Re: [v6ops] ULA draft revision #2 Regarding isolated networks

[Owen DeLong <[e-mail]>]

On May 28, 2014, at 2:21 AM, Tore Anderson <[e-mail]> wrote:

> * Doug Barton
> 
>> We have a substantial number of medium-sized enterprises which share the 
>> following characteristics:
>> 
>> 1. They are large enough to have some internal resources that need 
>> addressing (printers, file servers, maybe a web site or two)
>> 
>> 2. They are small enough that PI space and their own ASN are not practical
> 
> You don’t need an ASN to use PI space.

Except possibly in the APNIC region due to previously discussed very high fees,
I’m not sure why you think PI space is not practical for small organizations. I’ve
set up multi homed connections for a number of small businesses, including even
some one-man operations with gross revenues under US $250,000 annually.

> 
>> 3. Some of them want to have multiple service providers, either for 
>> failover or traffic shaping
>> 

Which makes an ASN and a PI prefix the easiest tactic possible.
(Even easier than NAT, really.)

>> 4. They don't want to have to renumber all of their internal resources 
>> when they change providers
>> 
>> What's your solution for them?
> 
> We have a few customers in the same situation. So we obtained a PI
> prefix for them, which costs next to nothing in the RIPE region at
> least, and advertise the prefix on their behalf (and in the cases where
> there's a second upstream, the second upstream does the same). Works
> perfectly well, and is much less complex than anything solution
> involving ULA, NAT, multiple prefixes on the hosts, or whatever. The
> customer just gets a bunch of addresses he can use in perpetuity.

Exactly, but it does have the drawback of black holing traffic in certain
failure modes. If you really want to avoid an ASN (not sure why), it is
possible to do this using a private ASN that is stripped off by the
upstream provider(s), but using a real ASN is much simpler.

Owen