North American Network Operators Group

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Re: IPv6 news

  • From: Tony Li
  • Date: Sat Oct 15 15:59:48 2005


Daniel,

The alternative is a multihoming scheme that does not require a
prefix per site.  But that doesn't match the stated requirement of
'conventional', 'proven', 'working' [sic], 'feature-complete'.
Those weren't the "stated requirements" on an alternative multihoming
scheme,, but only the attributes of conventional BGP multihoming.
Please don't lay words into my mouth I didn't say.

Those are exactly the words that you used in your message. I quote:

>> While watching shim6 we carry
>> on hoping that we'll get IPv6 multihoming going in the conventional,
>> proven, working, feature-complete way we're used to... until IETF
>> perhaps at one point in time realize that they are designing a solution
>> which misses the stated requirements of many folks actually operating
>> networks -


The operational community needs to reach consensus on what its
priorities are.  We fought the CIDR wars to keep the routing
subsystem working and the operational community were the primary
backers of that.  To not support scalable multihoming is to reverse
that position entirely.
CIDR didn't have the big disadvantages to operators (at least non that
I can identify, not having personally lived thru the CIDR migration).

No. It had big disadvantages to the end users. We asked them to suck it up in the name of having a scalable Internet. Now that we are proposing a technology to continue to help the providers scale, but that has disadvantages to the providers, we're seeing that the providers are not willing to sacrifice. Extremely disappointing.


Operators DO support scalable multihoming, but it has to deliver what
they want/need. HOW this can be achieved is the task of the IETF and
the REAL challenge. shim6 is only "the easy way out".

The IETF is responsible for providing real world engineering solutions to continue the growth of the Internet. When presented with the fundamentally conflicting requirements of supporting the Internet and fulfilling one faction's requests, they have chosen in favor of the Internet. If you'd like to suggest that they discover fundamentally new technology so that one can have their cake and eat it too, that's a fine thing, but that is the province of the IRTF. Engineering is the art of making tradeoffs, and that's what the IETF has done. I think that the provider community should examine the tradeoffs that have been made in much greater detail before condemning the result. The provider community has been well served by the IETF over the years and shim6 deserves at least a full and reasoned hearing before you throw the baby out with the bath-water.

Tony