IPv6 Confusion

Tue Feb 17 23:50:34 UTC 2009

Joe Provo wrote:
> This is highly amusing, as for myself and many folks the experience
> of these 'other protocols', when trying to run in open, scalable,
> and commercially-viable deployments, was to encapsulate in IP(v4)
> at the LAN/WAN boundary.  It is no wonder that is the natural reaction
> to IPv6 by those who have survived and been successful with such
> operational simplicity.

There is nothing preventing you from doing the same thing again, ... except
oh yea, lack of addresses and the bloating routing table as ever smaller
address blocks are traded on eBay. 

Seriously, you could easily do the same thing by encapsulating IPv4 over
IPv6. One might even consider using one /64 for internal IPv4 routes
(embedding the IPv4 as the next 32 bits), then another /64 for each IPv4
peer, to reduce the number of IPv6 routes you need to carry everywhere. At
the edges where it matters there would be a /96 routing entry, but even if
all of the /96 prefixes were enumerated everywhere the table would be the
same size as the IPv4 one would have been. 

Tony