Addressing plan exercise for our IPv6 course

Fri Jul 23 14:22:53 UTC 2010

JORDI PALET MARTINEZ wrote:
> And then next you can say ok, so /32 bits is big enough for your home, so
> let's change it again, kill autoconfiguration, ask existing IPv6 users to
> redo their addressing plans, renumber, etc., and use all the rest of the
> bits for routing ?
>   
I *really* don't understand why a /32 isn't big enough for a home. Even 
if you insist on SAA for getting the addresses. How many IPv6 devices is 
the guy going to plug in / attach wirelessly anyway?
> And so on, of course, where is the limit ? You should propose this to 6man
> at the IETF.
>   
The same IETF that until just a few months ago believed that DCCP and 
SCTP would be wildly successful as new IP protocols because NATs don't 
matter?
> You're not getting it. Autoconfiguration is a very good feature. 
No, no it isn't. It goes on the list of "interesting ideas for IPv6 that 
were good enough to be implemented, and refined (in this case as DHCP), 
for IPv4". Insisting on SAA is basically saying "well, you know all 
those things we learned when we deployed DHCP... lets go ahead and 
forget them and pretend that home machine OS vendors *and* IT 
departments are wrong.
> More bits
> for the user to subnet means more business for smart ISPs who don't want to
> sell addresses but instead services and applications much more easier to
> deploy thanks to a uniform /48 ways to address all end sites.
>   
I fail to see how a household, even a really big one, is going to attach 
more bandwidth-consuming devices (which I presume is how the ISP does 
more business) to a link with a /48 on it vs a link with a /64 on it. A 
/64 allows more machines in your house than today's entire Internet has 
connected. Unless you have a new plan for electric power delivery to the 
home, there's no need to go beyond that.

Matthew Kaufman