North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: IPv6 daydreams
--- Mark Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > Why have people, who are unhappy about /64s for > IPv6, been happy enough > to accept 48 bit addresses on their LANs for at > least 15 years? Why > aren't people complaining today about the overheads > of 48 bit MAC > addresses on their 1 or 10Gbps point-to-point links, > when none of those > bits are actually necessary to identify "the other > end" ? Maybe because > they have unconsciously got used to the convenience, > and, if they've > thought about it, realise that the byte > overhead/cost of that > convenience is not worth worrying about, because > there are far higher > costs elsewhere in the network (including > administration of it) that > could be reduced. Wrong issue. What I'm unhappy about is not the size of the address - you'll notice that I didn't say "make the whole address space smaller." What I'm unhappy about is the exceedingly sparse allocation policies which mean that any enduser allocation represents a ridiculously large number of possible hosts. The only possible advantage I could see from this is the protection against random scanning finding a user - but new and fun worms will use whatever mechanism the hosts use to find each other: I guarantee that the "find a printer" function won't rely on a sequential probe of all of the possible host addresses in a /64 either... Also, the 64-bit addressing scheme is sized to include the MAC address, right? Why would encoding L2 data into L3 be a good thing? The conceptual problem that I have had with v6 from the beginning is that it's not trying to optimize a single layer, it's really trying to merge several layers into one protocol. Ugh. -David Barak- -Fully RFC 1925 Compliant- David Barak Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise: http://www.listentothefranchise.com __________________________________ Yahoo! Music Unlimited Access over 1 million songs. Try it free. http://music.yahoo.com/unlimited/
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