> From: Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxx>
>>> Number portability, after all, only requires a layer of indirection.
>>> We can certainly engineer that!
>> And we have. It's called the DNS.
> no it's not. DNS sucks for that. it's too slow, too likely to be out
> of sync. DNS names are the wrong kinds of names for this.
Pardon me, but my bogometer just pinned. You keep bitching about the DNS,
and a lot of your complaints have a point, but this one is too much.
The whole effing point of the DNS is to translate from 'service-names' (to
coin a term) to addresses. If the DNS can't do that, what the hell is the
point of it?
> we can build indirection into the routing infrastructure.
Can I get you to be a little more precise in terminology here? Are you
talking about putting indirection into the "routing" (i.e. path-finding,
including databases and algorithms), or into the "forwarding"?
>From your later message it seems you visualize more the latter? And you do
not seem to be visualizing doing this mapping at every hop?
In other words, architecturally speaking, you're proposing jacking up the
current 'internetwork' layer and putting a new, second, 'internetwork' layer
underneath it? In other words, you'd be creating a new name-space *below* the
current 'addresses', which would become mostly just identifiers? Shortly
after being emitted, packets would be wrapped up in a lower-layer, but still
internetwork-wide header, which contained the 'locator' of their destination?
This is not an unreasonable approach. (Not too surprising that I approve,
since I proposed the same basic mechanism myself, several decades ago, as a
way of introducing a new addressing/routing architecture!)
Now, if only we could actually design that layer, as opposed to creating
it incrementally by various small accretions/kludges...
> identifer to locator mappings that is distributed via BGP.
BGP has a hard enough time as it is. You complain about people wanting to
dump the kitchen sink of functionality into DNS, because it's there, but
you're happy to commit the same sin yourself, elsewhere...
Noel
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