IPv6 daydreams

Mon Oct 17 11:43:19 UTC 2005

--- Mark Smith
<random at 72616e646f6d20323030342d30342d31360a.nosense.org>
wrote:

> Why have people, who are unhappy about /64s for
> IPv6, been happy enough
> to accept 48 bit addresses on their LANs for at
> least 15 years? Why
> aren't people complaining today about the overheads
> of 48 bit MAC
> addresses on their 1 or 10Gbps point-to-point links,
> when none of those
> bits are actually necessary to identify "the other
> end" ? Maybe because
> they have unconsciously got used to the convenience,
> and, if they've
> thought about it, realise that the byte
> overhead/cost of that
> convenience is not worth worrying about, because
> there are far higher
> costs elsewhere in the network (including
> administration of it) that
> could be reduced.

Wrong issue.  What I'm unhappy about is not the size
of the address - you'll notice that I didn't say "make
the whole address space smaller."  What I'm unhappy
about is the exceedingly sparse allocation policies
which mean that any enduser allocation represents a
ridiculously large number of possible hosts.  The only
possible advantage I could see from this is the
protection against random scanning finding a user -
but new and fun worms will use whatever mechanism the
hosts use to find each other: I guarantee that the
"find a printer" function won't rely on a sequential
probe of all of the possible host addresses in a /64
either...

Also, the 64-bit addressing scheme is sized to include
the MAC address, right?  Why would encoding L2 data
into L3 be a good thing?  The conceptual problem that
I have had with v6 from the beginning is that it's not
trying to optimize a single layer, it's really trying
to merge several layers into one protocol.  Ugh.

-David Barak-
-Fully RFC 1925 Compliant-

David Barak
Need Geek Rock?  Try The Franchise: 
http://www.listentothefranchise.com

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