Re: Last Call: <draft-ietf-6man-rfc4291bis-07.txt> (IP Version 6 Addressing Architecture) to Internet Standard

[Lorenzo Colitti <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 4:33 PM, Fernando Gont <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> My understanding is that Randy et al are trying to get rfc4291bis to
> reflect operational reality, but you want to progress the document with
> no changes, essentially meaning that you want to publish a document as
> full standard which doesn't agree with how the protocol is being deployed.
>

I think we all agree that the document doesn't agree with what Randy et al
deployed, because the document matches the existing standard and Randy et
al chose to violate the standard. What I'm saying is:

   1. The "operational reality" that Randy et al want to match is not
   widely deployed (in terms of number of links). The overwhelming majority of
   links on the Internet (of which backbone links are just a small number)
   follow the standards.
   2. There are hosts that follow the standards and only support /64 in
   some cases, or rely on /64 to provide useful functionality. Changing the
   standards to match said limited operational reality will render those hosts
   noncompliant.
   3. We should not render compliant hosts noncompliant because a minority
   of links purposely violated the standards.

If, even at the time of publication our documents already do not reflect
> reality, we are not going to be taken seriously.
>

But they do reflect reality. If you look at the whole Internet, think there
are probably 1000 /64 links for every /65-126 link deployed today. Removing
the fixed /64 boundary will cause way more than 0.1% of hosts - which
*correctly* implemented a fixed /64 IID - to become noncompliant. Thus,
changing the document as suggested by Randy et al will actually cause the
document to reflect reality less than it does today.

Repeating a "classful addressing is bad" mantra isn't going to change those
facts.