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Re: WG Action: Conclusion of IP Version 6 (ipv6)

  • From: John Curran
  • Date: Tue Oct 02 23:45:58 2007

At 7:01 PM -0700 10/2/07, David Conrad wrote:
>
>Actually, I suspect the vast majority of potential holders of addresses don't care all that much about uniqueness.  They care about being able to reach the content and services they're interested in.  
>As such, NAT (and hence non-uniqueness) is a perfectly workable solution for them.  For the tiny subset that actually want to provide services, uniqueness is generally a pre-requisite, but what percentage of the IPv4 address space is used to provide services?

Most organizations connecting to the Internet want at least
a few static unique addresses for web and mail servers.  It
may not be 100% of the organizations connecting, but it's
very close.

>My imaginary boundary?  Interesting.  You are asserting that ISPs are going to start accepting prefixes longer than /24, particularly in the face of the FUD spread about how everybody's routers are going to turn to slag?  Why would they do this?

A lot of ISP's will have no choice but to announce such
or lose the asking customer to someone who will...  

The largest ISP's are very likely to accept longer routes from
each other in order to facilitate their own continued growth,
and pay the cost of the router upgrades (presuming they can
actually upgrade fast enough to keep up with the tragedy
of the commons run on "free" address table entries...)

Whether they accept longer prefixes from smaller ISP's is
is a different question...  

>Again, we've been here before.  You and I both have the t-shirts.  
>What happened when routers started falling over circa 1996?  Why do you believe things will be different this time? Presumably you have a reason.

How does AT&T refuse numerous additional prefixes from BT,
if they in turn need to announce numerous additions in order
to grow?  Sales and marketing never take kindly to being told
"stop selling, we're full", and doubly so when competitors are
busy connecting new customers without adhering to all this
route filtering stuff in the way the quarterly numbers.

>Nope.  Fragmentation will occur.  The question is to what level.  Why should an ISP go in and modify its existing prefix length filters in order to gain routability to somebody else's new customer? 

See above.  They'll change it the day they're asked and find
themselves needing to announce longer prefixes as well.  Really,
the ability of filtering to survive in the face of competitive
pressure was already well-tested, and the result are: they don't.
Reference Randy's earlier post on same. 

>If you were actually worried about an explosion of routing information, I'd think you'd be campaigning for greater implementation of prefix length filters on the legacy /8s that are likely to be the first entrants into a free for all.

Sounds like wonderful idea...  run with it.  One could even imagine a
circumstance where such available /8's were reclaimed by the IANA
and issued per RFC2050 & ASO-001-2.

>What is your proposed alternative to a market in IPv4 addresses and, more importantly, how are you going to enforce it?

IPv6, and publicly arguing against betting the Internet in the
absence of a solid plan. May not actually work, but ihe task
comes with the job description...

We're likely going to have to agree to disagree on the impacts
of a "market", as you see an "additional O(1M) routes" being
the total impact (over the remaining lifetime of IPv4!), whereas
I see no such limit on additional routes with balkanization as
the inevitable result.

/John