Re: sockets APIs extensions for Host Identity Protocol

[Miika Komu <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, 8 May 2007, Keith Moore wrote:

Hi,

> Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
>>> One could conceive that such a level of indirection could be used
>>> more generally outside of HIP, to enable applications to be more
>>> compatible across IP versions, for instance.
>>>
>>
>> One important thing: this is only for the C programming language. In
>> most (all?) other languages, programmers no longer handle directly IP
>> addresses and thus are shielded from things like IPv4 vs. IPv6 or
>> addresses vs. handles.
>
> In those cases, the programmers are also crippled and prevented from
> dealing effectively with various cases that are now increasingly common
> in the Intenet today: NATs,  multiple addresses for source and
> destination (not all of which work equally well), IPv4 vs IPv6 (for
> which the default address selection rules are woefully inadequate),
> multi-faced DNS, LLMNR, etc.

Yes, we need both simple and advanced interfaces and let the 
application developer choose what ever that is required for the 
application. This considers especially multihoming:

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-shim6-multihome-shim-api-02.txt

For the NAT traversal, my opinion is that we should should avoid making 
the applications NAT aware because would just too much unnecessarily 
redundant code around. This is approach taken in the NAT traversal draft 
(beware, the protocol mechanism is going to change in the next version 
radically):

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-hip-nat-traversal-01.txt

-- 
Miika Komu                                       http://www.iki.fi/miika/