my web 0.2 website

I’ve been allowing the webcast of RIPE55 to mutter away in my ears all week and have let myself get distracted from time to time when the topics turned relevant to networks I operate or the chatter got interesting.  A bit like the end of today’s ipv6-wg session.
Six months ago I was quite sure that v6 was not likely to be viable as a way to guarantee the continuity of fresh (and useful) addressing resources when the IANA ipv4 pool is expired (around two years from today).  I thought that our best chances remained with working with our remaining v4 options; reclassifying 240/4 as normal unicast, pressure or perhaps even (shudder) regulation imposed on the holders of unused legacy class-A space, tighter policy control on remaining v4, and eventually a market model for new address distribution.

This is operator speak for burying one’s head in the sand.  240/4 is not going to useful for end-to-end internet use any time soon, thanks to the amount of equipment which is configured to not permit assignment of a class-e address to an interface, which unless you are using a very old or patched operating system will include the computer you are sitting in front of.  The best we can hope for is that it will be useful for private internetworking at some point in the future.  The class-A holders wont give their legacy allocation back because they think its worth lots of money, but the holders (and their future customers who ‘buy’ rights to a slice of addresses) are going to be disappointed when their announcements are ignored - anyone who thinks that HP can deaggregate 15.0.0.0/8 into 65,000 /24 networks and sell it off (HP not subject to the cost of every single other router in the world carrying the routes for free) is mistaken.

I have changed my mind and started testing v6 out.  I care about the end to end internet, and I care that addressing resources should be available to anyone who can justify need and that this is good for innovation. I am therefore pleased to hear the ipv6-wg discussing text for a new RIPE recommendation document that boils down to:

• New v4 addresses wont be available in two to four years, and this means your future network plans STOP HERE if they only involve v4.
• RIPE urges the deployment of v6

I am however concerned about one thing.  There are a number of networks which use provider independent addresses so that they can multihome (connect to more than one ISP for redundancy and performance.)  This is not catered for in general circumstances with RIPE v6 policies, except in very special circumstances.  This is due to a desire to keep the v6 routing table small so that we avoid the problems of an unwieldy routing table like today’s (by today’s equipment standards) in the future.

I don’t think the RIPE community can justify publishing such a document until 2006-01 reaches concensus, and in fact that this resolution is that IPv6 PI is available, it is a /48, and it’s possible to get some if you are multihoming.  You can’t tell operators that they must move to v6 without giving them a migration path.

The argument revolves around routing table size and control, but the community must allow networks that rely on connectivity to multihome, it’s an accepted technique for many operations now.  By all means require the organisation to continuously multihome or give the addresses back, but we must let the concept of v6 PI exist.

Otherwise needs based address resource allocation dies in around two years.