North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Important IPv6 Policy Issue -- Your Input Requested

  • From: Daniel Senie
  • Date: Tue Nov 09 14:31:25 2004 
At 11:17 AM 11/9/2004, Simon Lockhart wrote:


> > In today's networks, printers do NOT need global addresses.

So I'm not allowed to send stuff to my printers at home or in the office, to
be picked up by my wife, or a colleague, wherever I am on the Internet?
That's fine, if that's what network policy on your global enterprise network permits.


You should be careful not to try and apply local policies to a global network
Or apply global policies to a local network.

The printers that are not going to be accessible from elsewhere in the world are going to precluded by firewall from talking beyond the administrative boundary. That being the case why is it the concern of the global internet community whether the address for that printer comes from a block of addresses from an upstream ISP, an address that may change over time, or comes from a locally administered scope? This is the concern of the owner of the network, not those trying to impose their view of how IPv6 should be deployed.

Lack of suitable private space allocated for that purpose will result in a repeat of what happened with IPv4: people will pick random address blocks to use. This is really outside the purview of NANOG, since what we're talking about is NOT on the public networks. About the only impact on NANOG is how much backbone networks can charge for blocks of address space to companies who are not going to route those blocks over the public networks.

The message likely to be learned by enterprises from reading this discussion is rather different than many of you would hope: Stay with IPv4, and use private address space from RFC 1918 for disjoint networks. Preaching to enterprises about how they should run their networks is a sure fire way to get ignored. Backbone networks and operating enterprise networks may use much of the same gear, but the policies, procedures and goals are quite different.