Important IPv6 Policy Issue -- Your Input Requested

Tue Nov 9 19:05:08 UTC 2004

At 11:17 AM 11/9/2004, Simon Lockhart wrote:

> > > In today's networks, printers do NOT need global addresses.
>
>So I'm not allowed to send stuff to my printers at home or in the office, to
>be picked up by my wife, or a colleague, wherever I am on the Internet?

That's fine, if that's what network policy on your global enterprise 
network permits.

>You should be careful not to try and apply local policies to a global network

Or apply global policies to a local network.

The printers that are not going to be accessible from elsewhere in the 
world are going to precluded by firewall from talking beyond the 
administrative boundary. That being the case why is it the concern of the 
global internet community whether the address for that printer comes from a 
block of addresses from an upstream ISP, an address that may change over 
time, or comes from a locally administered scope? This is the concern of 
the owner of the network, not those trying to impose their view of how IPv6 
should be deployed.

Lack of suitable private space allocated for that purpose will result in a 
repeat of what happened with IPv4: people will pick random address blocks 
to use. This is really outside the purview of NANOG, since what we're 
talking about is NOT on the public networks. About the only impact on NANOG 
is how much backbone networks can charge for blocks of address space to 
companies who are not going to route those blocks over the public networks.

The message likely to be learned by enterprises from reading this 
discussion is rather different than many of you would hope: Stay with IPv4, 
and use private address space from RFC 1918 for disjoint networks. 
Preaching to enterprises about how they should run their networks is a sure 
fire way to get ignored. Backbone networks and operating enterprise 
networks may use much of the same gear, but the policies, procedures and 
goals are quite different.