[nos-bbs] will mirroshades route to a FQDN?

[Barry Siegfried]

[jerome schatten <romers at shaw.ca> wrote]:

> I'm sure my questions belie my limited understanding of TCP/IP, but
> I have no shame:
>
> Our internet gateway here in Vancouver is basically useless, as the
> university has shut down all inbound 44 traffic (long time ago).
> Outbound stuff still worked the last time I tried it). There was a time
> many years ago (before paranoia) when everything worked very well.
>
> We had a strong jnos community here at one time, but it has dropped to
> almost zero because the gateway is gone.
>
> My 44.135.160.40 address is routed to this crippled university gateway
> (hamgate.comm.sfu.ca:142.58.173.14).

That gateway still appears to be operational.  Well, at least
44.135.160.113 answers.  What is this gateway's path to you?

> What I was thinking of was that if mirrorshades could could be made
> route my 44 address to say va7vv.dnsalias.org which would resolve to
> my current ip address, I could be my own gateway.
>
> Questions:
>
> 1. I'm sure this won't work, but why not?

It is hard to hit a moving (i.e. dynamically IP-assigned) target and
even though your "fixed" FQDN always resolves to your currently
assigned IP address, IP routing list lookups don't use hostnames...
they use only IP addresses.

If you have a dynamically-assigned IP address it does not necessarily
mean you're out of business, it just means you can (and should) not
register it as an IPIP target in the gateways file.  That is what
DGipip was developed in 1997 for and with the cooperation of any
statically IP-assigned gateway that is willing to host your IP
route, you can enable the DGipip client at your dynamically IP-
assigned gateway and point the routing broadcasts to your statically
IP-assigned hosting gateway and the hosting gateway will then know
where to forward frames for your IP address block(s).

Then, when your IP address changes, the hosting gateway is informed
within the next broadcast interval and updates its IPIP route for
your address block(s).  This works very well.

> 2. If one had a genuinely static ip address, would it work then?

Yes, but as you can see above, with the help of another statically
IP-assigned gateway to host your route, you don't need one yourself.

> 3. If the answer to 2. is yes, then why couldn't mirrorshades be
> changed to allow routing on the domain name rather than the static
> ip?

Imagine what would happen to any machine that had to do a hostname
to IP address resolution for every packet that is routed through
it.  It would cripple the machine within seconds.

73, de Barry, K2MF >>
           o
          <|>      Barry Siegfried
+---------/-\---------------------------+
| Internet | bgs at mfnos.net              |
| HomePage | http://www.mfnos.net/~bgs  |
+----------+----------------------------+
| Amprnet  | k2mf at nnj.k2mf.ampr.org     |
| PBBS     | k2mf at k2ge.#cnj.nj.usa.noam |
+----------+----------------------------+