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Re: And Now for Something Completely Different (was Re: IPv6 news)

  • From: Daniel Senie
  • Date: Mon Oct 17 17:29:32 2005 
At 04:51 PM 10/17/2005, Tony Li wrote:



Fred,


If we are able to reduce the routing table size by an order of
magnitude, I don't see that we have a requirement to fundamentally
change the routing technology to support it. We may *want* to (and
yes, I would like to, for various reasons), but that is a different
assertion.

There is a fundamental difference between a one-time reduction in the
table and a fundamental dissipation of the forces that cause it to
bloat in the first place.  Simply reducing the table as a one-off
only buys you linearly more time.  Eliminating the drivers for bloat
buys you technology generations.

If we're going to put the world thru the pain of change, it seems
that we should do our best to ensure that it never, ever has to
happen again.
But wasn't that the rationale for originally putting the kitchen sink into IPv6, rather than fixing the address length issue? I think we missed a lot of opportunities. Extended addressing may well have been possible to integrate in the mid 1990's ahead of much of the massive Internet expansion. Too late.

We're 10 years on, and talking about whether there will need to be more than one massive pain of migration, because the kitchen sink didn't take into account multihoming. Now we're talking about a solution that appear to be an even worse Rube Goldberg than token ring source-route bridging. Moore will likely have to continue to produce the solution.