RE: draft-bourbaki-6man-classless-ipv6-00

["Manfredi, Albert E" <[e-mail]>]

>> Would be a shame to throw away lessons learned from IPv4.
>
> I think that's exactly the fallacy here. It is not useful to apply something
> you learned about IPv4 addressing to IPv6, because the number of addresses
> is incomparably bigger. Rule of thumb in software engineering is that a
> solution usually scales by one or two orders of magnitude. Here we have
> something like 34 orders of magnitude. Even a single /64 is 9 orders of
> magnitude larger than the IPv4 Internet.

Yeah, this hype needs to end. A /64 hard boundary merely doubles the width of IPv4 addresses, and egregiously wastes the majority of the remaining 64 bits.  And with innovations such as IoT, suddenly all that vast extra space can be swallowed up. Back in 1980, IPv4 address space seemed pretty huge too. The deployment assumptions made are key, when people make assertions about the vastness of the address space.

> Example: I don't want us to have to deal with NAT any more, ever.

I've seen this comment made before, and yet the /64 hard boundary practically guarantees that NAT will get used with IPv6. It's exactly the same solution, for exactly the same problem. Inability to expand at the edges.

Bert