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Re: Important IPv6 Policy Issue -- Your Input Requested

  • From: Iljitsch van Beijnum
  • Date: Tue Nov 09 18:07:21 2004

On 9-nov-04, at 17:27, Leo Bicknell wrote:

My comment here was directed at the unregistered variant.  You'll
notice the math in the paper assumes each company coming to the
table has a single IPv6 unregistered prefix.

My statement is that math does not reflect reality.  Consider when
Cisco wants to do a interconnect with AOL Time Warner, which due
to the way they grow both bring 1,000 prefixes to the table.  The
chance of collision is actually quite high.
Why would a company need 1000 /48s, when a single /48 allows for 65536 subnets?

I believe even with that relatively small number of networks (2000
total) the probability of collision is well more than 50%.
Ok, let's assume there are already 2k networks connected. So a new one would have a one in 2^(40-9) chance of colliding. Do this 2k times and you're at one in 2^22. (Actually less because I'm overlooking the chance of successive collisions.)

This is very similar to the birthday problem.
http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.birthdayprob.html  It only
takes 23 people (6% of the 365 available birthdays) to generate a
50% chance of collision, with them only bringing one birthday to
the table.  Bring 20 "birthdays" to the table for each one and that
number drops by orders of magnitude.
But if birthdays are only celebrated once every 3 million millennia (2^40 days) the number goes down again ever so slightly. :-)

And unlike IPv4, it's easy to give all hosts more than one address and
renumbering the hosts themselves is fairly straightforward.

Another incorrect assumption.  First, I want to dispel the notion right
now that anyone is going to use IPv6 autoconfiguration.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this one, as I firmly believe very few people are going to use DHCP in IPv6.

That's another
head in the sand idea.  We have two groups here.  People who run "fixed
infrastructure", which include network operators and server operators,
and the second group is "end user workstations".

The first group has always, and will always statically assign addresses.
This will be true with IPv6. They want to know when they swap out a NIC
the address doesn't change.
That's why your favorite C (and presumably other) boxes have the MAC addresses burned in the chassis rather than the NIC.

They enter IP's in DNS and other systems where having them be static is key.
Yes, renumbering the DNS still sux.  :-)

The second group could use autoconfiguration, except it provides none
of what they need. Look at the people using DHCP today. They need
to get nameserver IP's, WINS server IP's, NTP server IP's, configuration
file names and all sorts of other information.
Not so much. Autoconfiguration and some DNS resolvers is all I need.

So, for both groups to "renumber" it's no different than today.
There is still a big difference: you get to use the old and new addresses side by side for a while.

Best I can tell renumbering will be NO LESS expensive in IPv6, and
actually will be more expensive, since the IPv6 proponents seem bent
on requiring everyone to have 6 addresses to do anything useful, so
it will be address management effort x6.
Renumbering is always bad, but there are degrees of badness. Fixed subnet masks, ample address space within subnets, multiple addresses all help, even if you discount autoconfiguration (which I don't) and all the filtering and DNS issues are of course the same.

With registered space you have the additional benefit that when packets
leak, they can be traced back to the originator, and it's possible to
delegate name service.

Except the draft doesn't allow for that.  I quote:

The ownership of the allocations is not needed to be public since the
resulting addresses are intended to be used for local communication.

The draft does not make that information public.
Well, someone should, if not the draft.