Re: Sequentially assigned IP addresses--why not?

[Geoff Huston]

At 04:40 PM 8/10/00 -0400, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
>Look at it this way.  We have about 75K routes in the "default-free
>zone" now.


No - that was March 2000 - now we have about 87,000 (www.telstra.net/ops/bgp)


>   If we just assigned addresses sequentially, we'd need a
>route for every endpoint.  There are what, 100,000,000 nodes today, and more
>tomorrow?  We can't handle 3 orders of magnitude increase in the size
>of that table, let alone what it will be in a few years.


There are a number of scenarios which will make the routing system
crash and burn - this is one of them. On the other hand even doing
nothing will be a problem - we appear to have resumed exponential
growth of the routing system again, presumably as multi-homing at
the edges starts to be more and more common.

   Geoff Huston