> going back to the Saltzer paper, where in the topology is the > IPaddress and who is the name of the entity... so if there is an > entity at a point in the topology, then the name maps nicely into the > DNS.
Nope. Not even close. Why in the world people think that a name space and lookup system that are currently optimized and widely used for one purpose, are somehow suitable for a very different purpose, completely eludes me. > if not... then we have a problem. Yes, we do have a problem. As far as I can tell, it's the problem common to lots of different naming and lookup systems - and that problem is something like this: If you try to define a name for one purpose, and optimize a lookup system for certain purposes, you can be sure that people will insist that it be used for all manner of things for which the namespace was not designed and for which the namespace and lookup mechanism are poorly suited. It happened with DNS names, which were originally intended for use in naming hosts but have been widely used to name services for at least ten years now. (It's too late to change it, and DNS names aren't well suited for endpoint identifiers any for several other reasons) It happened with URNs, which were intended to be stable names, that were distinguishable from URLs, used to name network-accessible resources but people kept trying to insist that (a) they look like URLs or worse that URLs be acceptable as URNs, (b) they not be required to be stable, or (c) that they be used to name anything but network-accessible resources (e.g. that they be used merely as unique names - like GUIDs) And experience with the URN battle suggests that as long as people insist on putting square pegs into round holes - e.g. forcing DNS names to do a job that they cannot do well - we will not make useful progress. Keith -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List IPng Home Page: http://playground.sun.com/ipng FTP archive: ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng Direct all administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------
