Re: Human-regenerable IPv6 addresses

[Jeroen Massar]

Pars Mutaf wrote:

On Mon, 2006-09-11 at 23:42 +0200, Jeroen Massar wrote:

Pars Mutaf wrote:

Hello,

I have updated my HUMID internet draft entitled:

"Human-regenerable IPv6 interface identifiers and addresses"

Until it appears at the IETF site, you can find it at the
following address if you're interested:

http://www.freewebs.com/pmutaf/draft-mutaf-ipv6humid-01.txt

[don't read this as an overly negative reply...]

Hi Jeroen,

Why don't you: ping6 ff02::1

Because when you do that, you got a lot replies. You don't

know who is who.

Thus your DNS server is down, even though you have a lot of hosts?

Are all these hosts using hard-coded address then, as that is what your HUMID proposal will end up being used for, unless you patch all the hosts to have a fake DNS resolver that actually does the HUMID calculation.

and then ssh into the server that has your DNS server running and fix it up? Or, why not use mDNS (http://www.multicastdns.org/) or SMB/CIFS nameresolution? Without DNS you have no network nowadays anyway.

I believe the DNS server may be down (routing is independent). But if you don't agree, there are a lot of other things that may go wrong. Take the MIPv6 home agent, it may be unreachable. You can't get the destination's care-of-address. Only the home agent knows it, and it is unreachable.

>

Or, simply, there is no internet infrastructure in range.

(please let me know when you finish reading the draft ;-)

I read the draft and indeed it contained almost exactly what you write above, but that has nothing to do with what I wrote. That I don't comment on certain parts of the draft is not because I didn't read them but because those parts where not the main parts to address in the first place. If you don't have a network in the first place, then you don't need resolving either as there is nothing to be reached. If you want to have a network without DNS, then I suggest you look at things like mDNS, SMB/CIFS which already cover this and don't cause any naming problems or anything you have to remember. Also a local DNS server/cache is quite normal nowadays and thus doesn't require any internet infrastructure to be available. Just look at any out of the box "DSL router^WNAT box"

Solving your missing DNS problem by (ab)using a large portion of the EUI-64 space is not something I think is very useful.

Why do you think I'm (ab)using the EUI-64 space? We already have

random addresses. I missed something?

As you will need to obtain a valid EUI-64 prefix to actually be using this address space validly. RFC3041 addresses also have a special prefix allocated and so will any local-part of the address. Your draft also nicely mentions using DAD for dupe detection, what if two resources are named 'router', which is the resulting address that comes forth out of it? Or 'dns' as you want to fix that server but don't know it's address (but can guess the first 64bits...).

It is a fun approach, but not very useful in common cases.

I'm glad that you find that funny. But I'm really serious here ;-)
It is very useful in uncommon cases.

In common cases people simply fix their DNS server.

[..]

Frankly I've no problem with typing jean francois le roux.
Please note that, you don't have to know all names in the world!
I'm sure there are a number of human names that you know

In this case, HUMID is useful for you.

typing correctly (family, colleages, friends...).

The only 'name' you need to remember is that of the DNS server and the router, the latter is found at <prefix>::/64 (the subnet anycast address).

Or simple case, my own name, people tend to even say "jereon" or "jeroem" or "joeren", let alone the problem with pronunciation and then how people tend to write it ;)

Then again, only dutch folks seem to be able to pronounce it correctly.

Good for them. Bad for the others. In fact, I don't think human is that stupid. We (humans) know in general that we might have done a mistake somewhere.

[..]

Technical people know indeed, but technical people also are smart enough to configure their DNS server correctly and/or when broken fix it. People use google nowadays for looking up their things, they don't type in hostnames that much any more and they certainly will not start typing 128 bit addresses made up out of hex chars which they need to calculate

Try to see this like a human scanning protocol. It may find you, or it may fail. I say it will mostly succeed.

Do you know anybody who can do SHA-1 from the head? Even with pen and paper most people won't be able to do so as most people don't even know the algorithm. When you say 'but you can install a tool, download it from http://www... then you are using DNS.

I suggest you take a look at mDNS/SMB/CIFS for the needs you describe.


Greets,
 Jeroen

Secondly if you really think this draft has a value, talk to the folks in the dnsop WG what they think of it as they have a big history in name resolution, and that is what you are cooking up.

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