Re: What's 16 bits between friends?

On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 09:44:22AM -0400, Brian Dickson wrote:

> The routing infrastructure of the combined IPv4+IPv6 needs to survive 
> the addition of IPv6, and handle
> the dual routing via dual-stack, for a minimum of 3-10 years. This means 
> not only supporting all of the
> existing devices, but handling the continuation of exponential growth, 
> ideally with a minimum of additional
> routing slots eaten up on the devices in the DFZ.

But this is an argument to add not only more than 16 bits to the
Ethernet MAC to build the LAN, but more than 16 bit to the LAN size to
build the site address space, to make the globally-visible address
space even smaller - isn't it? Note that we have one site address
(assuming /48 sites only) per the maximum number of deployable Ethernet
devices, and 65536 LANs per the amount of deployable Ethernet devices 
- that really should be enough for 3-10 years.

[Also it is an argument to really make all LANs equal, and all
site-internal addressing equal, to minimize the reconfiguration needed
when you change the network technology ...]

But I might misunderstand your argument.

> Do we feel so strongly about universally supporting oddball cases, that 
> we will not accommodate operator
> need when it is presented?

[...]

> - there are these wonky things that maybe a few dozen research sites are 
> playing with that use 64-bits for MAC

Oh, there are not only IEEE1394 and Infiniband, and maybe a few others... 
There are also cryptographically generated addresses and "privacy"
addresses that use the lower /64 space.

	-is

--------------------------------------------------------------------
IETF IPv6 working group mailing list
ipv6@ietf.org
Administrative Requests: https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipv6
--------------------------------------------------------------------