Yes, we made a guess -- a design compromise. Folks, we're engineers, and we
come up with "good enough" answers. Sure, we try to make sure that the
"good enough" answers are good enough for the majority of situations, for a
reasonable length of time. But we're not prophets or philosophers or
prescient -- we're just engineers. We made some "good enough" guesses with
IPv4 that, as Keith points out, got us to the situation of a global Internet
-- and our present dilemma is a byproduct of that solution's success. I
would not be disappointed if our next "good enough" guess lasts us as long
as the last one. After all, I'll want SOMEthing entertaining to do twenty
years from now. :-)
BTW -- I feel the same way about NAT: it's "good enough" for many
situations. :-) Send me mail at home, it goes to one machine on my internal
172.16 LAN; check out my personal webpages, you're talking to another
machine (and a different OS) in that address space. You don't see that, and
frankly I don't think about it very often. It's close to a "it just works"
solution -- which is "good enough" for now.
-- Ian
-----Original Message-----
From: Keith Moore [mailto:moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu]
Sent: Monday, April 24, 2000 5:38 PM
To: Anthony Atkielski
Cc: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: IPv6: Past mistakes repeated?
[snip]
but this same impossibility means that we do not know whether
we should
put today's energy into making variable length addresses work
efficiently
or into something else. so we made a guess - a design compromise -
that we're better off with very long fixed-length addresses because
fast routing hardware is an absolute requirement, and at least today
it seems much easier to design fast routing hardware (or software)
that looks at fixed offsets within a packet, than to design
hardware or
software that looks at variable offsets.
[snip]