[ih] IP addresses are not phone numbers, was Some Questions over IPv4 Ownership

[Adrian Chadd]

On Sun, Oct 17, 2010, Miles Fidelman wrote:

> It's not necessarily a link-layer function to do the handoff, but what 
> is actually changing is happening at the link layer - one physical link 
> is dropping, and a new one is coming up.
> 
> The hand-off is really a routing function - changing the mapping between 
> a specific IP address and a specific physical link.  That shouldn't be 
> too hard to do if one carrier is handing things from one asset to 
> another, seems a bit more difficult when two carriers are involved - and 
> brings us back to the original question of who "owns" the IP address 
> when more than one carrier is involved. :-)

I've had people claim "websockets" is the future, where all that complicated
stuff is hidden behind a HTTP gateway. Your address can change but as your
sockets are all over HTTP, none of your code needs to know.

Of course, websockets has its fair share of problems (incl. but not limited
to a previous draft wanting to speak HTTP enough to fool a proxy, but not
speak HTTP - making proxying it through a hierarchy of caches rather
unreliable. Sigh. When will people learn. :-)



Adrian