[e2e] It's all my fault

[Detlef Bosau]

Christian Huitema wrote:
>>
>> before we really rathole,   uucp != the usenet
>>     
>
> Yes. Sorry about that. Should have written UUCP all the way. From our
> neck of the wood in the early 80's, the two pretty much appeared as one,
> but that certainly is not the case anymore.
>
> -- Christian Huitema
>   

But didn´t this mixup, if by accident, match the point?

Basically, the good ol´ bang path offered a neat way to add application 
based routing / overlay networks to a heterogeneous world.
And this kind of routing was active until recently / is still active, 
e.g. when you are offered to take part in the usenet by uucp.

So basically, when we talk about source routing, we talk about 
heterogenous overlay networks. These are well known, pretty understood, 
work fine. There are many well known applications for that, usenet news, 
Internet mail, SAP and saprouter, EDI in all flavours, only to name a 
few. (And even Geocast is to come :-))

In my humble opinion, we have seen a more elegant way for 
interconnecting heteregenous systems and to offer things like
- path transparency,
- path redundancy,
- reliability and avoiding single points of failure.

It´s called the Internet and IP :-)

Basically, I tend to agree with Lloyd. I think, if we did not knew about 
source routing - we surely wouldn´t miss it.

And even for overlay networking, I wonder whether we really need 
_application_ _based_  routing. If we need a mesh of nodes for a certain 
application, SAP, IRC, usenet, mail, skype, whatever, isn´t it 
sufficient to assign an IP address to these and then to rely upon well 
known and well understood internetworking techniques? And of course 
_with_ end to end path transparency, end to end path redundancy etc.?

Perhaps it´s advisable to provide some mapping between application 
specific names (organisational, geographical, functional, whatever) to 
IP adresses.

Perhaps, I have a somewhat restricted way of thinking there, but I 
always think of the DNS as a model for services like that and that one 
should provide a similar service to applications if necessary - and 
that´s it.

Basically there are two compelling reasons for doing so:
1.: It´s always a good idea to rely upon something that is known to work.
2.: K.I.S.S. (Keep It Small and Simple.)

And it´s needless to say that the idea of end to end path transparency / 
redundancy / reliability cannot be overempasized here. It´s to my 
understaning _the_ very basic rationale behind the whole Internet.

Detlef     (who just thinks of saprouters - and that´s really an evil 
hack to undermine just _all_ security policies and routing / traffic 
engineering  considerations one can think of. I always prefer the front 
door over the back door.)