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IETF draft on different IPv4 addressing scheme
skuzbunny writes "The IETF [?] draft The Mathematical Reality of IP Addressing in IPv4 Questions
the need for Another IP System of Addressing has some really interesting comments on IPv6 [?] . Quote: "I was indeed successful in the
elimination of the problems associated with IP Address Flooding
inherent in IPv4 and the complexities of IPv6. In short, small
business and single family dwellings can now have the option of
having their own private IP Addressing Scheme," " Interesting, particularly if I understand the math correctly. Can anyone who's actually qualified to comment on this comment below?
The problem that many of my detractors (who Should be Obvious to you by now). Is that They have more problems with, ( of course ) the subnet of my presentation ( table 1 ). Needles to say, Nevertheless. That they more than Likely do not comprehend ( of course ) the Fundamentals of the I'm a Fucking Retard Rule ( Needless to say, similar to my Octet rule ).
Never the less, it should be Obvious why I didn't ( or should i say, Couldn't ). Needless to say, pass the fucking Cisco exam because my head ( or never the less, what is on top of my head ) is so far.
Just imagine! Shoved up my ass, that this paper should be my addmitance paperwork out of computer ( or network ). Consutlting/IT Professional, and into scooping M&M's for Dary Queen.
if you read this hampsters paper all the way thru.. take off two points. Take off 3 if you printed it out to read it later.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
If his math is anything like his grammar, you can basically write it off straight away. And if it's not, it's still impossible to work out what he's really trying to say since he's not communicating with any sort of precision.
My translation:
Jen stepped over to the couch, slowly rocking her hips with each step, accenting the graceful curves of her body. She quickly move in next to him, noting the warmth coming from her lover. His warm hands started at her thighs, and crept up until they were her under her red sweater. He moved his lips next to her face, giving a quick nibble or her ear, and losing himself in the scent of her soft blond hair. She moaned softly, and brought her face closer to her man's ear.
"Rob," she moaned, "show me your Commander Taco."
How's my translation?
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It looks to me like this draft is saying:
A) The author feels nobody explains IP Addressing well;
B) There is some discrepancy between the standard decimal representation of an IP address and the standard binary representation of it;
C) The original class A/B/C method of assigning IP addresses is obsolete;
D) The 32 bit IPv4 system could be used for another hundred years without upgrading to IPv6 if you use some obscure addressing scheme that appears to depend on B, above, and hiding some of the address in the subnet mask;
E) Adopting this scheme will be easier than teaching people how to use IPv6.
Well, point A is obvious, if he considers this draft to be a "logical...explanation", than no previous documentation would quite pass muster.
He provides no clear evidence for point B. The number 119 is the same if you represent it in decimal (119) or binary (01110111). If this is not the case, I want to hear it from a mathemetician, not an IETF draft.
Point C is true, that's why we no longer use it. He apparently has either not read or not understood RFC 950, which describes how to get away from the unnecessarily coarse class A/B/C system, without using his equally coarse class A-1/A-2/A-3/B-1/... system.
Point D is not adequately documented to be of any use to anyone. The current IPv4 address allocation scheme still has a lot of wasted addresses, which could extend its life if tapped. I can't even tell if this scheme taps them, or if it just pushes big words around on the page.
Point E is false in this instance, since fully grocking this draft is much harder than understanding and implementing IPv6. Even if it is translated and better explained, I doubt any scheme to tap a significant number of wasted IPv4 addresses would be easier than just upgrading to IPv6. This is because most of the waste is considered "expansion space" by the owners of the network addresses. Any use of these addresses would require not only reprogramming many routers, but spending a lot more time maintaining the resulting routing tables as addresses here and there get used.
The bottom line, IPv4's not dead yet, but IPv6 is still inevitable, and this paper proposes nothing coherant.
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Open mind, insert foot.
The catch (of course there is one!) is that you need to accept the axiom of choice, which basically allows you to make arbitrary choices even if those choices are too many to count. The cuts you have to make along the sphere involve choosing an uncountable number of unknown real numbers in each of the three spatial coordinates all at once.
In real life you could not make such choices, since you are constrained to splitting a gold bar along gold atoms, which are discrete units. This lack of applicability of the axiom of choice to real life has led many in the field to reject the axiom of choice as invalid ... but that's a whole other story.
If I understand it correctly (and I'm not sure that I do, due to the incredibly obfuscated language) he is claiming some expansion of the IPv4 address space by using multiple instances of the same IP address, differentiated by subnet mask.
I gave up after Chapter 3, as my head was starting to hurt.
His mathematics is extremely suspect, both in his calculations and in his apparent amazement that binary and decimal notations do not coincide. Competent mathematicians writing for a technical audience do not generally point this out three times a paragraph.
If someone finds a kernel of truth or reason in this article, please speak up. But don't go in there without your brain firmly strapped in.
Rupert
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E_NOSIG
His math reminds me of something I saw about 10 years ago - there was some stir in the comp.compression newsgroups over a press release by a company called WEB something-or-other (short for Wider Electronic Bandwidth) anyway, this company claimed they had 'almost perfected' a breakthrough compression algorithm that could losslesly compress any file by a ratio of exactly 16:1. They claimed you could even do this recursively on the output of their compressor, until you reached a size of 'about 1k'. Imagine it! They actually believed that they could take absolutely any n-byte file, and map it one-to-one with some file of m bytes, where m is 1024 or so.
:^)
you could argue, I suppose, that with godlike foreknowledge, you could 'number' all the files humanity will ever produce, and the serial number for any document ever produced could fit into under 1k, but, of course, you decompression tables would be *enormous*. -- oh, and I guess that table would be a file, so it would need a new serial number, and thus a new table, ad infinitum.
As I recall, they even issued press releases announcing they had received VC, and were about to release a product as soon as they figured out how to solve the 'highly unusual situation when four identical numbers are at the corner of a matrix' -- they never explained this cryptic gobbledygook, and never released any details of their scheme.
But the really amazing thing was how many yoyos in the newsgroups bought it, hook, line, and sinker, and spouted nonsense such as: "people thought Galileo was crazy, too, but it turned out he was right! Maybe there are things about your precious number theory that we haven't discovered yet!"
Some poor soul tried to explain that there is no "advanced number theory" involved, just plain counting - there is no way to do a one-to-one mapping from one-byte to 16-bytes. You would think a reasonable person could generalize this principle to understand that you also can't do a one-to-one mapping from 1kb to 16kb, but alas, many pundits wrote back, calling the first guy an idiot for not 'noticing' that the company had 'already admitted' you could only carry out the process until a size of 1k.
The whole thing was pretty funny, but rather pathetic at the same time...
Also, I was surprised to not find an mention of CIDR in the entire document. The IP class system has been obsolete for nearly five years....
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