In message <20590.7539.491575.455977@world.std.com>, Barry Shein writes:
In Singapore in June 2011 I gave a talk at HackerSpaceSG about just doing away with IP addresses entirely, and DNS.
Why not just use host names directly as addresses? Bits is bits, FQDNs are integers because, um, bits is bits. They're even structured so you can route on the network portion etc.
It's the worst idea I've heard in a long time. Names have nothing to do with physical location or how you reach a machine.
Routers themselves could hash them into some more efficient form for table management but that wouldn't be externally visible. I did suggest a standard for such hashing just to help with debugging etc but it'd only be a suggestion or perhaps common display format.
About the only obvious objection, other than vague handwaves about compute efficiency, is it would potentially make packets a lot longer in the worst case scenario, longer than common MTUs tho not much longer unless we also allow a lengthening of host name max, 1024 right now I believe? So 2K max for src/dest and whatever other overhead payload you need, not unthinkable.
OTOH, it just does away with DNS entirely which is some sort of savings.
There are obviously some more details required, this email is not a replacement for a set of RFCs!
-- -Barry Shein
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