Internet Edge Router replacement - IPv6 route tablesizeconsiderations

Sat Mar 12 00:13:13 UTC 2011

On Mar 11, 2011, at 10:58 AM, Leo Bicknell wrote:

> In a message written on Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 01:07:15PM -0500, Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
>> On Fri, 11 Mar 2011 09:38:12 EST, Joe Maimon said:
>>> rfc3927 does not require 64 bits and works sufficiently well wherever it 
>>> is employed. SLAAC should be redesigned to be configurable to work with 
>>> however many bits are available to it and it should be a standard 
>>> feature to turn that knob all the way from on - off with 128 bit stops 
>>> in between.
>> 
>> Feel free to explain how SLAAC should work on a /96 with 32 bits of host address
>> (or any amount smaller than the 48 bits most MAC addresses provide).  Remember
>> in your answer to deal with collisions.
> 
> Well, I at least think an option should be a /80, using the 48 bits
> of MAC directly.  This generates exactly the same collision potential
> as today we have with a /64 and an EUI-64 constructed from an EUI-48
> ethernet address.  The router is already sending RA's for SLAAC to
> work, sending along one of a well-known set of masks would be a
> relatively minor modification.
> 
How would you use that on a Firewire netowrk or FDDI or any of the
other media that uses 64-bit MAC addresses?

> That said, ND has built into it DAD - Duplicate Address Detection.
> There is already an expectation that there will be collisions, and
> the protocols to detect them are already in place.  I see little
> to no reason you couldn't use a different length subnet (like the
> /96 in your example), randomly select an address and do DAD to see
> if it is in use.  Indeed, this is pretty much how AppleTalk back
> in the day worked (with a 16 bit number space).
> 
Detect, yes. Mitigate, no. DAD on the link-local results in Interface
shutdown.

In an environment where there's a very low probability of collision,
that's an acceptable risk that is easily mitigated in most cases.
In an environment where you create a much higher risk of collision,
such as 1/2^32 or less, vs. 1/2^48 or more, I think that's a rather
ill advised approach.

> The probability of collision is pretty low, and the penalty/recovery
> (picking a new address and trying again) is rather quick and cheap.
> 
IPv6 does not try to pick a new address and try again in SLAAC, at
least not what it's supposed to do.

> If a service provider is going to end up giving me a /64 at home (I
> know, a whole different argument) I'd vastly prefer to use /80 or /96
> subnets with either of these methods, and still be able to subnet the
> space.  I suspect if /64's are given out one or both will come to be
> "standard".
> 
If a service provider attempts to give ma a /64 at home, I'd opt for
a new provider instead.

Owen