we are the identities we adopt. For example, some 'ring knockers' choose to wear their military class rings, or varsity grads their college sweatshirts. In London, it's the old school tie that gets you into the East India Club. At that point, the group has been embraced by the persona, and the identity shapes and marks the identified. (But not always willingly; consider tattoos at Auschwitz.) Inferring external meaning is tricky with signifiiers. Point being, multiple identiities in networking (IPv4 and IPv6, multihomed, multiple naming authorities, choosing what to conform to) can be expected to be the norm, and the sign of good networking equipment will be the ability to adopt and discard identities as wanted for purpose with guile and grace (and I don't just mean DHCP). We are many; we contain multitudes. Our networking equipment will be the same. IPv4 flat address space with a single root DNS is liberatingly simple in some respects, but pretty limiting in others. This would have been a discussion for the end2end list of old. Lloyd Wood http://sat-net.com/L.Wood/ > Yes. That said, an identity identifies what someone thinks it identifies. Suppose you had a gold wrist band > of a particular style; it might be emblematic of you. But suppose that you had gotten it as a member of some > group, all of whom received it; while I might think of it as emblematic of you, it would actually only identify a > member of that group.