this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2026
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So a problem just came up today that encapsulates why IP addresses are still useful.
I have a webservice at http://jeopardy.local:9981/, but typing that into a web browser gives "Server Not Found".
But if I type in http://<ipaddress>:9981 it works perfectly.
It turns out that the problem is that flatpak Web browsers can't resolve mdns names.
The world is full of stuff like this which unfortunately makes ip addresses the most reliable way to reach selfhosted services.
The point I'm making is that IP addresses are useful/used because they are the canonical way of reaching a service. If you have a name (via DNS), it still needs to be translated into an address because routing depends on arbitrary numerical addresses.
But they shouldn't be, and they don't have to be. They identify an interface, not the host. We have services on a single host running across multiple interfaces (multiple ports), or in some cases multiple services running on a single interface (k8s, cloudflare), or even sometimes multiple interfaces/servers masquerading as a single interface (DNS root servers).
The correct way to handle this is to identify services by a name, which means routing itself should be handled via name, not IP addresses. This is one of the things Named Data Networks (NDN) tries to solve. In this scheme, everything has a name. Not a numeric address. Memorizing 10.0.0.1 becomes a lot less important when you can always reach your service at "foo/bar/service".
Needless to say, this is currently not feasible because every single IP router in the world needs to be replaced with a NDN router, in which nobody would do. Vendors have already shown that when they can adapt new technologies or implement NAT, they will implement NAT.
Edit NDN wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking
That is pretty cool!