Re: Where to buy Internet IP addresses

["Ricky Beam" <jfbeam () gmail com>]

On Tue, 05 May 2009 00:08:51 -0400, Joe Greco <jgreco () ns sol net> wrote:
> For today.  But, remember, this sort of shortsightedness is what landed
> us in the current IPv4 pain.

48bit MACs have caused IPv4 address exhaustion?  Wow.  I didn't know that.

> ... justify not making a future-proofing change now, before IPv6
> is widely deployed, and changes can be easily made?

It's not very widely deployed now, and it's already too late to make  
simple changes.  ONE single, simple protocol change requires a lot of  
people to do a lot of work.

> For ethernet, today.

IPv6 is a decade old and there still aren't many people using it.   
Ethernet is 30 years old.  Do you honestly think you'd be able to roll out  
EthernetV2(tm) with 64bit MACs anytime in the next century?  Ethernet is  
far more fundamental than IPv4, grown into the silicon of almost  
everything.  Even though there are alternatives to ethernet (infiniband  
anyone?) ethernet is still *everywhere*.

> Correct.  So it's trivial to do, and it future-proofs us to be able to
> support EUI-64. ...

And the only reason we'd need to use EUI-64? Because some twits decided to  
use a Layer 2 address in a Layer 3 address.  Or have we exhausted EUI-48  
as well?

> Most of the significant problems with IPv4 are due to people thinking
> small, and not having a vision towards the future. ...

I'm thinking small?  No.  I'm being frugal and efficient --  
"conservative".  FORCING networks to be no smaller than /64 -- per the  
fundamental requirement for SLAAC -- when there's absolutely no forseeable  
need for 18billion billion hosts per network is wasteful beyond measure.   
I see this a fundamentally the same as handing out /8's 25 years ago --  
"because the protocol (classfulness) requires it."  Just because *we* see  
the IPv6 address space as unbelievablly huge *today*, doesn't mean we  
should carve it up in recklessly huge chunks.  That's exactly how IPv4 was  
seen long ago, and we've been and will be living with that mistake for  
decades.

So, to sum up... we're being locked into using /64's as a minimum  
allocation simply because a fundamental part of IPv6 (SLAAC) requires an  
EUI-64 -- taking a layer-2 address and promoting it to a layer-3 address,  
more or less because it's there and supposed to be globally unique (read:  
we're lazy and don't want to figure out another way to be "stateless".)   
This despite no current internet devices using EUI-64[*], and the  
overwelming technology leader (ethernet) doesn't and very likely never  
will (given the millions of tons of existing hardware in use.)

([*] according to the wiki, firewire and zigbee are the only things using  
EUI-64.  I don't know of anyone using firewire as a network backbone.   
(obviously, not that you care.)  Zigbee is relatively new and similar to  
bluetooth; will people use them as a NIC or connect little zigbee gadgets  
to the internet -- well, there are coffee makers, vending machines, and  
christmas lights on the internet, so as a novelty, certainly. How many  
bluetooth devices are running IP over bluetooth?  That said, I could see  
PAN meshes (personal area networks) eating a huge number of addresses, but  
/64???)