CNN.com - WiFi activists on free Web crusade - Nov. 29, 2002 (fwd)

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Sun Dec 1 01:26:34 PST 2002


On Sat, 30 Nov 2002, Dave Howe wrote:

> without routing and name services, you have what amounts to a propriatory

I believe I mentioned geographic routing (which is actually switching, and
not routing) so your packets get delivered, as the crow flies. The
question of name services. How often do you actually use a domain name as
an end user? Not very often. People typically use a search engine. It
doesn't matter how the URI looks like, as long as it can be clicked on, or
is short enough to be cut and pasted, or written down on a piece of paper
and entered manually, in a pinch.

So you need (distributed) searching and document (not machine) address 
spaces, which current P2P suites create the architecture for.

> NAT solution - no way to address an interior node on the cloud from the

It depends on how large the network is. Wireless is potentially a much
bigger node cloud, so the current Internet could became a 'proprietary
niche' eventually.  However, there is no reason why the nodes wouldn't
have a second address, or the IPv6 address would double as a geographic
coordinate. At least during the migration.

> internet (and hence, peer to peer services or any other protocol that
> requires an inbound connection not directly understood by the nat
> translation - eg ftp on a non standard port or ssl-encrypted as ftps)

Fear not.
 
> under ipv6 you can avoid having to have a explicit naming service - the

You obviously understand under naming service something other than DNS.

> cloud id of the card (possibly with a network prefix to identify the cloud
> as a whole) can *be* the unique name; routing is still an issue but that

Anything which relies on global routing tables and their refresh will 
always has an issue. Which is why geographical local-knowledge routing 
will dominate global networks.

> reduces to being able to route to a unique node inside the cloud - which
> appears from a brief glance at the notes from Morlock Elloi (thanks again :)
> to have at least a workable trial solution.  if a IPv6 internet ever becomes
> a reality, clouds would fit right in.

It is a patch, not a solution. But wireless ad hoc meshes are really a 
first real reason to go IPv6.

> TCP/IP tunnelling without a name service at at least one end isn't workable;
> *static* NAT/PAT is of course a name service and can't be considered, but
> SOCKS and socks aware p2p is a definite possibility.

The best solution would seem to leave the multilingual node the choice of
means of delivery. It would be completely transparent to the packet.





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