romkey@asylum.sf.ca.us (John Romkey) (11/30/88)
In article <207@logicon.arpa> Makey@LOGICON.ARPA (Jeff Makey) writes: >With 4.2 million network numbers, 115 new network numbers could be >registered every DAY, and it would still take 100 years to exhaust >them all. It seems that there really isn't a problem in the >foreseeable future. Ah, they said that about addresses spaces so many times...it is to cry. I want to see a protocol address space large enough to handle a node in each household appliance, each piece of electronic equipment, and several extras per household, office and vehicle. Traffic lights on the Internet. Stray toasters. And enough addresses left over to scatter hosts across the inner solar system. I'm not very worried about IP running out of addresses here because I'm pretty sure that by the time we start doing all this we'll have learned enough new things about protocols and the devices we're communicating with that we'll have scrapped TCP/IP and gone on to new horizons. Same thing goes for ISO (which there is not a whole lot of 'practical experience' in, anyway). I have a small piece of internet in my dining room. It's not connected to the rest of the world yet (give me another few months), but soon it will spread through the rest of the house. And you can buy a toaster with a microprocessor in it from Sears. No ethernet, yet. - john -- - john romkey romkey@asylum.uucp romkey@xx.lcs.mit.edu romkey@asylum.sf.ca.us Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground Mother Earth will swallow you, lay your body down.
amanda@lts.UUCP (Amanda Walker) (12/02/88)
In article <1010@asylum.sf.ca.us>, romkey@asylum.sf.ca.us (John Romkey) writes: > I want to see a protocol address space large enough to handle a node > in each household appliance, each piece of electronic equipment, and > several extras per household, office and vehicle. Traffic lights on > the Internet. Stray toasters. And enough addresses left over to > scatter hosts across the inner solar system. This reminds me of a remark Gurshuran Sidhu made at an Apple networking conference a couple years ago. He described Ethernet addresses as having been "designed to be intergalactically unique." The biggest problem, I think, is that 32 bits (or 48, or whatever) is certainly big enough to serve as a *physical* addressing scheme, but we keep chopping up addresses so that we can have a *logical* addressing scheme. I mean, we have a Class C address, and we've got a whopping four hosts. That's 1.5% utilization. Of course, it's nice to be able to add hosts as we get them, and subnetting makes contiguous blocks A Good Thing, but it still means that the address space is sparsely populated if you think of it as a physical address space. One advantage that I see IP having over OSI (from what I understand about OSI addressing, anyway), is that the encoding scheme is very simple, thus giving some of the advantages of both physical and logical addressing. I remember the NCP/TCP switchover. It will be a lot harder the next time... -- Amanda Walker ...!uunet!lts!amanda / lts!amanda@uunet.uu.net InterCon, 11732 Bowman Green Drive, Reston, VA 22090 -- "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." -- N. Negroponte
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (12/03/88)
In article <729@lts.UUCP> amanda@lts.UUCP (Amanda Walker) writes: >... He described Ethernet addresses as having >been "designed to be intergalactically unique." > >The biggest problem, I think, is that 32 bits (or 48, or whatever) is >certainly big enough to serve as a *physical* addressing scheme, but >we keep chopping up addresses so that we can have a *logical* addressing >scheme... Another thing that Xerox arguably did right with Ethernet: the 48-bit addresses are *not* chopped up this way. They are in fact divvied up by manufacturer, but manufacturers are supposed to use their part of the space completely before getting another one. The Xerox notion is that the 48-bit address provides a unique identifier for the destination, and any information needed to efficiently locate said destination should be supplied separately. (As I recall, XNS adds a 16-bit network number as a routing hint.) The paper some years ago in SIGCOMM [grr, I just realized I don't have an exact reference handy] on the design of Ethernet addressing should be required reading for anyone thinking about this. -- SunOSish, adj: requiring | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 32-bit bug numbers. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
morgan@Jessica.stanford.edu (RL "Bob" Morgan) (12/03/88)
John Romkey writes: > I want to see a protocol address space large enough to handle a node > in each household appliance, each piece of electronic equipment, and > several extras per household, office and vehicle. Traffic lights on > the Internet. Stray toasters. And enough addresses left over to > scatter hosts across the inner solar system. In the newspaper the other day there was an article about Echelon, Inc., which apparently is intending to fire up the ToasterNet business in a big way. As I recall, they proposed 48-bit addresses. I personally would feel happier with 128, or maybe even 256. It's a big galaxy. - RL "Bob"
MAB@CORNELLC.CIT.CORNELL.EDU (Mark Bodenstein) (12/10/88)
> ... Traffic lights on >the Internet. ... Could they be used for flow control? :-) Mark Bodenstein (mab@cornellc.cit.cornell.edu) Cornell University
mckee@MITRE.ARPA (H. Craig McKee) (12/12/88)
lts!amanda@uunet.uu.net (Amanda Walker) writes: >This reminds me of a remark Gurshuran Sidhu made at an Apple networking >conference a couple years ago. He described Ethernet addresses as having >been "designed to be intergalactically unique." What was the rationale for 48-bit Ethernet addresses? They are never used beyond the "Local" Area Network; duplicate addresses at different sites shouldn't matter. Regards - Craig
evan@RICE.EDU (Evan Wetstone) (12/13/88)
H. Craig McKee <mckee@mitre.arpa> writes: >What was the rationale for 48-bit Ethernet addresses? They are never >used beyond the "Local" Area Network; duplicate addresses at different >sites shouldn't matter. Regards - Craig But how can you then guarantee that duplicate addresses will not be at the same site? Evan Wetstone Rice University
murray@jumbo.dec.com (Hal Murray) (12/13/88)
The idea behind a globally unique 48 bit ID was to avoid the confusion that results when somebody sets the switches wrong. The Altos on the early 3MB ethernet had switches/jumpers for the host number. Every now and then somebody would move a machine from one building to another and plug it in to a handy drop cable without checking in with the local host number czar. Now, suppose that host number is already assigned to another machine. Suppose one of the overlaping machines is talking to a server. The ack goes back, and both machines hear it. The wrong one doesn't know about the socket, so it sends a reject to the server. The server closes the connection. The next packet from the first machine to the server hits a dead connection. Soon, the user gets a strange error message. The Altos normally ran with the ethernet interface disabled. It was only activated when you ran a program that used the ethernet, say to print something or FTP a file. That meant that this sort of confusion was likely to be very mysterious because the time when things actually acted up was long after the "move" that caused it. It makes more sense in the XNS protocols where the 48 bit ID is used directly as the host number. That way you don't need a parameter file for the ARP info. (They added 32 more bits for the network number.)
w-colinp@microsoft.UUCP (Colin Plumb) (12/14/88)
In article <8812121420.AA27357@mitre.arpa> mckee@MITRE.ARPA (H. Craig McKee) writes: >What was the rationale for 48-bit Ethernet addresses? They are never >used beyond the "Local" Area Network; duplicate addresses at different >sites shouldn't matter. Regards - Craig So you could burn the address into ROM on the controller and never, ever, have to worry about changing it to avoid collisions. So every ethernet card ever made could have a different address. It's simpler than a dynamic addressing scheme, and less work than a configurable one. The only penalty is the address length. -- -Colin (uunet!microsof!w-colinp)
SSanfilippo.osbunorth@XEROX.COM (12/15/88)
The Ethernet address is large because it is assigned to a device permanently, and remains the same even if the device is moved to another network. Also, the Ethernet address is the same size, and is identical to, the "host" portion of the XNS address used by a higher-level protocol known as IDP (Internet Datagram Protocol - the XNS counterpart of IP). Since these addresses are the same, there is no need for an ARP protocol in XNS.
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (12/15/88)
In article <8812121420.AA27357@mitre.arpa> mckee@MITRE.ARPA (H. Craig McKee) writes: >What was the rationale for 48-bit Ethernet addresses? They are never >used beyond the "Local" Area Network... In TCP/IP-land they are strictly local. In XNS-land they are globally known, with other addressing information present only as hints. There was also a considerable desire to guarantee uniqueness on any LAN without reliance on administrative actions like flipping DIP switches. -- SunOSish, adj: requiring | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 32-bit bug numbers. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
shore@ncifcrf.gov (Melinda Shore) (12/15/88)
[] Actually, there are some IP implementations that, under certain circumstances, will use part of the hardware address in the IP address. CTIX (Convergent Technologies) is one. -- Melinda Shore shore@ncifcrf.gov NCI Supercomputer Facility ..!uunet!ncifcrf.gov!shore
ww0n+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Walter Lloyd Wimer III) (09/07/90)
I thought people might find this interesting. . . . ToasterNet may be closer than we think. Walt Wimer Networking and Communications Carnegie Mellon University ---------- Forwarded message begins here ---------- Return-path: <dowjones+@andrew.cmu.edu> Filename: 26e64ee3 Corporation: CCI T ZE T.VDO Industry: CPR CMT Government: Flags: P N J SequenceNum: 1809060536 Message-ID: <katWXAa00UfA00WUkB@andrew.cmu.edu> From: DowJones@andrew To: bb+dow-jones@andrew Subject: Computers In Disguise Aim For Wide Acceptance Date: Thu, 6 Sep 90 06:45:32 -0400 (EDT) Lawrence Weiss, one of Citicorp's top technology executives, works at a desk surrounded by 14 boxes of "Underoos," kids' underwear cleverly packaged to look like superhero costumes. Weiss created Underoos in an earlier job and keeps them nearby as a reminder of the marketing principle behind them: The best new products are variations on comfortable old products. Today he is applying that lesson to a lumpy beige gadget that resembles an ordinary telephone. Citicorp is gambling it will catch on as a bank-at-home device better than an earlier system that let customers dial up their accounts via personal computer. This same philosophy is behind a cornucopia of products sneaking computing power into the home in the guise of more familiar devices. Other projects in the works use embedded computer technology to let people trade stocks on a Nintendo Co. game machine, receive written messages on an American Telephone & Telegraph Co. telephone, search databases of articles and listings on a television set and program household appliances with a television's remote control. Products such as these are crashing onto the turf of the personal-computer industry, which has long promised to make the PC as ubiquitous as a telephone or a TV. Right now, the PC industry is wooing the home market more aggressivel- y than ever, led by lavish new products from International Business Machines Corp. and Tandy Corp. These and other companies paint pictures of every household using a computer to send messages, read news, play games, bank and shop. PC makers scoff at the idea that simpler household gadgets could ever do these jobs. But so far home computers have shaped up as a narrow market. Only about a quarter of all American households have PCs. Most use their computers for limited, utilitarian tasks, such as writing or doing leftover office work. Now, instead of home computers becoming household items, household items are turning into home computers. "People said there were going to be two or three computers in every home like there are two or three telephones," says A.C. Markkula, an Apple Computer Inc. founder and present vice chairman. "They're right, but the physical implementation isn't what they had in mind. Instead of having three things that look like PCs, people will have many pieces of equipment that are in essence PC technology but are buried in refrigerator doors, and lighting systems, and VCRs and TVs and CD players and telephones." Markkula has founded a new Silicon Valley company called Echelon Corp., which is working on ways to link all the hidden microchips in a home or commercial building into one communications and control network. Echelon won't say more about its products until it unveils them later this year. Right now the most promising buried PCs are showing up inside telephones. In a Citicorp pilot program, about 400 customers already are using the home-banking phone, which has a little screen, a hidden keyboard and microchips that let it handle all manner of banking tasks. The bank says it wants to ship hundreds of thousands more of the phones over the next few years, though it won't dislose a specific timetable. The unit lets a user transfer funds, buy certificates of deposit and send anyone a check. Eventually, the bank plans to let customers check stock quotes and trade securities. AT&T is working on a rival product dubbed SmartPhone, which it is promoting as the standard telephone of the future. SmartPhone, slated for a 1992 introduction, has a small screen and built-in software for adding customized programs. For instance, AT&T says, a customer could set the phone so that pressing one button would place an order for his usual pizza, or his usual seats at a baseball game.