Re: Extending a /64

[Nick Hilliard <[e-mail]>]

Tony Whyman wrote on 19/11/2020 14:10:
> For the sake of a few addressing bits, there is really no justification 
> for going down this (very expensive and time consuming) path and we 
> don't have the funding anyway.

Tony,

address management and assignment policies are issues that affect all 
organisations to some degree or another.  What you're describing here 
can be paraphrased as:

- we've found out that address assignment management is hard, 
particularly given the constraints that we find ourselves in and the 
architecture we've chosen. As the IETF has lots of ipv6 space, it would 
make our lives much easier if we had an allocation large enough to embed 
our own persistent identifiers in the locator of the ipv6 address.

The IETF's position is approximately:

- an ip address consists of a topology locator and a network identifier. 
This definition does not acknowledge that persistent identifiers managed 
by other organisations are a legitimate part of the justification for 
bit space.

> To continue the metaphor, the only reason for jumping down this Rabbit 
> Hole seems to be a "Mad Hatter's Tea Party" where you have a big empty 
> "table" that is the current address space and with a group down one end 
> of the table shouting "no room".

If you look at this from the other point of view, if the IETF opens up 
ipv6 address space to allow third party persistent identifiers to become 
part of how you can justify bit space in an addressing allocation, where 
does that end?  Other than in exhaustion of any addressing scheme that 
the ietf could ever devise?

I hope you can appreciate that this isn't a mad hatter's tea party 
situation, but a consequence of a long-term decision made by rational 
actors who had the benefit of hindsight when making that choice.

Nick