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Re: It's Ars Tech's turn to bang the IPv4 exhaustion drum

  • From: Justin M. Streiner
  • Date: Mon Aug 18 17:30:11 2008
On Mon, 18 Aug 2008, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

On 18 aug 2008, at 21:18, Justin M. Streiner wrote:

Just because IPv6 provides boatloads more space doesn't mean that I like wasting addresses :)

That kind of thinking can easily lead you in the wrong direction.

For instance, hosting businesses that cater to small customers generally have a lot of problems with their IPv4 address provisioning: for a customer that only needs one or a few IPv4 addresses, it's not feasible to create a separate subnet, because that wastes a lot of addresses. But invariably, these customers on shared subnets grow, so over time the logical subnet gathers more and more IPv4 address blocks that are shared by a relatively large number of customers, and because of resistance to renumbering, it's impossible to fix this later on.

I don't have a problem with assigning customers a /64 of v6 space. My
earlier comments were focused on network infrastructure comprised of mainly
point-to-point links with statically assigned interface addresses. In that case, provisioning point-to-point links much larger than a /126, or at the maximum a /120 seems rather wasteful and doesn't make much sense.

jms