IPv6 mistakes, was: Re: Looking for an IPv6 naysayer...

Fri Feb 11 05:31:21 UTC 2011

On Feb 10, 2011, at 5:46 PM, Ricky Beam wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Feb 2011 11:43:50 -0500, Matthew Kaufman <matthew at matthew.at> wrote:
>> There is no one universal "global routing table". They probably appear in someone's routing table, somewhere... just not yours.
> Using public address space for private networking is a gross misuse of the resource.  

Amusingly enough, I personally (along with others) made arguments along these lines back in 1995 or so when the IAB was coming out with http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1814.txt.  Given the publication of 1814, you can probably guess how far those arguments fared.

> Go to any registry and ask for address space for your private networking that you do not intend to announce to the internet.  They will laugh at you, and point you to RFC1918. (and likely flag you as someone to whom address space should never be assigned.)  The only reason legacy holders get away with such crap is because there's no clear contract governing their assignment.

I haven't looked recently but I believe all the RIRs have policies that requires them to allocate unique numbers regardless of whether those addresses will be used on the Internet, as long as the requester documents appropriate utilization.

> Then send out nasty sounding letters informing whomever that X address space has not been announced to the public internet in Y years; on Z date, the space will reenter the IANA/ICANN free pool for reassignment. (cue lawyers :-))  

I gather you're volunteering to pay higher fees to cover the increased legal costs?

Regards,
-drc