Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!HOGG.CC.UOREGON.EDU!jqj From: jqj@HOGG.CC.UOREGON.EDU Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: Running out of Internet addresses? Message-ID: <8812021842.AA01707@hogg.cc.uoregon.edu> Date: 2 Dec 88 18:42:22 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 36 Before we put much effort into a version 5 of Internet IP we should ask ourselves whether it is worth it. From my perspective, GOSIP IP and CLNS are coming along fast, and mostly solve the addressing problem. Meanwhile, the major advantage (for me!) of TCP/IP is the large installed base of systems and linked networks. A major revision of IP would almost certainly be incompatible with every existing implementation, and hence could not be widely adopted in time to solve our interim problems. Some alternatives to a major revision of IP at this time: 1/ revisit running TCP over OSI IP. OSI IP routers already exist, sort of. Could we live with OSI IP addresses? If not, what are we gonna do when we're not allowed to buy TCP/IP any more? 2/ make more effective use of the existing IP number-space. The current problem is not that we are running out of host addresses (we only have some 60K to 100K hosts on the Internet). The problem is that in a couple of years we'll run out of some kinds of network number. So maybe we should consider assigning a single class A network to each of the regional NSF networks. They could subnet their networks, issue a few hundred 10-bit subnets to each campus they are connected to, and reclaim a couple of dozen class B and C networks each. Push the problem out of the domain of IP routing into that of subnet routing and take advantage of the internal connectivity that the NSF regionals have given us! 3/ seriously consider disjoint Internets with overlapping IP address spaces, connected by application-specific bridges. The routing technology for mail is already deployed, and the technology for telnet is pretty simple (just change the documentation; you wanna get to foo.bar.PROPRIETARY? Telnet to proprietary-gateway.nsf.net, get the HOST: prompt, and telnet from there to foo.bar.proprietary). Granted you can't do much else, but 70% of our community doesn't care about NTP or NFS -- they just want to send mail or open a remote terminal session.