Re: 69/8 is harder to fix than it looks at first glance

[Joe Abley]

On Wednesday, Mar 12, 2003, at 12:11 Canada/Eastern, 
Michael.Dillon@radianz.com wrote:

> The fact is that are operating these 21st century networks using 19th
> century business technology. This does not scale. The net is too big 
> to be
> managed by person to person exchange of information. That's why we have
> DNS protocols instead of issuing updated copies of the hosts file. And
> that's why we need an automated system to publish current status of IP
> address ranges in a format that would be acceptable to firewall admins 
> and
> firewall vendors.
The DNS is managed by person-to-person exchange of information, and it 
scales. HOSTS.TXT was an example of a centrally-managed database, which 
didn't scale. Your examples seem to be backwards in some way.

Most of the Internet operates on the basis of person-to-person (or 
router-to-router, or AS-to-AS) information exchange, a characteristic 
which has *allowed* it to grow. Information which cannot be distributed 
in this manner frequently becomes troublesome to administer and mired 
in policy discussion with little forward momentum (e.g. the contents of 
the root zone, IP address assignments).

Saying that the Internet is too big for distributed information 
processing to scale (and promoting centralised management of 
information as a preferred alternative) is just odd.


Joe