Re: IPv6 - real vs theoretical problems

[Grant Phillips <grant.phillips () gwtp id au>]

Hi Deepak,

I acknowledge and see the point made. There is a lot of dead space in the
IPv6 world. Are we allowing history to repeat it self? Well i'm swaying more
to no.

Have you read this RFC? This is pretty satisfying in making me feel more
comfortable assigning out /48 and /64's. I can sleep at night now! :P

http://tools.ietf.org/html//rfc3177

Cheers,
Grant Phillips

On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 9:00 AM, Deepak Jain <deepak () ai net> wrote:

> Please, before you flame out, recognize I know a bit of what I am talking
> about. You can verify this by doing a search on NANOG archives. My point is
> to actually engage in an operational discussion on this and not insult (or
> be insulted).
>
> While I understand the theoretical advantages of /64s and /56s and /48s for
> all kinds of purposes, *TODAY* there are very few folks that are actually
> using any of them. No typical customer knows what do to do (for the most
> part) with their own /48, and other than autoconfiguration, there is no
> particular advantage to a /64 block for a single server -- yet. The left
> side of the prefix I think people and routers are reasonably comfortable
> with, it's the "host" side that presents the most challenge.
>
> My interest is principally in servers and high availability equipment
> (routers, etc) and other things that live in POPs and datacenters, so
> autoconfiguration doesn't even remotely appeal to me for anything. In a
> datacenter, many of these concerns about having routers fall over exist
> (high bandwidth links, high power equipment trying to do as many things as
> it can, etc).
>
> Wouldn't a number of problems go away if we just, for now, follow the IPv4
> lessons/practices like allocating the number of addresses a customer needs
> --- say /122s or /120s that current router architectures know how to handle
> -- to these boxes/interfaces today, while just reserving /64 or /56 spaces
> for each of them for whenever the magic day comes along where they can be
> used safely?
>
> As far as I can tell, this "crippling" of the address space is completely
> reversible, it's a reasonable step forward and the only "operational" loss
> is you can't do all the address jumping and obfuscation people like to talk
> about... which I'm not sure is a loss.
>
> In your enterprise, behind your firewall, whatever, where you want
> autoconfig to work, and have some way of dealing with all of the dead space,
> more power to you. But operationally, is *anything* gained today by giving
> every host a /64 to screw around in that isn't accomplished by a /120 or so?
>
> Thanks,
>
> DJ