RE: Competing Domain-Name Registries Creating Tower of Cyber-Babel

["Tony Hain" <alh-ietf at tndh.net>]

It is nice to know that in your corner of the Internet there are clean 1:1
mappings between each machine, its name, and its IP address. That is not the
case in many parts of the Internet today, and the reasons why are based on
local policy, not global mandate. Even if the companies in your example
wanted to get to that point they couldn't, simply because their business
requirement to be constantly live means they need more than one machine
mapped to a given name (never mind the load balancing issues). They
typically do that through multiple addresses in DNS, or may simply NAT a
single address to some 1918 space where the set of machines live. Either way
there is not a clean mapping.

Tony

-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony Atkielski [mailto:anthony at atkielski.com]
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 3:29 PM
To: ietf at ietf.org
Subject: Re: Competing Domain-Name Registries Creating Tower of Cyber-Babel

Dave Crocker writes:

> For each machine to have a unique IP address,
> yes each must have an IP address that no other
> shares.

Quite so.  And if you use names in place of IP addresses, this means that
every
name must resolve to exactly one machine, worldwide--which rules out local
interpretations of names.

> However this does not prevent machines from
> sharing IP addresses ALSO.

If each machine has a unique address, shared addresses are irrelevant.  If
shared addresses are used in place of unique addresses, then the criterion
of
unique addressing is not satisfied.