Re: The internet architecture

[Bryan Ford <brynosaurus at gmail.com>]

I know this follow-up is a bit late, but on the topic of transitioning  
upper-layer protocols such as transports and applications toward being  
"IP address oblivious" - either by using DNS names instead, or  
location-independent crytpographic identifiers as in HIP, or personal  
names as in UIA, or something else -  I just wanted to suggest that  
the new "Transport Architecture Evolution" (tae at ietf.org)) mailing  
list that I set up just after the IETF meeting might be a good place  
to discuss such architectural issues, especially in terms of the way  
they affect application<->transport and transport<->network layer  
interfaces.

To throw in my quick $.02 (and perhaps invite more discussion :) ), I  
think we absolutely need to migrate both networking APIs and transport  
layer protocols themselves toward a model where an "endpoint" is an  
opaque (to the transport/application) variable-length string of some  
kind, and the transport/application shouldn't even care much if any  
what exactly the string is.  The string could potentially be a DNS  
name, a dotted IPv4 address, a colonificated IPv6 address, a hex- 
encoded HIP cryptographic host identifier, a UIA personal name, ...   
And sure, the semantics of these different kinds of "endpoint strings"  
will vary depending on what they actually are, and for network  
management purposes they won't all be equivalent or interchangeable,  
but for purposes of normal transport and application protocol  
operation - i.e., "gimme a TCP-like connection to the endpoint named  
'X'", why should transports and applications need to care?  Just think  
how much easier the IPv4 to IPv6 transition would have been if nothing  
above the IP layer cared exactly what an IP address looks like or how  
big it is.

Cheers,
Bryan

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