Naive IPv6 (was AT&T UVERSE Native IPv6, a HOWTO)

Tony Hain alh-ietf at tndh.net
Wed Dec 4 19:34:28 UTC 2013


Brian Dickson wrote:
> > And root of the problem was brought into existence by the insistence
> > that every network (LAN) must be a /64.

Get your history straight. The /64 was an outcome of operators deciding
there was not enough room for hierarchy in the original proposal for the
IPv6 address as 64 bits (including hosts), despite its ability to deliver 3
orders of magnitude more than the IAB goal statement. Given that position,
the entire 64 bits was given to *ROUTING* and we argued for another year
about how many bits to add for hosts on the lan. The fact it came out to 64
was an artifact of emerging 64 bit processors and the desire to avoid any
more bit shifting than necessary. Yes, autoconfig using the mac was a
consideration, but that was a convenient outcome, not the driving factor.

Yet here we are 15 years later and the greedy, or math challenged, still
insist on needing even more bits. Stop worrying about how many bits there
are in the lan space. That abundance allows for technical innovation that
will never be possible in the stingy world of centralized control. Consider
a world where the 'central control' crowd only allows one application on the
network (voice), and innovation is defined as 'only deploy something with an
immediate income stream' (caller id). In an environment like that, were do
new things come from? You can't prove a demand exists without deployment,
yet you can't get deployment without a proven demand. Enter the ott Internet
which leveraged the only allowed app via an audio modulation hack and built
something entirely different, where innovation was allowed to flourish. Now
go back to the concept of miserly central control of lan bits and figure out
how one might come up with something like RFC3971 (SEND) that would work in
any network. 


Rob Seastrom wrote:
> 
> Re-working your conclusion statement without redoing the math, "This
> leaves room for 2^15 such ISPs (a mere 16384), from the current /3."

Interesting; that was the IAB design goal for total end system count.  >>>
2^12 networks supporting 2^15 end systems.

> 
> Oddly enough, I'm OK with that.  :)

So am I, and if we do burn through that before a replacement network
technology comes along, there are still 6 more buckets that large to do it
differently.

Tony









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