The Southern Cal site.

[Justin W. Newton]

Bah, here we go again.

At 02:32 PM 2/28/97 -0600, Carol Anne Cypherpunk wrote:
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>Jim Fleming scambled some electrons to say:
>Can someone explain what people are supposed to infer from above ?
>
>What I got from it was this:
>
>Someone with a lotta money, is gonna stomp on somebody
>who doesn't have a lot of money. 

Don't forget the helicopters, the helicopters are very important.

>
>This ain't www3, and as sure as folks are discovering domains,
>someone (like me but only with tons of bucks) is discovering IP
>numbers. And they will have the game (legal) played in US courts.

HINT: WWhile people are trying to make this a business decision, it is not
strictly so.  Behind a lot of the way that IP's are currently allocated are
/technical/ limitations.  Wheteher these limitations are here because Big
Company X decided to abuse our trust and place false limitations on us, or
because God stated it to be so, or because we were all too busy looking at
the pretty blinky lights to build the internet better, the limitations
remain.  There are /possibly/ going to be solutions in 6 months or so, but
noone has proven that any of these solutions work in LARGE networks.
(Sorry Karl, you aren't large, and neither is Nathan, and neither am I for
that matter.)  We don't know that these solutions ever /will/ work
(although they probably will), and it would be unwise of us to setup
registries /assuming/ that a solution is in the works.  

>Frankly I'd like the 9.9.9.9 ip address (cause I'm an old Beatle fan) :)

Well, talk to IBM and see if there is a way that they will either sell you
a connection or allow you to tunnel into their network.  Having them sell
you the address so that your provider could announce it individually would
be a VeryBadThing(tm).  


>Someday every computer from Apple will have an IP address built in.
>Just like an operating system.
>An IP a day keeps the bankruptcy court away.

Cool, does this mean that Apple is going to become a provider for all of
their sold computers so that they can announce an aggreaget, or are core
routers going to have to carry several billion /32's?  (Cool, we could use
the entire available bandwidth of the internet for flap updates).

>Maybe we even need to add another .xxx to the routing tables, we'd sure
>have enough IP's for every concievable situation.

What does it cost to add another .xxx to the IP protocol?  I would bet that
the number would be somewhere betwen $10billion and a trillion, but I could
be off.  Karl, how unfeasible is it for you to renumber your customers
again?  Add into that downtime due to trying to coordinate cutover, and you
have some interesting economics going on there.  This /isn't/ the solution
(there are solutions being worked on, but this isn't it).

>
>Enough rant for now. but it IS what gleaned from that lovely So. Cal site.

Ok, my turn to rant.  What did you do to educate yourself on how the
internet works before deciding that you had the solution?  How many large
scale networks have you run or talked to the operators of?  When did you
work with, or speak to, people who have allocated, or had allocated to them
at least a /17 of space about IP allocation issues?  How's your education
level on how routers react in exposure to large numbers of routing table
entries, especially with frequently changing entries.  (If my IP address is
hard coded into my Mac, I should be able to use it at BOTH of my providers
right?)  Please, please, please folks, don't post until you have spent a
lot of time researching the effect that IP registries can have on the net.
The domain issues are NOT the same.  

(For anyone who cares, I was originally against the creation of new TLD's
because of the headache it would cause my tech support folks when someone
meant to go to www.foo.web and typed in www.foo.com and wondered why it
took them to the wrong place.  Now, I simply don't care, if people really
want a billion TLD's, fine by me, it won't break anything.  Some of these
ideas on registries /could/ break things.  For more information related to
competing IP registries, or "buying and selling" IP's, etc etc, please go
to either the pagan or piara mailing lists.)




Justin Newton				
Network Architect					
Erol's Internet Services
ISP/C Director at Large