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Re: Important IPv6 Policy Issue -- Your Input Requested

  • From: Leo Bicknell
  • Date: Mon Nov 08 17:19:56 2004

In a message written on Mon, Nov 08, 2004 at 10:46:48PM +0100, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> Well, if they can manage to interconnect all those networks a tiny 
> amount of coordination isn't too much to ask for. Also, with the proper 
> hashing this shouldn't be much of a problem even without coordination. 
> Yes, no coordination and bad hashing won't work, but guess what: don't 
> do that.

It is too much to ask for, because you assume it's one company day
one.  What happens when AOL and Time Warner merge?  There was no
chance of coordination before that.  Or how about Cisco?  They buy
what, 100-200 companies a year?

My problem is that even with good hashing it doesn't take long for
there to be a collision.  And once there is a single collision the
whole system is suspect.  It's the promise of "if you do this extra
work you'll never have to renumber" without delivering.

> Your argument is that people are going to be stupid so we should skip 
> ahead and give them the result of their stupidity. Now obviously there 
> will be people who do it the stupid way, but at least unique site 
> locals allow the people who don't do it the stupid way certain 
> benefits. I don't see how this can ever be a bad thing.

No, my argument is that it only takes a few stupid people to make
this entire system not work at all.  Since the draft seems to promise
it will work it is misleading people.  Indeed, I have "proof" the IPv6
crowd realizes this won't work at all, and it's the other draft.  If
this draft had a chance of working then there would be no need to create
a central registry to guarantee unique addresses.  The very existence of
that draft shows some people realize this method will not work.

> >   - It is not good engineering to give something away for free with no
> >     method of recovery, even if that resource is plentiful.
> 
> So we should play telco and sell a service that is so cheap that the 
> users are basically only paying for the billing? (= metered local 
> calls)

No.  My argument is not about money.  In this system anyone can get
something for free anytime they want.  "Lose" your address block?
Make it unusable for some purpose (eg, blacklisted)?  Just want a
second (third, fourth, millionth) block, just go get it.  Get a block,
then die?  Well, no one else can ever use your personal block.

If you get a personal block, then die, no one else can ever reuse that
block.  Every failed dot-com, that's address space we'll never be able
to use again.  I realize there is a lot of space, but this proposal
really seems to ask the question "how fast can we waste space if we
try", which is very dangerous in my opinion.

> That's nice. But it simply can't be done for any significant number of 
> PI prefixes. That's why we're going through so much trouble to create a 
> multihoming mechanism that doesn't kill the routing system.

Bah, hand-waving that makes no sense.

There are 33,000 allocated ASN's today.  Give each one a PI prefix
(however they might get it).  That's 33,000 routes.  Given my routers
are fine with 140,000 now, and are being tested in labs to well
over 1 million and I fail to see the issue.  Let's assume they all
have two PI prefixes for load balancing, ok, we're at 66,000, still
no problem.

More to the point, if most network admins have the choice of running a
full overlay network and updating software on every end host to be more
complex to make it understand the overlay networks or puting a few more
prefixes in the routing table and upgrading your router I bet they will
all pick the latter.

The problem is not routing PI blocks for all the existing ISP and even
companies.  The problem is routing blocks for individuals.  If ISP's
fall to pressure to route these prefixes between themselves (after all,
they are globally unique, so what's the harm?) and then you inject
individual's prefixes into the table you now have a melt down.

As with most system failures it takes multiple steps.  However, I
think these steps are likely.  ISP's in Asia have complained forever
that they don't get a fair share of the space.  Well, here they can
take, take, take and use as much as they need.  ISP's in Africa
have complained space costs too much (ARIN's fees, though low by
US standards are several years sallary in some countries), and want
a way around it.  If those groups used this space even only internally
at first between each other (after all, the purpose is to allow
routing between organizations, just not to the global internet)
eventually there will be great pressure to add them to the global
table.  It will be phrased as "UUNet won't accept prefixes from all
of Asia" or similar.  Then we end up having to accept them with
none of the controls the RIR system puts in place for setting policy
or anything else.  Prefixes will instead be randomly assigned
worldwide out of a single /7.

Distilled down the proposal makes no sense.

  1 You can have globally unique addresses.
  2 You can use them between organizations.
    a If your organization is an ISP, please don't allow them on the
      "Internet".

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - [email protected] - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Read TMBG List - [email protected], www.tmbg.org

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