Important IPv6 Policy Issue -- Your Input Requested

Thu Nov 11 02:52:10 UTC 2004

since this is a few days late on the conversation someone might have said
this but....

On Tue, 9 Nov 2004, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> On 8-nov-04, at 23:15, Leo Bicknell wrote:
> >> Well, if they can manage to interconnect all those networks a tiny
> >> amount of coordination isn't too much to ask for. Also, with the
> >> proper
> >> hashing this shouldn't be much of a problem even without coordination.
> >> Yes, no coordination and bad hashing won't work, but guess what: don't
> >> do that.
>
> > It is too much to ask for, because you assume it's one company day
> > one.  What happens when AOL and Time Warner merge?  There was no
> > chance of coordination before that.  Or how about Cisco?  They buy
> > what, 100-200 companies a year?
>
> If both companies use either registered globally unique space (which
> also has the important property you get to know who the packets come
> from when they show up in the wrong places) or use the unregistered
> variant with proper hashing, the chance of collisions is negligible.

1) if they are smart
2) if they use the 'right' hash
3) if they expect to interconnect
4) if the network isn't a 'short term fix'.

There are all sorts of 'new requirements' that are forcing companies to
link to other places over IP that they would never have considered even a
year or so ago. Most larger corporations have been running some form if
'internal network' for 10+years, I'd bet they didn't renumber on a regular
basis as they moved from provider to provider or linked in new
'partners'... Thus they are already hitting the collision problems.

I can see valid reasons to have /rfc-1918/ for ipv6, but that crutch for
internal networks (security through obscurity) will always cause
collisions in the end. I also don't see a way to avoid the problems
here...

> > There are 33,000 allocated ASN's today.  Give each one a PI prefix
> > (however they might get it).  That's 33,000 routes.  Given my routers
> > are fine with 140,000 now, and are being tested in labs to well
> > over 1 million and I fail to see the issue.
>
> Well, I can't _guarantee_ routers are going to explode when people
> start doing PI in IPv6, but I think they will, eventually. The big
> difference with IPv4 is that in IPv4, there is still a significant
> hurdle to multihoming, as you need at least a /24. In IPv4 _everyone_
> gets to have a /48. And once so many important services sit in /48s
> that you can't filter them individually anymore, you need to allow all
> /48s in your routing tables and then you're at the mercy of how popular
> multihoming is going to be. It could easily end well (multihoming isn't
> that popular today) but the risk of it going very badly is just too big

Multihoming is quite popular actually, and getting more so each quarter.
People don't want their business unnecessarily tied to a single vendor,
especially one in 'financial trouble', or 'who has frequent meltdowns'
(define meltdown as you please).

For the last 4 years people have been encouraged, for good reasons I
think, to multihome. Telling them next year that they can no longer easily
multihome is going to cause significant issues... atleast for the
deployment of v6 for true production uses.