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

Sat Nov 20 12:25:17 UTC 2004

On 19-nov-04, at 18:40, Owen DeLong wrote:

>> 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.

> This is patently false.  If it were true, then I would have to renumber
> every time I changed telephone companies.  I don't, so, obviously, 
> there
> is some solution to this problem.

Well, the old saying is that there is no problem in computer science 
that can't be solved by adding a layer of indirection. Apparently this 
applies to telephone networks as well, because your phone number is no 
longer an address these days: it's more like a domain name. When you 
dial a number it's looked up in a big database to see where the call 
should go to.

And don't forget that you still have to change your phone number when 
you move a great enough distance. In IP we somehow feel it's important 
that there are no geographical constraint on address use at all. That's 
a shame, because even if we aggregate by contintent that would save up 
to four times in the number of entries in the routing table of any 
router.