Introducing draft-denog-v6ops-addresspartnaming

Mon Nov 22 11:11:48 UTC 2010

On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 23:15, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:

You seem to be indirectly answering the parent posting in much of what
you say. That is fine, I just wanted to point it out.

> > It's a commonly accepted, well-defined convention to save humans
> > effort while not sacrificing readability. There are weirder things in
> > technology.
>
> I don't think it's all that weird and it's a major savings in writing
> out IPv6 addresses and being able to read them (except in lists of
> varying sized addresses (please, when dumping routing tables
> and such, just keep the optional zeroes or give us a flag to choose).
> In practice, the :: usually ends up being placed between the
> network number and the host number for things with static
> addresses and rarely appears in EUI-64 based addresses,
> so, I don't see this as a problem.

FWIW, I do not see it as weird or as a problem, either. "There are
weirder things" does not mean the thing I am referring to is weird
itself :)

> I don't see a problem with people not assigning customers /56s so long
> as they go in the correct direction and give /48s and not /60s or /64s.

Many ISPs will end up handing their customers /64, /62 or other
less-than-ideal prefixes. As soon as a customer needs to subnet their
/64, the real fun starts. There is nothing we can do about it, other
than trying to educated people and hope for the best.

> > I honestly think I never explained (as in, after I understood the
> > matter, myself) netmasks other than as a bit vector. Unless you mean
> > "write 255.255.255.0 in there cause that's what right for you".
>
> Then you are young and never had to deal with systems that didn't
> know about bit-vector syntax. I have had to explain the translation
> between bit-vector syntax (/n) and bit-field syntax (255.255.255.240)
> to many people. It's easy when n is a multiple of 8. After that,
> it can be quite hard for some mathematically challenged individuals
> unfamiliar with binary and BCD to wrap their heads around.

I wish ;)
Either the person can grasp that a dotted netmask can be transformed
into a bit vector or I tell them "use 255.255.255.0 everywhere, it
will work for everything you will ever need." 80/20 and all that.

> Removing bitmath from operations where possible is a good thing
> that reduces outages caused by human factors. It's just good human
> factors engineering.
> We can't do so in IPv4, there aren't enough bits to do it.
> We seek to do so in IPv6 with ARIN draft policy 2010-8 and
> proposal 121.

If by bitmath you mean ending netmasks not on full bytes only, I could
not agree more. This will reduce a lot of useless overhead.
I really wish the RIRs would get unique a name space for their
respective drafts. If even my person object needs a -RIPE suffix, I
don't see why drafts etc don't.

> Should we all sing kumbayah now?

Only if you bring a tambourine.

> Basically, as I recall the earlier discussions of this and the IETF
> arriving at the decision to use colon (:), it boiled down to the
> simple fact that colon (:) is the worst choice except for all the others.

Agreed.

Richard