An article in the November 2017 issue of The Internet Protocol Journal raises the excellent point that IP addresses have been replaced by host names in defining coherence to a network.

This week I’ve discovered that IP version 6 reserves an address space that is intended for local communications, normally within a site. This space is defined in RFC 4193, and goes on to explicitly state a design objective: the addresses are not designed to aggregate.

Our IT brethren are being driven away from aggregating addresses by the rise of mobile devices and the internet of things. Within the commercial IT world, host names are replacing addresses in allowing technicians to find specific assets, troubleshoot particular problems, and maintain environmental awareness. Our controls IT world is still working with aggregated addresses and organizing our systems using the addresses.

If the controls environments continue to use Commercial Off-The-Shelf components and to rely on Corporate IT for design and high-level support we need to begin migrating our designs from system organizations built around addressing and shift to comprehensive naming and name resolution services.