IPv6 news

Sun Oct 16 07:57:38 UTC 2005

On Sun, 16 Oct 2005, Christopher L. Morrow wrote:

> I don't want to speak for Daniel, nor other operators really, but a 
> solution that doesn't allow an operator to traffic engineer 
> internally or externally is just not workable. For the same reasons 
> quoted in your other messages to me: "Increased reliance on the 
> Internet"

Well, people havn't been at all keen on solutions which would need 
fairly significant changes to how the operators do inter-AS routing 
(even if they would avoid shifting some aspects of routing to 
end-nodes).

Given this high-resistance (rightly, wrongly, doesn't matter) to big 
changes in the transit parts of the internet, the only place then to 
do it is at the edges: have leaf-sites^Wnodes be more far active in 
how their packets are routed (by making deliberate use of the current 
provider aligned allocation<->topology transit internet).

What kind of operator are you thinking of btw? End-node shouldn't 
bother operators of ISPs really (they'll only get the traffic that 
the end-node decided it wanted to send via them, which is exactly 
what you have today ;) ). It could bother operators of other kinds of 
sites though - but I'm hopeful though that the shim6 mechanisms will 
be malleable to site-multihoming, even if initially shim6 only 
concerns itself with end-hosts.

> If the network isn't reliable due to suboptimal routing issues it can't
> survive :(

Just cause one network is unreliable does not mean that all the 
networks the end-node is connected to are unreliable. The end-node 
can try figure out which work and which don't and route accordingly. 
That's the whole point of shim6 ;).

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
I do not fear computers.  I fear the lack of them.
 		-- Isaac Asimov