Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 16:01:15 +1000 From: Greg Daley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| It's not that dumb an idea, it reminds me of | base-85 (RFC-1924) IPv6 addressing notation. Which is a joke, not an idea (dumb or otherwise)... | It certainly does solve the uniqueness issue | for any given instant. What happens if you | 're-number' your telephone? This has the same problem as MAC addresses - it isn't stable (someone else can quite validly end up with the number that used to be yours). But, if abusing number spaces to try and gain easier uniqueness is an aim, then a (less automatic but perhaps still reasonable) method would be to abuse the IEEE OUI space (instead of the MAC address space). That is, any organisation with an OUI (22 real bits big) has 18 bits (256K) of numbers they can allocate however they see fit. And of course, organisations that the IEEE allows can go get new numbers. (The IETF is one such organisation of course, so IANA would have numbers to allocate). (This re-use of numbers would not conflict with other uses of the OUI, it would be in parallel, just as MAC48 and EUI-48 are - it would be xxx-40 of course, or -45 or something, depending upon prefix length). Of course, IEEE would probably need to agree to their number space being abused this way before we could suggest it as a method. Doing this still doesn't guarantee any kind of uniqueness, all it does is provide a ready made answer to the "one monopoly organisation" problem, while similtaneously making it effectively impossible for anyone to snarf any large fraction of the address space (no need to prescribe huge fees - like Eur 10). Even adding in registries, as Benny Amorsen proposed, doesn't really solve the problems. To be unique, there'd need to be one overall registry (perhaps sub-dividing the space to others) - which again means one monopoly, with no real justification for anyone to be the owner of that. Further, it only helps if people actually register (otherwise there are the same issues as with trade marks, where they can be held, unregistered, for a very long time, etc - except we have no legislation or case law to help with consistent reasonable answers to who wins). Multiple registries just means more places to register, and would create more confusion if A registers in registry 1, and B registers the same number in registry 2 (perhaps at about the same time, perhaps not). To actually get any kind of uniqueness, we need something that fails to work if the numbers are duplicated anywhere - and as these numbers are addresses, that really means that addressing has to fail. I can't see how that can possibly happen for numbers intended to be used only locally. kre -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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] --------------------------------------------------------------------