Multi-6 [WAS: OT - Vint Cerf joins Google]

Tue Sep 13 20:50:32 UTC 2005

On 13-sep-2005, at 21:58, Daniel Senie wrote:

>> So where were you the past years in multi6 and months in shim6?
>> Please be part of the solution and not part of the problem. (That
>> goes for John Payne and Daniel Senie too.)

> I was there in the beginning for Multi6. When I saw the direction 
> (s) that were being considered, I decided the whole concept was a  
> non-starter and spent my budget of IETF hours on other areas that  
> had a chance of being useful.

Which is of course your good right.

However, in your message earlier today you were spreading FUD about  
the IPv6 address length, a ship that sailed a decade ago. In my book,  
that's being part of the problem. Especially since a subset of the  
NANOG membership may not be familiar enough with the issues to be  
able to see through all of this.

> Just how many IETF groups do you participate in?

There is one that I always make time for, about four others depending  
on time constraints.

> In how many different IETF areas?

Never counted.

> Do you also get other work done?

Look up my name on Amazon...

> Most folks (perhaps including you) have limited amounts of time to  
> spend on IETF work. Some folks get paid to do such work by their  
> employers, while others don't.

Well, I don't have an "employer" so that doesn't apply in my case.  :-)

> At what point does it make sense as a participant in a working  
> group to look at the direction and sense of the room and decide  
> that no amount of arguing is going to keep a trainwreck from  
> occurring?

At some point after the requirements discussion, I'd say.

I'm not saying everyone and their dog should co-design the protocol,  
but I think it's reasonable to ask people to take 15 minutes to write  
down their requirements in a message to the list at that point,  
rather than whine later.

Something similar is happening with the RIR policies. People "just  
want PI" but they don't want to come up with a policy that makes it  
possible to give people who really need PI or a PA block one, while  
at the same time making sure the routing tables aren't going to  
explode in the future.

I don't know why I bother, but let me tell all of you that the size  
of the v4 table TODAY is a problem. A customer of mine wanted to load  
balance over two BGP sessions to the same AS, but his linecards  
crashed because this required two copies of every route in the FIB,  
which didn't fit in the linecard's memory. These were fairly  
reasonable Cisco 12000 linecards with 512 MB RAM.

Now in v4 the minimum prefix you'll see is a /24. Since a lot of  
address space is already used in larger blocks, and you need to show  
decent utilization, there are natural limits to the numbers of /24s  
in the routing table. However, in v6 these limits don't apply, so  
ANYONE can get a /48 (I have 3 currently). If you accept those in  
your routing table that table is going to explode at some point.

So just ignoring the issue is not an option. Still, many people just  
want their own portable block, and don't even want to bother THINKING  
about the issue.