ISP customer assignments

Tue Oct 6 00:05:57 UTC 2009

If people start getting /32s because some ISPs are refusing to route / 
48s, then,
the RIRs are not doing their stewardship job correctly and we should  
resolve
that issue.

If addresses are handed out according to policies, there is more than  
enough
space for every individual to have a /48. I think that /56s for  
residential customers
are probably a good idea and I agree that /48s are usually excessive  
for residential.

(a /64 is far more than a billion addresses since 32 bits if 4 billion  
and a /64 is
whatever number 4 billion^2 works out to, basically 16 followed by  
lots more
digits).

As a residential customer, if you get a /64, then, your ISP is really  
limiting you
in ways they should not.  You should get at least a /56 in most cases.

I think that comparing this to class Bs is kind of absurd, and, I  
think that the
people talking about lessons learned haven't really analyzed the lessons
very well.

The argument of "lessons learned" usually centers around the idea that
we should regard address space as finite and seek ways to maximize its
use.

The reality is that is not the best lesson.  That is what you do when  
address
space is finite and insufficient and you can't make use of extra bits  
to do
other optimizations.  Therefore, the best lesson to learn is simply  
that the
IPv4 space was simply not large enough and that we need a much much
much larger space with bits available to do other forms of optimization.

IPv6 does appear to contain that lesson rather well.  We have TONS
of bits available on each network for host addressing.  So much so that
complicated bizarre subnet address calculations and DNS reverse
delegation difficulties become a thing of the past (look at the hacks
necessary to delegate reverse DNS to 16 different /28 customers
in a /24 block, for example).

In essence, a class B was equivalent to a /56 in its original form, you
could carve it up into 256 /24s.  In IPv6, we have plenty of space
to issue /56 and even /48 networks to every small to medium business,
home, etc. and still have lots left over.  Large organizations and IPSs
easily get /32s which each contain 65,536 /48s, so, you can divide
your multi-national mega-corp into as many as 65,536 regions and
give each region a /48 and still be OK.

IPv6 offers so much address space that we could give every existing
IPv4 user an entire IPv6 ISP allocation (no, I'm not recommending this)
and still have enough /32s left over in IPv6 to give one to each ISP
and large mega-corp.

Lesson learned... The original address was far too small.  The new
address space is actually large enough that this is a pretty good guess
at how to generate addresses that will be fine for decades to come
and still have space left over.  In fact, so much so, that, to test the
theory, we're issuing 1/8th of it this way, and, if it doesn't work out
as planned, we can change the allocation policies for the other
7/8ths of the space.

So... Lesson learned... If we had tossed classful addressing
overboard in IPv4 when we allocated 1/8th of the address space,
most of the legacy /8s wouldn't be.

Owen

On Oct 5, 2009, at 4:41 PM, Robert.E.VanOrmer at frb.gov wrote:

> The address space is daunting in scale as you have noted, but I  
> don't see
> any lessons learned in address allocation between IPv6 and IPv4.   
> Consider
> as a residential customer, I will be provided a /64, which means each
> individual on Earth will have roughly 1 billion addresses each.
> Organizations will be provided /48s or smaller, but given the current
> issues with routing /48's globally, I think you will find more
> organizations fighting for /32s or smaller...  so what once was a
> astonomical number of addresses that one cannot concieve  
> numerically, soon
> becomes much smaller.  I can see an IPv7 in the future, and doing it  
> all
> over again... I just hope I retire before it comes... The only  
> difference
> I can see between IPv4 and IPv6 is how much of a pain it is to type  
> a 128
> bit address...  Just like back in the day when Class B networks were
> handed out like candy, one day we will be figuring out how to put in
> emergency allocations on the ARIN listserv for IPv6 because of address
> exhaustion and waste.
>
> Food for thought...
>
>
>> Message: 3
>> Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2009 17:47:12 -0400
>> From: Dorn Hetzel <dhetzel at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: ISP customer assignments
>> To: bmanning at vacation.karoshi.com
>> Cc: NANOG list <nanog at nanog.org>
>> Message-ID:
>> <7db2dcf90910051447r5bd7e42fja0b750dceb8d764 at mail.gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>>
>> The estimated mass of our galaxy is around 6x10^42Kg. The mass of  
>> earth
> is a
>> little less than 6x10^24Kg.
>>
>> 2^128 is around 3.4x10^38.
>> So in a flat address space we have about one IPV6 address for every
> 20,000Kg
>> in the galaxy or for every 20 picograms in the earth...
>>
>> One would hope it would last for a while :)
>>
>> On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 5:32 PM, <bmanning at vacation.karoshi.com>  
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> considered top posting to irritate a few folks, decided not to.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Oct 05, 2009 at 04:20:44PM -0500, Chris Owen wrote:
>>>> On Oct 5, 2009, at 1:43 PM, Wayne E. Bouchard wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Whenever you declare something to be "inexhasutable" all you do is
>>>>> increase demand. Eventually you reach a point where you realize  
>>>>> that
>>>>> there is, in fact, a limit to the inexhaustable resource.
>>>>
>>>> This is where I think there is a major disconnect on IPv6.   The  
>>>> size
>>>> of the pool is just so large that people just can't wrap their  
>>>> heads
>>>> around it.
>>>>
>>>> 2^128 is enough space for every man, woman and child on the  
>>>> planet to
>>>> have around 4 billion /64s to themselves.   Even if we assume
> everyone
>>>> might possibly need say 10 /64s per person that still means we are
>>>> covered until the population hits around 2,600,000,000,000,000,000.
>>>>
>>>> Chris
>>>>
>>>
>>>        here, you expose a hidebound bias to 20th century networking.
>>>       please remember that - with few exceptions - people network
>>>       at a very different level than machines.  people don't need
>>>       IP addresses - computing nodes that want to communicate do.
>>>
>>>       Just for grins, put a unique IPv6 address in every active RFID
>>>       tag.  ...  and remember that there are RFID printers that can
>>>       put 18 tags on a single A4 sheet.  Numbers will become
> disposible,
>>>       like starbucks coffee cups and MCD's bigmac containers.
>>>
>>> --bill
>>>
>>>