North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: shim6 @ NANOG

  • From: Roland Dobbins
  • Date: Sat Mar 04 23:50:36 2006

On Mar 4, 2006, at 7:06 PM, Joe Abley wrote:

No support in big networks is required, beyond the presence of shim6 in server stacks.
Why do you say this? Enterprises who multihome need their client machines (tens and hundreds of thousands of them) to be able to take advantage of multihoming, as well. It's a requirement, not a luxury.

[Note that I do not address the blurring of client and server roles which is happening even now, and which will almost certainly become more prevalent over the anticipated lifetime of the success protocol to IPv4.]

This fundamental misconception of the requirements of large enterprise customers should be an indicator to proponents of shim6, among others, that they do not have a good grasp of the day-to-day operational and business realities faced by large enterprises. This lack of understanding has led to such fundamental misconceptions as a belief that large enterprises can accept frequent renumbering within their organizations based upon changing business relationships with their SPs (they cannot, see RFC 4192 for some of the reasons why not), as well as underestimating the importance of multihoming for client computers as well as servers.

shim6 is simply not viable for large enterprises, who are the customers who require multihoming. I would argue that it's not really viable for smaller organizations either, due to the complexity it adds to the troubleshooting matrix for support staff. I hope that the operational community will turn to more fruitful lines of enquiry regarding IPv6 multihoming.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Roland Dobbins <[email protected]> // 408.527.6376 voice

Everything has been said. But nobody listens.

-- Roger Shattuck