nanog mailing list archives

Re: Where to buy Internet IP addresses


From: Joe Greco <jgreco () ns sol net>
Date: Sun, 3 May 2009 18:26:52 -0500 (CDT)

On Mon, 4 May 2009, Matthew Palmer wrote:
Oh!  You mean, like the way we piss away IPv4 addresses?

That's pretty much what I'm thinking of.  I'm sure that, had their been a
NANOG at the time IPv4 was being rolled out, there would have been an
equivalent discussion, except substitute /8 for /48, and probably site for
end user -- but the arguments, I'm sure, would have been the same, and they
would have sounded just as rational to the participants then, too.

In fact, there are probably people on this list now who *were* around when
the initial IPv4 addressing policies were thought up...

We shouldn't waste the IPv6 addresses, but giving each end user a /56 
isn't wasteful. It's even less than the protocol was designed for, and 
there is nobody who has conceived so far how this would be a problem 
before we've even used up 1/(2^16) of the available space and we can fix 
any problem seen by then with 65536 times more addresses to use in a less 
"wasteful" manner.

Crippling IPv6 by just giving people a /64 isn't helping anybody, it's 
just delaying and complicating the IPv6 rollout to end users. We should 
make sure people are used to the fact to have routing in their home (or at 
least the possibility to do so).

And I think I'd like to say that, as someone who was around in some of
the earlier days of the 'net, there were a lot of questions even at that
time about allocation of /8's - it was obvious that, even at the time,
we weren't going to be able to allocate every school a /8, and there were
questions about how to make the class B and C spaces work well.
Regardless of your opinion of what might have happened at the time, we
were aware that there were limits.

IPv6 was explicitly designed for this.  If it would happen to turn out to
be a problem, which appears exceedingly unlikely within any reasonable
timeframe, as noted, we have the option to change strategy.

Allocating smaller blocks will just encourage brokenness.  This is not a
desirable goal.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.


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