Re: The internet architecture

[John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net>]

Speak for yourself David.  These problems have been well understood 
and discussed since 1972.  But you are correct, that there were still 
a large unwashed that didn't and I am still not sure why that was. 
This seems to be elementary system architecture.


At 6:59 -0800 2008/12/05, Dave CROCKER wrote:
> Thomas Narten wrote:
> > And, if one wants to look back and see "could we have done it
> > differently", go back to the BSD folk that came up with the socket
> > API. It was designed to support multiple network stacks precisely
> > because at that point in time, there were many, and TCP/IP was
> > certainly not pre-ordained. But that API makes addresses visible to
> > APIs. And it is widely used today.
>
>
> Thomas,
>
> If you are citing BSD merely as an example of a component that 
> imposes knowledge of addresses on upper layers, then yes, it does 
> make a good, concrete example.
>
> If you are citing BSD because you think that they made a bad design 
> decision, then you are faulting them for something that was common 
> in the networking culture at the time.
>
> People  -- as in end users, as in when they were typing into an 
> application -- commonly used addresses in those days, and hostnames 
> were merely a preferred convenience.  (Just to remind us all, this 
> was before the DNS and the hostname table was often out of date.)
>
> Worse, we shouldn't even forgive them/us by saying something like 
> "we didn't understand the need for name/address split, back then" 
> because it's pretty clear from the last 15 years of discussion and 
> work that, as a community, we *still* don't.  (The Irvine ring was 
> name-based -- 1/4 of the real estate on its network card was devoted 
> to the name table -- but was a small LAN, so scaling issues didn't 
> apply.)
>
> d/
>
> ps. As to your major point, that having apps de-coupled from 
> addresses would make a huge difference, boy oh boy, we are certainly 
> in agreement there...
> --
>
>   Dave Crocker
>   Brandenburg InternetWorking
>   bbiw.net
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