North American Network Operators Group
Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: who gets a /32 [Re: IPV6 renumbering painless?]

  • From: Stephen Sprunk
  • Date: Sat Nov 20 13:10:20 2004 
Thus spake "Paul Vixie" <[email protected]>

[email protected] ("Stephen Sprunk") writes:

> isc is multihomed, so it's difficult to imagine what isp we could have
> taken address space from then, or now.

...

Some fear that you would more likely just generate a ULA, use that
internally, and NAT at the borders.  Or maybe you'd stick with IPv4
RFC1918 space internally and NAT to IPv6 PA space at your borders.

the internet endpoint type trend is toward SOHO and dsl/cable, and the
provider trend is toward gigantic multinational.  companies who build
their own networks tend to find that the cheapest interoffice backhaul
is IP-in-IP VPN's.  thus is the old model of a 1000-person company buying
a T1 transit connection moving toward the margins.
I'm not experienced with the 1000-person companies; the work I've done is for companies 20 to 100 times that size, so maybe my perception is skewed.

SoHo and residential users are definitely a growing percentage of the Internet connection count, but I think they're still a minority of _hosts_ which have Internet connectivity. Enterprises can have tens or hundreds of thousands of hosts behind a single T1 or T3, and may expose only a handful of PA addresses due to NAT. Large universities are similar, except legacy allocations mean they usually don't need NAT.

I've also seen a strong tendency in enterprises to backhaul even external traffic on IP VPNs, so that even users with a "local" Internet pipe have to go through the corporate firewalls to reach the outside world (if that's even allowed).

as i continue to research my own premises, i find that the style of
internetworking practiced at isc, which precludes PA space due to
multihoming and due to possible renumbering penalties,
So are you saying that if ISC had not gotten a legacy PI allocation, you wouldn't be using IPv6? Or that you wouldn't be able to design your network the way you'd want to, but would still use IPv6 anyways?

is becoming quite rare as a percentage
of the total number of network owners and the total number of endpoints
thus interconnected.  it's sad but it's true and it gives cause to ponder
the future of enabling technologies like internet exchange points.
I've run into very few enterprises that know they'd even be allowed to join an IX, much less actually interested in doing so. They'd rather pay one or two companies to drop big, fat pipes into their datacenter and collect on SLAs when something goes wrong. Very few, even in the Fortune 100, have the staff to handle their own BGP configs and keep things running smoothly. Humans cost more money than they'd probably save on transit, and the money often comes out of different pockets anyways.

I see IXes (IXen?) as a solution for providers, not end-sites. With the relatively lax IPv6 PI policies for providers, the threat to IXes is minimal.

this may yet lead to a mechanism for qualifying multihomed network builders
to get PI space, since they'll be rare enough to have a low impact on the
global routing table.
We'll see what the reaction is on PPML. Based on the number of origin-only ASes in yesterday's Routing Table Report, we should expect to see about 16k prefixes from multihomed end-sites if adoption in IPv6 matches that in IPv4.

on the other hand, transit-provider lock-in is not officially recognized as
having any bearing on any RIR policy in any region; if that continues to
be the case, the rare kind of network i'm most familiar with will continue
to use ipv4 or will only use ipv6 via something like ULA's. what this
may mean is that approving ULA's will make the situation better, since
network owners will otherwise just pirate unused space at random. with
ULA's we'll at least have a chance to trace leaks and try to make
BCP38 happen in more places.
Agreed.

S

Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking