Where to buy Internet IP addresses

Ricky Beam jfbeam at gmail.com
Tue May 5 19:58:16 UTC 2009


On Tue, 05 May 2009 09:13:06 -0400, Joe Greco <jgreco at ns.sol.net> wrote:
> No, it's not too late to make simple changes.  We're still figuring out
> lots of bits about it.

Yes, it is too late.  IPv6 as it stands is a huge pile of crap and bloat.   
We'd be better off straping the whole mess and starting over, but that  
ain't gonna happen.  Over the next dozen decades and hundreds of RFCs, we  
might have something that looks like it was designed by competent people  
instead of glued together mess we have today that was created by  
committees with multiple personal and political agendas.

> On the other hand, can you *guarantee* that it will not?

Yes.  Yes, I can.  Ethernet has been around for decades from 10M to 100M  
to 1G to 10G and now we're working on 100G.  Look around the room and  
count the number of devices containing ethernet technology.  It's f'ing  
EVERY. WHERE.  Every single piece will have to be replaced to support  
EUI-64.  It's grown into the silicon, so there's no amount of software  
updates that can fix it like we're attempting to do with IPv4-to-IPv6.

> And quite frankly, you've already conceded that
> a technology - firewire - exists that does use EUI-64.

True.  But you ignore the fact that firewire isn't used as an internet  
transport technology.  Where's the 24 or 48 port firewire switches?  You  
can run IP over fibre channel, but I don't know of anyone who does so  
outside of private (read: internal) networks. (Clusters often use FC-IP  
within the SAN for node-to-node signaling.)

Ethernet won.  It uses 48bit addressing.  It's not going to change.  That  
"mistake" is now cast in diamond.  The world is not going to throw away  
all the ethernet gear because someone wants to change the addressing  
scheme.

> Do you have an equally brilliant but completely different suggestion as  
> to how to implement reliable stateless autoconfig in IPv6?

Sure I do.  And I'm not the only one.  In fact, many IPv4 systems have an  
address generator... the thing that builds "local" 169 addresses.

The simple fact is they took the dirty, brainless simple path of using  
what is supposed to be a unique identifier (Layer-2's MAC-48) and directly  
attching it to the layer-3 (IPv6) address.  Everyone is confusing  
"stateless" with "constant" and "consistent".  SLAAC doesn't need to  
generate the exact same address everytime the system is started.   
Stateless simply implies a host is not depending on data maintained from  
an external source.  A host can generate whatever random number it needs.   
It doesn't have to be *globally* unique; it only need be *locally*  
unique.  There are plenty of ways to generate and verify local uniqueness.

> No.  Do we have to do that before we figure out what to do next?

Do we have to replace trillions of dollars in hardware because of a  
problem we don't have?

> Are we too stupid to learn from the period of history we're going
> through right now?  With IPv4, we've waited until we're just about
> out in order to figure out where to go from here.  That was dumb.
> Predictable but dumb.  Why wait for resource depletion in another
> realm, when we already know that's a bad thing to do?

You must be new here.  IPv6 was designed a long time ago.  Long before we  
"ran out of addresses".  Nobody has deployed it because nobody has  
deployed it.  IPv4 works.  We still have address space to hand out -- and  
will for several more years.  IPv4 will *continue* to work long after IANA  
has no more blocks to assign.

Bottom line... there's no pressing reason to make the jump, and a whole  
bunch of reasons to hold off.  But you don't seem to care about any of  
that -- we should all continue driving our pintos with the exploding gas  
tank until your local shop has time to replace it.  No. Thanks.

> RFC3041.

Ah, so you conceed there *are* ways to generate addresses that aren't the  
MAC address.  Therefore, they don't have to be 64bits.  However, it's  
easier to be unique with larger numbers.

> You don't think that the IPv6 designers thought long and hard on that  
> very question?  You're second-guessing them?  I'm sure we'd all  
> appreciate a
> presentation as to why 128 bits isn't enough.

I'm not guessing at all.  I know they didn't.  And where the f*** have I  
ever said 128bit isn't enough.  My whole issue is with forcing people into  
0% utilization of their address space "because we have lots of address  
space" and "eventually we'll need that space."  Yet, you seem to think  
we're justified in giving people billions upon billions upon billions of  
addresses because we might, someday, somehow, have millions of gadgets  
that need to be globally addressable.  But that's completely different  
 from the mess we have with IPv4... handing out /8's because we could, then  
throwing on the breaks and promoting (even demanding) "responsible use",  
all the way to today where everyone asks for more address space than they  
currently need because "we might need it later" but later never comes.

128bit addressing is uber-plenty and will last us a long time as long as  
we continue to practice "responsible use".

> These are huge numbers that we're talking about.  At the time IPv4 was
> created, people were looking at 4 billion and refrigerator-sized routers
> and thinking, "this'll last us for a while."  And it did.  But I don't
> recall them assuming that IPv4 was the end of the road.

And you don't see the repeat with IPv6?  *sigh*  I see it everywhere...  
the address space is *HUGE*.  there's no way we'll ever use it all.  
"enough addresses to assign every grain of sand on the planet it's very  
own..."  But yet, day one we slice the address space in half and place a  
"globally unique" (probablly) number in the lower half.  And then propose  
slicing the uper half into chunks large enough to give every house 256 to  
65,536 *individual* globally unique spaces.

> You're not being locked into it.  Nobody's forcing you to use it.  I'm
> sure that you can find someone willing to delegate you a single /64 for
> you to subnet along the lines of the traditional IPv4 ways.

Yes, we all are.  We will all be given a minimum of a /64, while no one  
has a need for even a billionth of that space, and aren't likely to for  
the forseeable future.  When they do, *then* give them the space they  
need.  Ah, but "renumbering is a pain", you say.  That's another of those  
IPv6 fundamentals... renumbering your network is supposed to be easy --  
prefix delegation and autoconfig makes it all Magic(tm).




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