Networking in minecraft

[redstonewarrior]

Hello everyone,

As of about 3 weeks ago, people were getting very excited to have some sort of network implementation on the server. If i remember correctly, Red & Grace were the first "team" to start their router, after that Snug started his own design as well. Yesterday i found out that Aero was doing some sort of networking as well. Although this is very exiting for me personally, im a Cicso network specialist (if you dont know Cisco == Linksys (Or just the manufacturer of worlds best network equipment in the world, their products are often used in datacenters etc.)), it seems that there is a lot of confusion. Not only by me, and other players, but also just by some of the router designers themselves. So i've got a couple of questions for you'all;

• How will i imagine the IP adressing? Is this going to be static, or is there a dhcp server involved?
  
• If everyone is just building random routers, this will mean that we will all have seperate networks, cause every port on a router is a network.
  
• If the previous statement is true, that everyone has its own network, will there be any routing protocols involved? (Static routes, RIP, OSPF, EIGRP) <-- This MUST be used in a rl scenario is i want to send packages from my plot's computer, through my router, through my neighbor's router, to his computer / device. Note that the last 2 routing protocols are kinda hard to make in minecraft, but OSPF should be duable cause its based on the Dijkstra Algorythm.
  
• How will be the IP address layout? Do i need to expect something like a ipv4 layout, or just a plain binary number?
  

Thanks for reading & i would love to see some answers! (Red )

Woo, five days have passed, my slavemasters are allowing me to reply!

slavemaster.
As I'm terribly sleep deprived and dripping with horrifying alien blood, listanswermode!

• In minecraft, pasting a router is a significant act of precision and work alone. There is no reason to have dynamic IPs, we should more focus on making the routing as efficient as possible.
  
• Every port on a router is a network... Maybe? I don't think you can logically segment it that nicely. If you're talking about bridging all of these networks, that's what an internet is. It's an abstraction layer built upon computers that route data over multiple networks to the final destination (efficiently.) Ports are useful for a proper client-server model and private address spaces (NAPT.)
  
• We're not doing an internet, the gods of efficiency will rain down water buckets and destroy your plot. Would be fun, however. Hmmm...
  
• For efficient networking in minecraft, either expect per-request IP assignment or (for more robust networks) per-plot assignment.
  

I am fashionably late.