Re: IP namespace (Was: Re: root knowledge)

[Thomas Johannsen <[e-mail]>]

> From: Christian Huitema <[e-mail]>
> I see that you are investigating various ways to represent the IP address space in
> the DNS. Let me tell you of three possible criterias:
> 
> 1) It shall be directly based on the address itself, not on a DNS representation
> of the address,
> 
> 2) It shall be distributed. Storing tens of millions of entries in a single space
> is not an alternative.

I think these two points don't need more discussion. Agreed.

> 3) The distribution shall be independant of the address format. Class A, B and C
> are used now, but a new "CIDR" format is just being defined for coping with the
> "address exhaustion" problem.

It certainly should be independant of the address format. However, we need
to build some hierarchy in order to be able to distribute the information.
If addresses have a semantic, let's us it for this purspose. This does not
imply dependance on the syntax, though.

BTW, everybody speaks about this new address format. Can anybody provide me
with a pointer to the current state of the art of the related discussion? As
I understood it nothing has been decided so far (at least not definitely).

> This is in fact a case where you would like to use "longest match" searches, i.e.
> select all possible entries in the database where attribute X contains the "first
> bits" (yes, I said BIT, not octet) of the target Y, then select the "longest X"
> and continue the search. Similar searches would be absolutely needed for NSAP
> resolution.

I'm afraid I didn't get your point properly. Could you please explain
(perhaps with an example) once more what you have in mind. As I read
it, you are going to have a flat namespace (what about your point 2)?) and
searching (all) objects for the occurance of some substring ("longest
match", to be more precise) in order to build groups. But this 
interpretation might be terribly wrong :-(

> 
> Christian Huitema
> 

Thomas