Multi-6 [WAS: OT - Vint Cerf joins Google]

Wed Sep 14 05:50:24 UTC 2005

on Sat Sep 10 03:39:59 2005 Christopher L. Morrow writes
>
> On Sat, 10 Sep 2005, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
>
> >
> > [Perhaps this thread should migrate to Multi6?]
> >
>
> perhaps... then jason can argue this instead of me :)

The most basic question is if there will be a problem if we solve the 
multihoming question in the traditional IPv4 way?  And if so, should we 
solve the problem by throwing hardware at it and hoping that when it 
becomes a problem the hardware will be sufficiently advanced to be able to 
solve it?

We can solve the multihoming question in the traditional IPv4 way, 
de-aggregation.  We can argue if that means give end sites a /32, or allow 
provider independent /48s, but the fact of the matter is a prefix whatever 
size creates routing state.  The sheer size of the IPv6 space allows for 
lots of routing state.

On the other side, if you remove the routing state then you have a trade 
off where the information you previously attained through routing state 
must now be detected in the forwarding plane.  We are seeing this now with 
respect to how end systems detect an outage.

draft-ietf-shim6-reach-detect-00.txt

The problem as I see it is that the IETF community is focused on the 
protocol design, how end hosts signal shim6 capabilities, and failure 
detection.

They are not focused on operational requirements such as
1.	The ability to inter-AS traffic engineering polices
2.	To be able to configure and manage inter-AS traffic engineering 
polices at the network level and not on each individual host
3.	The need for transit ASes to leverage traffic engineering.

This is evident by the fact that the language in RFC-3582 that attempted 
to document traffic engineering requirements was down graded to .goals. in 
order to get adopted.

The problem as I see it, is that there are only a few providers making 
this claim that these requirements are indeed requirements and need to be 
solved before there will be wide spread adoption of IPv6.  Most people 
involved in IETF either don.t care about multihoming, feel that simple 
fail-over will solve the problem for 90% of the Internet, or only are 
concerned with things that affect the protocol, and they believe 
multihoming isn.t one of them.

The process to define how these things work will be done in the IETF, 
in the shim6 working group... if this might be important to you, perhaps 
you will want to join the discussion and make your 
rerquirements/views/issues well known now, before the protocol is 
specified.

___Jason