted to use. (I.e., when you are attached to the home network, use this set of MX records, but if your laptop is connected to the IETF conference wireless network, use this *other* set of MX records.) So given that the only tool network administrators have is the DNS, there are tools which effectively use internal DNS views as a crowbar to effectively turn (some) URL's into URN's. It's ugly, and gross, and everyone who uses such a hack should be ashamed --- including myself, since I found it was easier to use an hacked split DNS setup for my home network instead of going around and changing all of the applications I cared about. Does that mean that the Internet Architecture is dysfunctional? Perhaps, but then again, I'm beginning to have a lot more sympathy with the point of view that we all come from dysfunctional familieis; the only question is how dysfunctional. The real problem though is that because of limitations in the Internet architecture that have been with us for decades --- and this goes beyond whether or not addresses are 4 bytes or 8 bytes or 16 bytes, and whether we have a host identifier and routing component in the address --- we have this huge installed base of applications, conceptual maps of how to solve problems in network administrators, security policies at corporations that effectively dictate things like NAT's, private address spaces, and split DNS setups, which is extremely hard to overcome. And we really expected IPv6, which after all really only increased the number of addressing bits, to address all of these issues? How much like an engineering organization.... - Ted _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf