nanog mailing list archives

Re: ISP customer assignments


From: Adam Armstrong <lists () memetic org>
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:11:06 +0100

eric clark wrote:
So far, I have only dabbled with IPv6, but my reading of the RFCs is that
VLSM for lengths beyond /64 is not required. Subsequently, to use anything
longer is an enormous gamble in an enterprise environment. I envision
upgrading code one day and finding that your /127 isn't supported any more
and they forgot to mention it. I'll stick to /64, though it does seem a
horrible waste of space.

Someone else might have read the RFC differently though.
I'm sure there's an RFC somewhere talking about Classful addressing pre-CIDR. Perhaps we should stop using CIDR in IPv4. It might stop working one day. ;)

Operational reality helps to refine RFCs. Many people are already using longer prefixes for infrastructure and other purposes, so it's unlikely to go away. The only real issue is that some old hardware may not support prefixes longer than /64 in hardware and so may drop to software routing.

I don't know of any examples of this though.

adam.


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