Subject: Re: Tired of Waiting

From: Patrick Greenwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 09:12:29 -0700 (PDT)

On Wed, 15 Jul 1998, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> 
> Patrick Greenwell writes:
> > On Tue, 14 Jul 1998, Noel Chiappa wrote:
> > 
> > > PS: Didn't we just have the US Congress mandate "number portability" for
> > > local phone companies to prevent just this kind of "lock-in" - and for much
> > > the same reason, which is that it's much harder to change your phone number
> > > than your credit card number.
> > 
> > Please, when customers are guaranteed IP portability, let me know....
> 
> Phone numbers aren't like IP addresses. IP addresses are much more
> like routing information -- the stuff that is permanent in the IP
> world is the domain name, not the IP address.

Phone numbers aren't like routing information? Then why do we have area
codes and exchange prefixes?

Further, I would love to have a truly permanent, portable IP address(es). 
I imagine lots of folks would. 

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From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 17:32:12 +0000

>I imagine lots of folks would. 

Right.  Lots of people would.  The problem is that at present, it's
simply not technically feasible.  Portable IP addresses -- even on a
corporate scale, where the units routed are networks, not hosts -- would
imply a very large increase in the size of the global routing table.
And that's problematic, partly because of the memory requirements -- routers
don't use the SIMMs you buy at your corner computer store -- but because
of the computational complexity of the routing table calculations.  And
that issue, in turn, is exacerbated by the desire for the Internet to
respond quickly to changes in topology, which in turn means that the
calculations need to be done rather frequently.

It may be that new algorithms and techniques will make this point moot.
For now, the best approach is to adopt technologies that make addresses
less visible and less permanent, such as IPv6 with automatic renumbering.
Or perhaps IPv6's large address space will let us experiment with other
techniques, such as geographical addressing and metropolitan area
exchanges.  For now, though, I think we have to live with topology-based
addressing -- not because anyone wants to, but because the technology
doesn't exist to do otherwise.

I should note that this issue, unlike most of the others, is almost
purely technical.  If anyone has any *detailed, technical* refutations
-- and not simply assertions that topology-based addresses are wrong,
or a bare claim that the problem is solved -- I'd be interested in
hearing it.  You're right, of course, that today it is an important
issue.  But I for one don't know how to solve it, nor to my knowledge
do the IETFers I respect.

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From: Patrick Greenwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 11:17:28 -0700 (PDT)

> imply a very large increase in the size of the global routing table.

That really depends on what you consider a network. /30? /29? /24?
Certainly Sprint could remove their (now) assinine filter tomorrow, and I
don't think you would see a very large increase in the size of the global
routing table. Most providers announce /24's already anyways. 

At any rate, I wasn't saying that personalized, individual IP portability
is technically feasible at this time, just that it would be nice.
Perhaps we could ask the telco industry, who is working on what seems
to me to be a fairly similar issue with phone number portability. :-)

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From: John Day <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 14:54:51 -0400

>>I imagine lots of folks would.

But it wouldn't be an address.

Noel, you want to explain this or is it worth it?

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From: Patrick Greenwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 12:20:25 -0700 (PDT)

> Noel, you want to explain this or is it worth it?

Oh, please do. :-)

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From: Simon Spero <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 22:40:47 -0400 (EDT)

> Noel, you want to explain this or is it worth it?
[Noel Chiappa had a farm EIEID...] 

If no-one has any objection, I will setup a daemon to automically post
random postings from the big-internet archive until we all travel
sufficiently far back in time that we can prevent the spice girls from
meeting.

ObLibel: Postel didn't write 793 - bacon did