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From: hedrick@TOPAZ.RUTGERS.EDU (Charles Hedrick)
Newsgroups: mod.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: (none)
Message-ID: <8703170849.AA08094@topaz.rutgers.edu>
Date: Tue, 17-Mar-87 03:49:43 EST
Article-I.D.: topaz.8703170849.AA08094
Posted: Tue Mar 17 03:49:43 1987
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I was surprised by the address structure in GOSIP as well.  Some of it
could be fixed by changing the commentary, rather than the actual
spec.  E.g. there are two-byte codes for organization and "subnet".
The commentary suggests that the organization will be a Department and
the subnet a particular installation.  The problem with that is that
many installations are large enough to need more than one Ethernet,
and therefore they will need subnetting.  I have to believe that 32
bits of address is enough.  But I think it would be good to suggest
that at least part of the subnet should be available for use within
large sites.

I was also somewhat surprised to see the Ethernet address (in some
IEEE incarnation) used as the lowest level piece of the address.  I
thought there was a concensus that this is a bad idea.  Without
careful management, changing a bad Ethernet controller card is going
to change your protocol address.  Yes, I know there are solutions to
this, but I think a separate protocol address would be cleaner.

I sure hope there is good name server technology behind this proposal.
Even if we ignore the prefix that says "this is a U.S. Govt address",
we have 10 bytes of address, the last 6 of which are essentially a
random number.  I sure wouldn't want to have to remember this.  I find
that I remember the Internet addresses of lots of my machines, and
that this is very useful for all sorts of testing and debugging
situations.  I'm trying to think what the design of the GOSIP version
of netwatch is going to look like.

Finally, have you given any thought to non-governmental applications?
I mean, the whole point of ISO is supposed to be that commercially-
supported implementations will exist.  So it seems counter-productive
to have a standard that doesn't allow for non-governmental uses.  As
far as I can see, the address format only allows for government
agencies.  I think you might want to reserve some address space for
compatible commercial or educational users, and define a way for
allocating it within the GOSIP structure, much as DoD reserved address
space for commercial and educational uses within the Internet addressscho'\an