IPv6 allocation plan, security, and 6-to-4 conversion

Sun Feb 1 18:17:16 UTC 2015

> Worse, IPv6's promises are falling one by one. You saw an example in
> this thread: Eric wants to break up his announcements for traffic
> engineering purposes because, as it turns out, one announcement per
> ISP isn't actually enough, Registry practices aren't the primary
> drivers behind routing disaggregation. That was a bad assumption baked
> in to IPv6's addressing strategy.

Traffic engineering still won’t be anywhere near as bad as the current IPv4 routing table, so no, that doesn’t indicate a failure in the promise of IPv6.

Traffic engineering (and other factors) will probably prevent the ideal of one prefix advertised per ASN, but IPv6 will still likely top out somewhere around 4 or 5 on average vs. the current IPv4 average which is north of 10 last time I looked. That’s still a pretty substantial win.

Further, technology in routers continues to advance and we are starting to see routers capable of holding very large routing tables. (So far, necessary to cope with the abomination of keeping IPv4 on life support). Once IPv4 can be deprecated, even just in the backbone, it’s a huge win in terms of routing slots available.

Further, your statement about registry practices doesn’t hold water. It wasn’t a bad assumption, it was the facts on the ground as they existed for IPv4 at the time. In the 20 years since, the world has changed. Registry practices aren’t a factor in IPv6, but they are, in fact, still a factor (though somewhat less than they used to be) in IPv4.

> Years ago I cracked a joke about IPv6: http://bill.herrin.us/network/ipxl.html <http://bill.herrin.us/network/ipxl.html>

I didn’t realize you thought it was a joke. I thought it was just more of your misguided railing against IPv6 because you love NAT so much for reasons passing understanding.

> These days I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Given your past statements and apparent position along with the fact that despite various efforts, IPv6 deployment continues to accelerate, I’m guessing cry, but that’s certainly your decision.

Owen