Where to buy Internet IP addresses

Tue May 5 13:13:06 UTC 2009

> On Tue, 05 May 2009 00:08:51 -0400, Joe Greco <jgreco at ns.sol.net> wrote:
> > For today.  But, remember, this sort of shortsightedness is what landed
> > us in the current IPv4 pain.
> 
> 48bit MACs have caused IPv4 address exhaustion?  Wow.  I didn't know that.

No, thinking small is what landed us in the current IPv4 pain.

> > ... justify not making a future-proofing change now, before IPv6
> > is widely deployed, and changes can be easily made?
> 
> It's not very widely deployed now, and it's already too late to make  
> simple changes.  ONE single, simple protocol change requires a lot of  
> people to do a lot of work.

No, it's not too late to make simple changes.  We're still figuring out
lots of bits about it.

> > For ethernet, today.
> 
> IPv6 is a decade old and there still aren't many people using it.   
> Ethernet is 30 years old.  Do you honestly think you'd be able to roll out  
> EthernetV2(tm) with 64bit MACs anytime in the next century?  Ethernet is  
> far more fundamental than IPv4, grown into the silicon of almost  
> everything.  Even though there are alternatives to ethernet (infiniband  
> anyone?) ethernet is still *everywhere*.

Yes, I do think that something fundamental like that will happen at some
point.

On the other hand, can you *guarantee* that it will not?  Because if you
cannot *guarantee* that it will not, then that raises doubts as to the
wisdom of your advice.  And quite frankly, you've already conceded that
a technology - firewire - exists that does use EUI-64.

> > Correct.  So it's trivial to do, and it future-proofs us to be able to
> > support EUI-64. ...
> 
> And the only reason we'd need to use EUI-64? Because some twits decided to  
> use a Layer 2 address in a Layer 3 address. 

Do you have an equally brilliant but completely different suggestion as to
how to implement reliable stateless autoconfig in IPv6?

But it's not the only reason we need to use EUI-64.  We know that someday,
even if it's many years out, we'll run out.  And further, I believe that
the rate of depletion will only increase, as the number of network-capable
devices explodes.

> Or have we exhausted EUI-48  
> as well?

No.  Do we have to do that before we figure out what to do next?

Are we too stupid to learn from the period of history we're going
through right now?  With IPv4, we've waited until we're just about
out in order to figure out where to go from here.  That was dumb.
Predictable but dumb.  Why wait for resource depletion in another
realm, when we already know that's a bad thing to do?

> > Most of the significant problems with IPv4 are due to people thinking
> > small, and not having a vision towards the future. ...
> 
> I'm thinking small?  No.  I'm being frugal and efficient --  
> "conservative".

Yes, that's thinking small, because IPv6 was *designed* to be liberal.
Intentionally.  By massive amounts, so that no credible claims could be
mounted that there was any good reason for "being [excessively] frugal."

> FORCING networks to be no smaller than /64 -- per the  
> fundamental requirement for SLAAC -- when there's absolutely no forseeable  
> need for 18billion billion hosts per network is wasteful beyond measure.   

RFC3041.  That's a need.  It works today.  It's implemented on FreeBSD,
Linux, and Microsoft stacks, among others.  We just went through an
educational process with the DNS protocol to learn why the ability to do
this sort of thing is a completely credible "need", as well.  So I'm 
sorry to say, but you're just wrong, that's a need, and it's there now.

> I see this a fundamentally the same as handing out /8's 25 years ago --  
> "because the protocol (classfulness) requires it."  Just because *we* see  
> the IPv6 address space as unbelievablly huge *today*, doesn't mean we  
> should carve it up in recklessly huge chunks.  That's exactly how IPv4 was  
> seen long ago, and we've been and will be living with that mistake for  
> decades.

You don't think that the IPv6 designers thought long and hard on that very
question?  You're second-guessing them?  I'm sure we'd all appreciate a
presentation as to why 128 bits isn't enough.  Really, if it's a problem,
now is the time to decide to go to 256 bits and IPvX.

These are huge numbers that we're talking about.  At the time IPv4 was
created, people were looking at 4 billion and refrigerator-sized routers
and thinking, "this'll last us for a while."  And it did.  But I don't
recall them assuming that IPv4 was the end of the road.

With IPv6, we've made some very clear decisions about what we need to last
us for a while.  One of the most visionary things we've done is to set
aside a huge space for local network addressing.  This leaves us with a
huge amount of space to work with in the future, if, for whatever reason,
the current ideas don't pan out.

> So, to sum up... we're being locked into using /64's as a minimum  
> allocation simply because a fundamental part of IPv6 (SLAAC) requires an  
> EUI-64 -- taking a layer-2 address and promoting it to a layer-3 address,  
> more or less because it's there and supposed to be globally unique (read:  
> we're lazy and don't want to figure out another way to be "stateless".)   

You're not being locked into it.  Nobody's forcing you to use it.  I'm
sure that you can find someone willing to delegate you a single /64 for
you to subnet along the lines of the traditional IPv4 ways.

> This despite no current internet devices using EUI-64[*], and the  
> overwelming technology leader (ethernet) doesn't and very likely never  
> will (given the millions of tons of existing hardware in use.)
> 
> ([*] according to the wiki, firewire and zigbee are the only things using  
> EUI-64.  I don't know of anyone using firewire as a network backbone.   

They have to use it as a network backbone?  Why, exactly?

It has to be a technology that we are using today?  We're not allowed to
look at the way technology has developed and extrapolate that we might
have many, many more uses, new technologies, and needs in the future?

Hey, you know what, I'm just going to say this.

Your thinking is definitely small-scale.  There is nothing in IPv6 that
prevents you from making a network work on the teeny scale.  However, if
we were to deploy your ideas IPv6-wide, then those of us who can think
on the grand scale would find ourselves shortchanged for no good reason.

Therefore, IPv6 deployment needs to continue in the way it was designed
and envisioned, so that you are able to do your thing, and I am able to
do mine.

HTH, HAND, etc.  I'm out of here.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.