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Re: shim6 @ NANOG

  • From: Iljitsch van Beijnum
  • Date: Mon Mar 06 07:40:14 2006

On 5-mrt-2006, at 20:38, Matthew Petach wrote:

Hotmail runs shim6 so that multihomed Hotmail users can keep sending
mail even when one ISP fails, while Gmail doesn't?

The customers who can't reach gmail will call their ISP to complain about
the Internet being broken. They're not going to call Google and ask why
they aren't installing/configuring shim6 on 150,000+ servers. This is
observable today, and is not a matter of conjecture.
People who go through the expense of adding a second ISP are likely to be a bit more clueful than that, especially when they see that Gmail doesn't work and Hotmail does.

I think the trend has been pretty clear thus far--large networks/ large providers
have been getting PI /32 allocations in order to be able to multihome in v6 in
the same way they multihome in v4 today. And for those organizations that
today have multiple locations that aren't connected but still need to talk to the
Internet, they have separate v4 allocations and separate ASNs
Some of them, certainly. But others use one AS number and one prefix and break the prefix into smaller pieces that are announced from different locations.

Installing shim6 will not provide companies with the
same level of redundancy that multihoming with PI space provides in the
IPv4 world today,
In a world where most hosts are shim-capable it would.

It doesn't buy you fast and painless provider switching that having your own PI block does, but that's another issue.

In case you've never had to discuss network upgrades/conversions/ migrations
with executives before, the answer to any proposal that increases the risk to
the company's business without clear benefits that well exceed the added risk
is "NO".
Letting business people make engineering decisions is not a good idea, just like having engineers make business decisions. If the risk is too great, just let them wait and the risk will become smaller. And that's exactly what they're doing anyway.

2 million prefixes in a router that supports 1 million is also a non-
starter.

And in 1996, we would have said 200,000 prefixes in a router that
supports 100,000 is a non-starter.  And yet here we are, with everyone
in the core holding 200,000 prefixes without complaint.

2 million prefixes in a router that supports 1 million is a non- starter
*today*;
No, it's a non-starter ALWAYS. The only variables are whether routers of the required capacity are available and if so, how much they cost. I think the only time that routing table size wasn't a consideration when buying routers for me and my customers was a few years around 2000 when a Cisco 7200 was fast enough to handle the required amounts of traffic, supported memory to do full routing and was affordable with regard to revenues in the internet business as I knew/know it (= in the Netherlands). Before that, a C7200 was too expensive for many ISPs that I knew and these days, traffic volumes are such that you really need something with hardware support but then you either have cheap multilayer switches that can't do full routing or routers that are too expensive for small ASes.

Routing table growth is more limited by the ability of entities to get
physical links installed, obtain an AS, and learn how to spell BGP
than it is by our allocation policies.
Conjecture.

Yes, someday we'll get to
2 million prefixes, as more people learn to speak BGP, and purchasing
multiple physical links becomes cheaper. But it won't be overnight, and
routers will continue to scale, as they have from the CIDR crisis of the 90's
to our IPv6 non-crisis of today.
There is no way of knowing that. Moore's Law certainly appeared to be in bad shape a few years back as the traditional process shrinking in the chip industry hit some walls. We're back on track now, but there's no telling what will happen in the future.

IPv4 has been in operation for 25 years now. Let me be generous and assume that the switch to IPv6 happens 5 years from now. With more and more stuff connected to networks the switch to IPv7 isn't going to be faster than the one from v4 to v6, so IPv6 will have to last for at least 30 years like IPv4 before it. So we have to make certain that what we do today still works in 2041. That is a LONG time to keep doubling performance every 18 months.

Now, for the rest of us, let's move on to draft a useful allocation strategy
that allows for PI multihoming in IPv6 in the same way companies are able
to do so in the IPv4 world.
Bad idea.

If we aren't comfortable doing that, then let's draft
up the terms of the market economy that will develop in buying and selling IPv4
addresses as the pool runs dry
If you're happy with that as an alternative for PI in IPv6, then go right ahead. Personally, I don't like the idea of organizations who got a /8 now reaping huge benefits from that and the moment this is seriously suggested you can forget about anyone giving back address space voluntarily, but if that's what it takes, fine by me.

> I have more faith in our ability to deal with route table growth
> than I do in our ability to come up with a viable instantiation of shim6.

Engineering based on faith is insane. Even with today's science we
have balconies falling off of appartment buildings and roofs
collapsing when it rains or snows a bit harder than usual, so a
little caution here and there isn't too much to ask for.

And engineering based on FUD is equally insane.  Designing a bridge
for a two-lane country highway to support 20,000 ton loads "because
someday someone might want to drive a cavalcade of dump trucks
packed to overflowing with ozmium across it" is ridiculous, and won't
get you funding.  Engineers plan for reasonable safety margins, and
then post the safe operating loads.
Right. And that's why your analogy doesn't work. It's more like building a bridge that can handle 20000 tons and then it turns out people really like to live on the bridge (for some reason, good analogies are hard...). Some people then say, fine, as long as you use trailers or similar mobile homes so you can move them off the bridge when necessary. Others say: go ahead, just build houses, when the load increases we'll just reinforce the bridge. Obviously this will work for a while but at some point you'll have a complete city on the bridge and all the economic activity draws more and more new people that the reinforcement efforts can no longer support. At this point, moving off the bridge becomes incredibly painful but there's no easy way out anymore.

If you take a rational look at the ASN allocation curve, I think it's clear who is the real FUD-monger here. We can safely give out a PI IPv6 allocation to every ASN on the Internet, and not worry about hitting 2 million prefixes any time in the lifespan of our current routers. Companies that have multiple locations with different AS's today will get a prefix for each AS at each location in IPv6, *and the sky will not fall*.
There are currently some 17k ASes in the US and 265 in China. China has about four times the inhabitants of the US. If all the world reaches the same amount of multihoming as the US that would be 300k ASes today. Between 2000 and 2004 the number of IPv4 addresses given out averaged 80 million/year. Last year it was 165 million. We simply do not have enough data points to make reasonable projections, especially not over the course of 30 years.

The problem with opening a can of worms is that rarely, the worms go back into the can. We have to opportunity to start from scratch with IPv6, let's not waste this because in our hubris we think we know what's going to happen in the future even though we got it wrong so many times in the past.