Dual stack IPv6 for IPv4 depletion

Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Thu Jul 9 21:19:20 UTC 2015


Sigh…

Home gateways are an application in this context. How the firmware gets written in those things will be affected.

Further, applications do care about things like “Can I assume that every home is reachable in its entirety via a packet to ff02::<group>?” which is, for example, already baked into many products as the current mDNS default scope.

SSDPv6 also seems to default to ff02:: scoping.

Whether or not applications come into existence that can take advantage of diverse topology in the home will depend entirely on whether or not we make diverse topology possible going forward.

/56 will enable some development in this area, but it will hinder several potential areas of exploration.

/48 is a reasonable end-site boundary. It allows enough flexibility for dynamic topologies while still leaving enough prefix space to have lots of extra room for sparse allocations and everything else.

So, instead of focusing on the narrowest possible definition of “application” by todays terms, try opening your mind just a little bit and recognize that anything that requires software and interacts with the network in any way is a better definition of application in this context.

Owen

> On Jul 9, 2015, at 13:56 , Naslund, Steve <SNaslund at medline.com> wrote:
> 
> Huh, since when does ANY application care about what size address allocation you have?  A V6 address is a 128 bit address period.  Any IPv6 aware application will handle addresses as a 128 bit variable.
> 
> Does any application running on IPv4 care if you have a /28 or a /29?  In fact the application should not even be aware of what the net mask is because that is an OS function to handle the IP stack.  This argument makes no sense at all since every application will be able to handle any allocation size since it is not even aware what that is.  Any IPv6 compatible OS will not care either because they would be able to handle any number of masked bits.  No app developer has ever been tied into the size of a subnet since CIDR was invented.
> 
> Steven Naslund
> Chicago IL
> 
> 
>> Subject: Re: Dual stack IPv6 for IPv4 depletion
>> 
>> And I’m saying you’re ignoring an important part of reality.
>> 
>> Whatever ISPs default to deploying now will become the standard to which application developers develop.
>> 
>> Changing the ISP later is easy.
>> 
>> Changing the applications is hard.
>> 
>> Let’s not bake unnecessary limitations into applications by assuming that tomorrow’s networks in homes will necessarily be as simple as today’s.
>> 
>> Owen
> 




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