-When (and how) did site-locals become the main obstacle standing in the
way of solving the routing/identifier problem?
-When (and how) did all the other reasons that have been advanced to stymie
any work on the routing/identifier problem evaporate?
<rant>
From my point of view, as an apps person, people stopped looking at these alternatives when they found out they can force applications to have clue about routing topologies, force applications to use this clue to do clever source address selections, and more people started thinking Site Local was not only a solution to this, but also the magic pixie-dust which solves other problems as well.
</rant>
The problem I see is that we have the classical hammer problem here. You have a hammer, or manage to define something which looks like a hammer, and feels like a hammer, and then you look for nails.
This is something we see in many areas of the IETF, including Applications Area where I was Area Director for 5 years until March this year (so I am not blaming other Areas for these things).
Maybe it is because Internet technologies are so difficult to understand nowadays one only look at a solution within the space one work in, and then ignore (more or less) the cost in other areas?
Take the multiple addresses for example, which applications people hate.
The way an application do it's work is like the following:
- Take a hostname
- Call gethostbyname (and get a struct back with (at least) one IP address)
- Ask the IP strack to connect to whatever is described by that struct
That's pretty simple, isnt't it?
Further, another general rule for applications is:
If A uses address a(B) to contact B, C should also use a(B), because so many applications work in a scenario where A send to C not "B", but a(B), i.e. the address.
So, for applications to work, one need to only use global addresses all the time. Or, one can patch in local addressing by using things similar to split-DNS, which really is not a fun thing, because one get a view of the world which is different depending on where you are looking from. I.e. context dependent.
Note that I only talk about addressing in the above. Not routing.
So, yes, it would be very natural to talk much more about differentiating between routing and addressing.
Maybe one doesn't talk about it because for example apps and internet people don't talk so much with each other?
paf
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