i have long wished for and sometimes needed a way to renumber a host w/o killing or restarting its active tcp flows. this isn't a layering violation. tcp should be able to know about endpoint-renumber events.
This is a layering violation and has endless security implications.
as i told someone in private e-mail earlier this morning, tcp's notion of a flow-identifying tuple includes network addresses, and so, the ability to change these on the fly will absolutely affect tcp. when you bind a session to an address, as tcp currently does, you cause the community to waste ipv4 /32's or ipv6 /128's as loopback aliases just to have something they can virtualize, manage, move around, play with. let me put that another way, in case it's not clear enough as stated: tcp's existing reference to network addresses are a layering violation, and so anything we do to improve the situation will also be a layering violation, but what of it? deciding against making tcp "less pure" is not going to meet the needs and demands of the community -- and those needs and demands WILL be met, and probably in even less pure ways. google for a product or feature called "3TCP" to see what i mean.
You can solve the renumber thingie by having all TCP connecting to/from an official IP on the loopback interface. Then the routing code could do its work and route the packets through some some other or renumbered interface.
see above. we do that now. however, it limits the scope of mobility to "same autonomous system" and often "same campus" so it's not useful for any wide area purpose. the internet's target area is very wide indeed.
Try to get your TCP automatic renumbering stuff implemented from spec by five different people in five different codebases in a compatible way within two month time... No way.
where i come from that's called "the fallacy of the straw man" and is not a well respected technique for debate or discussion. the process i'm thinking of would take years to reach deployability, and more years to reach wide scale deployment.
KISS KISS KISS KISS !!!
Why is the telephone (POTS/Mobile) so popular? Easy answer: Even the most stupid person on earth capable of correctly reading digits is able to punch in a number. As simple as it gets.
i guess i was expecting smart people to write kernels and "lusers" to just run working code. this seems to work for apple and suse and redhat and sun and microsoft. or is this another straw man thing? certainly my kids think their mac/os/x machine is as easy to use as a telephone, and if you asked them how the routing table worked they wouldn't care. -- Paul Vixie