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.