At 2:02 PM -0400 9/11/97, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
On Wed, Sep 10, 1997 at 09:11:55PM -0400, Sean M. Doran wrote:
Sanjay Dani <sanjay@professionals.com> writes:
There are backbone providers and there are providers of specialized ISP or hosting or security etc. services that need independent* IP address space and do not have to waste resources on building a private "backbone".
NAT.
Perhaps I misunderstood Sanjay, Sean, but I believe his concern was that the addresses _not be the property of an upstream (ie: backbone) provider_ to provide flexibility of connection choice.
NAT will not solve this problem; it resides at too low a level of the theoretical architecture, being used primarily to avoid renumbering of internetworks. This isn't a network numbering problem, it's a routing problem.
Please, let's think this through carefully before making such pronouncements. If the problem to be solved is providing flexibility of choice, then Sean is quite right and NAT (plus other renumbering technologies) is the solution for most people. If you use NAT and renumbering technologies then you don't give a darn what your IP address is or who gave it to you as long as it is globally routable. You still have flexibility of choice in that you can switch upstream providers on a whim and use Paul Vixie's BSD tricks to multihome if that matters. NAT may not be the solution to every problem but it certainly does provide flexibility of choice which is one of the reasons many companies use it today. You can't give everyone globally routable and portable address space on the Internet. To do so would be tantamount to making everyone equal and flattening the hierarchy of the network. But this creates an unmanageble mess in which the network becomes a sort of amorphous blob with no discernable internal structure like some sort of slime mode. What we are trying to do is evolve the network into an organism that is strong and resilient. This requires that the network have discernable internal structure and that requires hierarchy and layering and a thick skin to protect the organism from the outside world. Hierarchy means that some addresses are better than others, i.e. portable, but it also allows us to carve the network up into manageable pieces and then to manage it in a reasonably stable and reliable way. Routing problems involve how to design, manage and operate this internal traffic distribution hierarchy and are essentially engineering problems, not policy problems or social problems. I think that the desire for portable address space is not a routing problem. ******************************************************** Michael Dillon voice: +1-650-482-2840 Senior Systems Architect fax: +1-650-482-2844 PRIORI NETWORKS, INC. http://www.priori.net "The People You Know. The People You Trust." ********************************************************