Scott Brim wrote: > Brian E Carpenter allegedly wrote on 03 19 2009 1:48 PM: >> I recently had this exchange with Dan Wing on the BEHAVE list: >> >>>>> ... it seems to me >>>>> that we might consider defining a generic 'referral object', containing >>>>> more information than just an address, that could be passed among >>>>> application entities. It could contain TLVs that would provide the >>>>> semantics of the referred address as well as the raw address bits. >>>>> >>>>> Does this seem worth exploring? >>> Yes, this could form the basis for very useful guidance to application >>> designers. ICE does something like this already, but abstracting its >>> functions up several levels, as you propose, would be useful. > > Referrals are hard to figure out. I think the tradeoffs are worth > serious study. > > First party referrals like this are interesting but not so hard as third > party referrals (Tom tells Dick how to reach Harry). They assume that > Tom knows Dick's and Harry's shared scope. ...or that Dick can, given the information in the referral structure obtained from Tom, figure out an effective way to reach Harry given their shared scope. > Can we assume we have some kind of globally unique identifiers that are globally unique? So far > that has been extremely hard to pull off. Yes and no. We've managed to cope with the IPv4 address shortage in the short term and get away with not requiring every host to have a global address. But this is only because there is still a large set of globally unique addresses. > I have a suspicion that for referrals you want to go all the way back to domain names and URIs. Ah, if only that would work well... it's a house of cards. > But in any case we should do a major investigation of referrals in the > light of location/identification separation and the fracturing of the > Internet into various scopes. It might be a bit late for that. Keith _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf