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

  • From: Iljitsch van Beijnum
  • Date: Thu Aug 21 04:11:28 2008

On 20 aug 2008, at 21:33, Crist Clark wrote:

No, that's my point. On a true point-to-point link, there is
only one other address on the link. That's what point-to-point
means.

For example, on the IPv4 ends gif(4) tunnel in my previous message,


gif0: flags=8051<UP,POINTOPOINT,RUNNING,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1280
tunnel inet 24.6.175.101 --> 72.52.104.74
inet6 fe80::200:24ff:feca:91b4%gif0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x7
inet6 2001:470:1f04:2fc::2 --> 2001:470:1f04:2fc::1 prefixlen 128

Note that this interface doesn't _have_ any IPv4 addresses: the IPv4 addresses that you see are the tunnel endpoints.


However, the IPv6 addresses do what you say: there is a local one and a remote one and they don't share a subnet. Obviously it's possible to do this, but in my opinion, this is just an implementation variation, not the natural state of point-to-point links. It makes much more sense to have one set of behaviors that applies to all interfaces.

And what is a point-to-point link, anyway? In theory gigabit ethernet is CSMA/CD, but I don't think anyone ever bothered to implement that, in practice it's point-to-point on layer 1, but layer 2 is point-to- multipoint...