31 Dec
2020
31 Dec
'20
4:24 a.m.
On 12/31/20 10:47 AM, Roland Schwarz via 44Net wrote:
I absolutely agree! What I wanted to point out is that there might be
basically two expectations about 44 addresses. Topological routing as
you have pointed out is one of it.
Let me elaborate on the second idea: lots of isolated /32 hosts or /28
subnets: Sure, if I need to load the entire routing table to every node,
this will not scale. But a single node will not need the full routing
table typically. Only a few entries are interesting at a single time.
So if you have a dynamic lookup facility of the gateway address, you
could populate your routing tables on demand. This facility could be
realized by means of a distributed hash table, so there is no single
point of failure. And yes the optimal routing is done by the core
internet in such a use case.
But there already is the BGP protocol which on internet manages
to maintain the route tables for hundreds of thousands of routes
and which should easily manage to maintain the routes in our
network even when done to /32 level.
We do this inside 44.137.0.0/16 now and we have about 270 routes.
In other similar networks they have like a few thousand routes.
Cheap routers handle that easily. No need to invent something
that is "more efficient" and again kill the advantage that you
can use off-the-shelf routers instead of having to tinker with
general-purpose computers running specialized images.
The advantage of routing to the /32 level is that every address can
connect from every place using every method. Sure you can gain
some advantage by strictly subnetting everything and e.g. limiting
the addresses by POP, but that introduces a dependency on that
POP. If the POP is down the users cannot connect to the network
anymore, which worries some people. But when you just route
every end-user address or subnet, the user can just connect to
another POP and still get his traffic on his fixed address.
And of course there can always be hybrid solutions. We can advertise
our entire network as a single 44.137.0.0/16 route and handle all
detail routes ourselves, when we like. Of course that would mean
a user could not connect somewhere else.
Rob