IPv6 daydreams

Mon Oct 17 12:00:27 UTC 2005

On Mon, 2005-10-17 at 04:43 -0700, David Barak wrote:

> 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.

See the HD ration + proposals about sizing it down to a /56 as mentioned
in my previous mail to this list.

> 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...

SDP, uPnP, DNSSD etc and most likely also using ff02::1 and other
multicast tricks.

The important thing here though is that you already have
a local address

> 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?

Because this gives you an automatic unique IP address.
Also some L2's (firewire comes to mind) have 64 bit EUI's.

> 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.

One could, at least in theory and afaik not tried yet, run IPv6 as L2 :)

Greets,
 Jeroen

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