Sunday, July 16, 2006

Just some technical mind-rambling......

I'm becoming more and more familar with internet technology than I had imagined I would and there is something that I'm just not understanding: Why is everyone pushing to IPv6 rather than another type of redesign. It's obvious that IPv4 does not have enough addresses for the load the future holds for the internet but wouldnt it make more sense to keep the IPv4 addressing and use another form of routing? The main thing I am thinking of is something like an update to the current DNS protocols. Instead of every device having a new IPv6 address, couldnt we just assign every network an IPv4 address and have the DNS system be able to resolve an address to an address AND port. Basically, this would put the control in the hands of the people running their own private networks. You assign every device a specific port and a specific name in DNS and when a computer looks to access that device, it receives the address and port that it is allocated on on the private network and off it goes. This is very similar to what I am doing with my churches VoIP phones. Each phone has a specific port assigned to it and our asterisk server has each extension preconfigured for a port. Each phone resolves DHCP and if its in our office, it is assigned a specific IP address which has its port automatically route to the address that it is assigned. If the phone is taken to the staff member's house, it just resolves to whatever since there are no other phones to conflict with it and Asterisk still knows the port that it will be listening on. It works very well, actually. So if you take this idea and deploy it so that DNS can do what I have preprogrammed Asterisk to do, wouldnt that make more sense than redesigning the entire address space on the net? Granted, DNS would change but I think that would me a much lower impact than what IPv6 may create.

Granted, I am *FAR* from a networking guru. I'm just curious what is wrong in my thinking -- or is there anything? Just want to know what other people's thoughts are on this.

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