ISP customer assignments

Mon Oct 5 18:34:51 UTC 2009

On Mon, Oct 05, 2009 at 08:18:23PM +0200, Jens Link wrote:
> "Brian Johnson" <bjohnson at drtel.com> writes:
> 
> > So a customer with a single PC hooked up to their broad-band connection
> > would be given 2^64 addresses?
> >
> > I realize that this is future proofing, but OMG! That?s the IPv4
> > Internet^2 for a single device!
> 
> Most people will have more than one device. And there is no NAT as you
> know it from IPv4 (and hopefully there never will be. I had to
> troubleshoot a NAT related problem today and it wasn't fun.[1])
> 
> And I want more than one network I want to have a firewall between my
> fridge and my file server.
> 
> > Am I still seeing/reading/understanding this correctly?
> 
> RFC 3177 suggest a /48. 
> 
> Forget about IPv4 when assigning IPv6 Networks to customers. Think big an
> take a one size fits all(most) customers approach. Assign a /48 or /56 to
> your customers and they will never ask you about additional IPs
> again. This make Documentation relay easy. ;-)
> 
> cheers 
> 
> Jens

Am I the only one that finds this problematic? I mean, the whole point
of moving to a 128 bit address was to ensure that we would never again
have a problem of address depletion. Now I'm not saying that this puts
us anywhere in that boat (yet) but isn't saying "oh, lets just put a
/64 on every interface" pretty well ignoring the lessons of the last
20 years? Surely a /96 or even a /112 would have been just as good.

Lets think longer term... IPv4 is several decades old now and still in
use. If IPv6 lasts another 50 years before someone decides that it
needs a redo, with current practices, what will things look like?
Consider the population at that point and consider the number of
interfaces as more and more devices become IP enabled. "wireless"
devices have their own issues to content with (spectrum being perhaps
the biggest limiter) so wired devices will always be around. That
means physical interfaces and probably multiple LANs in each
residence. I can see where each device may want its own LAN and will
talk to components of itself using IP internally, perhaps even having
a valid reason for having these individual components publically
addressable.

Like I said, I'm not necessarily saying we're going to find ourselves
in that boat again but it does seem as though more thought is
required. (And yes, I fully realize the magnitude of 2^64. I also
fully realize how quickly inexhaustable resources become rationable.)

-Wayne

---
Wayne Bouchard
web at typo.org
Network Dude
http://www.typo.org/~web/