Paul Vixie wrote:
Mumble. It's hard for me to buy the idea of there not being a "core"
portion of the Internet from which all public addresses are reachable.
i was going to say, "but these addresses aren't public", but then i saw the
larger problem, which is that the internet's architecture has guardians who
are able to either buy into, or not, various ideas.
"guardians" seems a bit skewed. within IETF, the RIRs, ICANN, USDoC,
Verisign, Cisco, or Microsoft it might make sense to think of there
being guardians who can promote a bad technology or block a good one,
each within their particular sphere. but I find it hard to think of the
LAN manager who buys a NAT box as being a guardian. sure the vendors
hawked them and misrepresented them, but the consumers kept buying them,
because there wasn't a better way to get that functionality in IPv4.
sometimes this is a
good thing, as with the wildcard *.COM that pointed to a sitefinder service.
other times this isn't a good thing, as occurred with NAT, firewalls, and
application layer gateways. how to tell good from bad? i think it's
whether the guardians think the idea is a stupid waste of the proposer's
time, or whether they think it will do outright harm.
"harm" becomes the important term in that equation... is it harmful to let
someone else's idea go forward because it will dilute the need for a better
solution? that's why a lot of people think DNSSEC DLV is bad -- simply that
it would take pressure off signing the root zone. is it harmful to set up
a service that stops RCODE=3 responses from coming back when a nonexistent
name ending in ".COM" is looked up? that's what i said when verisign added
a *.COM wildcard pointing to sitefinder.
without a consensus on what it means "to harm", we're sort of stuck. ULA-G
(and therefore ULA-C) would allow consenting adults to exchange routes using
the whois and in-addr infrastructure that has historically been reserved for
"public networking". lots of people, fearing leakage of "local" to "public",
think there is too much latent harm in this kind of centralized locality. in
the IETF, the naysayers pretty much kick the consenting adults' asses every
day and twice on sunday. and that's the real problem here, i finally think.
it certainly is a problem. and yet failure to provide direction seems
to cause even more problems.
Keith
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