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

Mon Nov 22 16:53:03 UTC 2004

> > you are drastically misunderstanding my hopes, my goals, and my role.
> 
> Please explain them then.

briefly, because i consider myself off-topic and sue probably does also.

the problem statement answered by the ipngwg was wrong.  they thought they
were supposed to "solve the shortage of address space problem", but that
wasn't the most serious problem then (and is not now).  the right problem
statement would be to "solve the shortage of PORTABLE address space problem".
note the insertion of the word "portable" before "address space".  the big
problem in 1992 and the big problem now is that a wal-mart corporate desktop
will either have an ambigious address (behind a NAT), or a hard-to-renumber
isp-price-locked address (provider assigned), or a takes-a-slot-in-the-global
routing-table address (provider independent).  three strikes and you're out!
none of those three things is acceptable, not even as a compromise.

i have not looked in on the multi6 wg this year.  my bad.  perhaps you've
come up with a fourth alternative, or a way of softening one of the three
existing alternatives to the point where its benefits outweigh its costs.
but everything i've actually looked at either resolves the cost/benefit in
favour of some minority of which neither isc nor wal-mart is a part, or
which would have been equally applicable to ipv4 such that all we needed
was the gimmick itself, not 128-bit addresses, if only we'd been willing to
pay this much pain back before ipngwg's work was complete.

ipng needed rapid renumbering, including renumbering tcp endpoints realtime
and including multihoming where you can add and delete PA interface addresses
whe way commercial RAID vendors add and delete disk drives.  the people in
putative "charge" of this said either (a) they didn't agree, (b) they didn't
understand, or (c) they didn't have time to add more requirements.

now it's 2004 and lo and behold, the problems of 1992 are still with us, but
now we have better terminology to describe them.  you can be locked into a
provider's pricing and service quality; or you can run NAT; or you can find
a way to get your own slot in the global routing table.  we have the same
shortage of portable addresses now that we had in 1992, even though we have
increased the overall supply of address space by a factor of 2**96.  if multi6
offers a fourth alternative, it would probably also have worked with ipv4, in
which case why did we spend years working on 128-bit addressing?

i strongly believe that the isp community who pays ARIN's bills will decide
that the best way to grow the industry is to let folks like ford and wal-mart
have their own /32's, and that there will be a spectrum of

                r e n u m b e r i n g    d i f f i c u l t y
  easy--------------------------moderate------------------------impossible

with PA+NAT on the left (home dsl, cable); wal-mart and ford on the right
with endsystem PI, and folks like isc in the middle, doing some kind of
multi6 thing, whose costs while high will be lower than the renumbering
penalty.

since the arin BoT has no policy formation role, i'm expecting to be able
to voice an opinion that weighs exactly as much as everybody else's, and
to vote ultimately on whatever the policy formation function comes up with.

so there.  those are my views.  aren't you glad you asked?

> It's wrong if these issues that have global impact are decided regionally.

yes.  i understand that the acid rain people, the ozone layer people, the
ice cap people, the whale people, and the ocean oxygen level people, all
have that same complaint.  human nature on a grand scale isn't always pretty.