IPv6 woes - RFC

Mon Sep 13 21:26:57 UTC 2021

Randy Bush wrote on 13/09/2021 19:22:
> the specs as originally RFCed by the ietf is very telling.  for your
> amusement, take a look at rfc 2450.  it took five years of war to get
> rid of the tla/sla crap.  and look at the /64 religion today[0].

architectural decisions were made because of a mixture of actual and 
perceived problems at the time, but several of the outcomes make little 
sense now or in some cases, actively cause problems.  E.g. using mcast 
for address resolution because large flat l2 networks were the order of 
the day, that "privacy addresses" would give privacy, that client 
self-selected addresses should be the only game in town for 
auto-addressing (it took years to get any form of dhcp through), that 
extension headers were a great idea, that "transition mechanisms" would 
be viable for fundamentally incompatible protocols, etc.  That said, 
it's easy to be critical of design decisions with 25y of hindsight, and 
even easier to understate how difficult it is to dislodge ipv4 which 
took 40 years of evolution to cement itself into its current position.

Nick