IPv6 news

Sat Oct 15 16:07:45 UTC 2005

On Fri, 14 Oct 2005, Tony Li wrote:

>
> >> But I think the discussion is mood. IETF decided on their goal, and
> >> it's superfluous trying to change that. While watching shim6 we carry
> >> on hoping that we'll get IPv6 multihoming going in the conventional,
> >> proven, working, feature-complete way we're used to... until IETF
> >>
> >
> > there is no hope in having operators explain to ietf that the
> > current path
> > is fruitless? certainly they can be made to see the light, yes?
>
>
> Doubtful.  The IETF was operating under the impression that having a
> scalable routing subsystem was paramount.  Do you think operators can
> be made to see that light?

They've been asking for that as well I think. I certainly don't want to
have 1M+ routes for JUST the Internet to worry about anytime soon, I'd
hate to see over 300k for real Internet routes anytime soon :( Much of
today's hardware doesn't seem so happy around that number :( Operators and
IETF need to hit a middle ground.

Perhaps that middle ground is a mix of these 2 things? Routing hardware
will certainly scale to larger than today's table, other factors are
driving that, will it scale to 1B prefixes or 1T prefixes? I'm not able to
speculate on that... I can see an immediate need to get over 500k though,
and not from ipv6 nor lack of shim, and I'm probably shooting low.

>
> Implementing IPv6 multihoming the "conventional" way guarantees that
> we end up with one prefix per site, and as the need for multihoming
> reaches deeper into the population, the growth rate of the routing
> table would surpass even the growth rate of the Internet itself.

I'm not sure I agree that the end state is 100% multihoming. I can
certainly agree that more multihoming is coming. Many more people are
pushing for multihoming today than in previous years, apparently telco
instability (financial not technical) is/has driven this :) (among other
things I'm sure)

Again, I don't know what the end state size is, I agree it's bigger than
today, I think it's probably smaller than infinity.

>
> The alternative is a multihoming scheme that does not require a
> prefix per site.  But that doesn't match the stated requirement of
> 'conventional', 'proven', 'working' [sic], 'feature-complete'.
>

whichever solution is the end solution there needs to be the capability to
solve today's problems in tomorrow's world. The current proposal I think
doesn't capture all of today's problems. If the set of missing solutions
were going to magically go away then alls good... I can't see link failure
(not complete failure of the path, partial path failure) or congestion or
suboptimal paths going away though. (just to name a few)

-Chris