On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 4:17 PM, William Pitcock <nenolod@systeminplace.net> wrote:
On Sat, 2010-07-24 at 15:50 -0400, Steven King wrote:
I am very curious to see how this would play with networks that wouldn't support such a technology. How would you ensure communication between a network that supported 33-Bit addressing and one that doesn't?
33-bit is a fucking retarded choice for any addressing scheme as it's neither byte nor nibble-aligned. Infact, the 33rd bit would ensure that an IPv4 header had to have 5 byte addresses.
33 bits nearly as useful as my proposal to extend the live of IPv4 by simply using the unused addresses. What "unused addresses" do I speak of? Currently the highest IP address is 255.255.255.255. Well, why not use the addresses from 256 to 999? IP addresses could go all the way to 999.999.999.999 and still be 3-digits per octet. We wouldn't even have to modify much code. How many times have you see a perl script that uses \d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3} as the regular expression for matching IP addresses? Tons of code assumes 3 digits per octet. None of that would have to change. We can get a few more bits another way. Why not steal bits from the port number? We used to think we needed 64k different ports. However, now we really only need port 80. Instant Message tunnels over port 80, so does nearly every important new protocol. Why not just reclaim those bits and use them for addresses? Instant address extension! Tom :-) <<<--- indicates humor or sarcasm (in case you weren't sure) -- http://EverythingSysadmin.com -- my blog http://www.TomOnTime.com -- my advice