Speak for yourself David. These problems have been well understood
and discussed since 1972. But you are correct, that there were still
a large unwashed that didn't and I am still not sure why that was.
This seems to be elementary system architecture.
At 6:59 -0800 2008/12/05, Dave CROCKER wrote:
Thomas Narten wrote:
And, if one wants to look back and see "could we have done it
differently", go back to the BSD folk that came up with the socket
API. It was designed to support multiple network stacks precisely
because at that point in time, there were many, and TCP/IP was
certainly not pre-ordained. But that API makes addresses visible to
APIs. And it is widely used today.
Thomas,
If you are citing BSD merely as an example of a component that
imposes knowledge of addresses on upper layers, then yes, it does
make a good, concrete example.
If you are citing BSD because you think that they made a bad design
decision, then you are faulting them for something that was common
in the networking culture at the time.
People -- as in end users, as in when they were typing into an
application -- commonly used addresses in those days, and hostnames
were merely a preferred convenience. (Just to remind us all, this
was before the DNS and the hostname table was often out of date.)
Worse, we shouldn't even forgive them/us by saying something like
"we didn't understand the need for name/address split, back then"
because it's pretty clear from the last 15 years of discussion and
work that, as a community, we *still* don't. (The Irvine ring was
name-based -- 1/4 of the real estate on its network card was devoted
to the name table -- but was a small LAN, so scaling issues didn't
apply.)
d/
ps. As to your major point, that having apps de-coupled from
addresses would make a huge difference, boy oh boy, we are certainly
in agreement there...
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
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