IPv6 - real vs theoretical problems

Fri Jan 7 19:53:49 UTC 2011

Thanks Grant,  I've already read this.  :)

I have no problem with enabling /64s for everyone/everything in the future, as the equipment capability increases, but right now there are real concerns about en masse deployment and the vulnerabilities we open our hardware to.

Which is why I was talking about reserving the larger block, but only allowing folks to have as much space as they can manage successfully and with a similar risk profile as they have today. Obviously it doesn't take too many people leaving their networks wide to cause a problem for the rest of us.

Best,

Deepak

From: Grant Phillips [mailto:grant.phillips at gwtp.id.au]
Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2011 5:47 PM
To: Deepak Jain
Cc: NANOG list
Subject: Re: IPv6 - real vs theoretical problems

Hi Deepak,

I acknowledge and see the point made. There is a lot of dead space in the IPv6 world. Are we allowing history to repeat it self? Well i'm swaying more to no.

Have you read this RFC? This is pretty satisfying in making me feel more comfortable assigning out /48 and /64's. I can sleep at night now! :P

http://tools.ietf.org/html//rfc3177<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3177>

Cheers,
Grant Phillips

On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 9:00 AM, Deepak Jain <deepak at ai.net<mailto:deepak at ai.net>> wrote:

Please, before you flame out, recognize I know a bit of what I am talking about. You can verify this by doing a search on NANOG archives. My point is to actually engage in an operational discussion on this and not insult (or be insulted).

While I understand the theoretical advantages of /64s and /56s and /48s for all kinds of purposes, *TODAY* there are very few folks that are actually using any of them. No typical customer knows what do to do (for the most part) with their own /48, and other than autoconfiguration, there is no particular advantage to a /64 block for a single server -- yet. The left side of the prefix I think people and routers are reasonably comfortable with, it's the "host" side that presents the most challenge.

My interest is principally in servers and high availability equipment (routers, etc) and other things that live in POPs and datacenters, so autoconfiguration doesn't even remotely appeal to me for anything. In a datacenter, many of these concerns about having routers fall over exist (high bandwidth links, high power equipment trying to do as many things as it can, etc).

Wouldn't a number of problems go away if we just, for now, follow the IPv4 lessons/practices like allocating the number of addresses a customer needs --- say /122s or /120s that current router architectures know how to handle -- to these boxes/interfaces today, while just reserving /64 or /56 spaces for each of them for whenever the magic day comes along where they can be used safely?

As far as I can tell, this "crippling" of the address space is completely reversible, it's a reasonable step forward and the only "operational" loss is you can't do all the address jumping and obfuscation people like to talk about... which I'm not sure is a loss.

In your enterprise, behind your firewall, whatever, where you want autoconfig to work, and have some way of dealing with all of the dead space, more power to you. But operationally, is *anything* gained today by giving every host a /64 to screw around in that isn't accomplished by a /120 or so?

Thanks,

DJ