Re: NATs *ARE* evil!

[Jon Knight <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, 19 Dec 2000, V Guruprasad wrote:
> Could you please take a look at
> 	draft-guruprasad-addressless-internet-00.txt
> ?

I've just started to read it and in 1.1 it says:

  "- requiring e2e network knowledge (omniscience) at each node in the  
     form of e2e routing tables (Section 1.3);"

Erm, now I might be misunderstanding something here but our end nodes
(workstations, servers, PCs, etc) certainly don't have full e2e routing
knowledge.  They know what their address(es) is/are, what network(s) they
are on and what the address of their gateway router is.  Not exactly what
I'd call omniscience.

Also I note in section 1.2 it says:

  "Even if better dressed as IP addresses, network addresses are
   real addresses in that they locate physical destinations in the
   network, unlike memory addresses, which are routinely virtualised by
   host operating systems."

Surely DNS addresses are more equivalent to the virtual memory
addresses in host if you're going to take that analogy?  The whole point
of virtual memory is that it makes it easier for the user (well,
programmer) by hiding the nasty details of which physical address your
code and data live at.  The whole point of the DNS is that it makes it
easier for the user by hiding the nasty details of what IP address you
need to talk to.  And that's without getting into the situations where a
single IP address locates multiple hosts (broadcast addresses, multicast
addresses, etc).

Reading further into the draft I was left think "URNs".  The draft does
mention URNs at all and yet alot of what it seems to do appears similar to
the ideas behind the URN efforts of the IETF in the past.

Tatty bye,

Jim'll