who gets a /32 [Re: IPV6 renumbering painless?]

Fri Nov 19 11:15:43 UTC 2004

On 18-nov-04, at 18:02, Jeroen Massar wrote:

> Larger enterprises probably consist of 200 'sites' already, eg seperate
> offices, locations etc. Thus they can, after becoming a LIR and getting
> an ASN, which most of the time they already have, easily get a /32.

Jeroen, this is nonsense and you know it.

We've been discussing the big enterprise problem in multi6 (multihoming 
in ipv6) circles very extensively. At some point, I realized that the 
"I'm so huge I need private space" claim is false in 99% of all cases, 
as these organizations tend to have multiple sites (as you indicate 
above) but they generally do not have real connectivity between those 
sites. This means a single large prefix won't do them much good, and 
basically they're no different than a bunch of smaller single-site 
organizations.

Now I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but having unaggregatable 
globally routable address space just doesn't scale and there are no 
routing tricks that can make it scale, whatever you put in the IP 
version bits, so learn to love renumbering. And again, IPv6+NAT makes 
no sense as NAT works much better with IPv4 and with NAT you don't 
really need the larger address space.

> Actually, I would even go so far that the really large corps should be
> able to get a /32 from every RIR when they globally have offices, this
> could allow them to keep the traffic at least on the same continent, 
> not
> having to send it to another place of the world themselves.

If you want to introduce geography into routing, do it right. The above 
"solution" is the worst of several worlds.