IPv6 Advertisements

Sat Jun 2 16:22:01 UTC 2007

On 2-jun-2007, at 17:25, Ross Vandegrift wrote:

> Am I under some misconceptions about IPv6 routing policies here?

There are no IPv6 routing policies. Everyone gets to decide which  
prefixes to accept and which to reject on their own. However, unlike  
IPv4, there are currently pretty much only two flavors: /32 and /48.  
So if you have a /32 and start announcing a bunch of /36s, or you  
have a /48 and start announcing /52s, it's likely that at least some  
people out there aren't going to accept those. (Nor /48s in blocks  
that are carved up as /32.)

So I expect people who are in your position to start requesting  
blocks larger than /32 or /48 in order to be able to deaggregate, or  
even request multiple independent PI blocks. It will be interesting  
to see what this means for the number of PI requests and speed at  
which the global IPv6 routing table grows.

It would be nice if rather than fight about how difficult it should  
be to occupy a slot in the routing table, with both "too difficult"  
and "too easy" having painful consequences, we could work something  
out using regional address blocks or something so it's not necessary  
for a router on one side of the globe to have all the more specifics  
that are only relevant on the opposite side of the globe. Obviously  
we don't want metro addressing with mandatory interconnection all  
over the place, but common sense suggests that there is some middle  
ground where it's possible to have address space that's at least  
portable within a certain region, but we get to prune the routing  
tables elsewhere.