Re: I-D Action: draft-carpenter-6man-lap-00.txt

On Fri, 15 Jun 2018 01:56 Fernando Gont <fgont@si6networks.com> wrote:

> On 06/13/2018 07:31 PM, David Farmer wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 10:39 AM, Nick Hilliard <nick@foobar.org
> > <mailto:nick@foobar.org>> wrote:
> >
> >     Lorenzo Colitti wrote on 13/06/2018 16:38:
> >
> >         I doubt it. The difference between "pretty much all" and "all"
> >         is unicast addresses that start with binary 000, which aren't
> >         routable on the Internet.
> >
> >
> >     my /127 subnets disagree.
> >
> >     Nick
> >
> >
> > Nick, while I agree with you, you are basically making Lorenzo's point,
> > this just degrades into a rehash of RFC4291-bis.>
> > So, would someone from Lorenzo's camp please propose language that
> > rationalizes RFC6164 with the 64-bit IIDs of RFC4291.
>
> Rationale: Folks realized that there are reasons for which you might do
> LAP != 64. -- which is not a surprise, since the rationale for the
> specific "64" value is simply "historical reasons".
>

And proven simplicity, proven by other protocols developed in the 1980s,
and deployed in the 1990s.

IPv4 was a terrible protocol to understand and deploy compared to IPX and
AppleTalk. They just worked. (My first protocol was IPX, when leaning IPv4
the fundamental question I wondered was "Why is this so hard and
complicated?" Then I taught it. That took 5 attempts before I fully felt
happy with how I'd taught and explained IPv4 addressing - and that didn't
even cover CIDR.)

For IPX, all you had to get right was give each link a unique 32 bit
network number. You set no other parameters. No complicated classes,
subnets, subnet masks, bit level maths etc. No worries about running out of
addresses on a link because the link host address space was 48 bits. Most
of the time you didn't even see IPX addresses, as they were hidden behind
service names.

The only reason that people put up with deploying IPv4 in the 1990s was
because it was the protocol needed to access the Internet. That made the
price worth paying, however it doesn't make IPv4 a superior protocol over
these later 1980s protocols, in terms of usability, supportability and
deployability.

IPv4's complexity makes sense, it was designed in the early to mid 1970s
for an experimental research project, and then had to be extended a number
of times for a use case it was never designed for - a global internetwork
connecting billions of devices.

By the 1980s, PCs and LANs had come along, and it was probably obvious that
networks were now going to become far more common. "Plug-and-play"
protocols like Ethernet, IPX and AppleTalk were the result.

Those 1980s protocols' usability, supportability and deployability levels
are the ones I expect IPv6 to meet and exceed, not IPv4's.

Regards,
Mark.

> --
> Fernando Gont
> SI6 Networks
> e-mail: fgont@si6networks.com
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