"David R. Conrad" wrote:
Daniel,
Those who fail to learn from history...
Very true. How many prefixes are in the swamp?
Actually, the lesson I was thinking of was the number of people who
built networks using Sun Microsystems' prefix, since that's what was in
the documentation. How many folks spent time remapping address spaces to
IANA assigned space or RFC 1918 space later? Picking your own prefixes
is a sure way to ENSURE you'll never talk to other sites. Even if you
use a NAT to get outside, you'll find it rather difficult to talk to
whatever site legitimately has the IP address block you randomly picked.
What'd be better is for SOME organization, perhaps IANA, setting up one
provider-sized block of addresses for early adopters to USE.
Unless you are purposely trying to create a new (potentially *much*
larger) swamp, causing v6 to run into the _exact same_ routability
issues that exist with v4, setting aside a block for "early adopters"
would seem to be a move in exactly the wrong direction.
If upstreams aren't going to provide space, then a VIRTUAL upstream
should be created.
As Brian said, get address space from your upstream provider. If your
provider doesn't support v6, find another. If you can't find another
then get used to and deal with the fact that you will have to renumber.
Everyone will expect to renumber somewhere along the line. That's not
the issue. Having REAL, INTEROPERABLE addresses is the issue. You think
MediaOne is in a rush to offer IPv6 on the cable modem plant? They
haven't figured out how to handle what they've got, and don't know how
to do multicast, why would they get to IPv6?
Here's where the general wisdom that we should all shift to IPv6 meets
the reality that SOMEONE has to ante up and provide a way for folks to
start really working with the protocol, with REAL and routable
addresses.
Routability is defined by service providers, not TLA allocation
registries. The allocation registries merely define uniqueness,
something that does not matter if you are not connecting to the
Internet.
OK. Here's what I'm proposing. For all the sites in the world who'd LIKE
to be able to have an upstream to provide IPv6, but for whom such
doesn't exist, and probably won't for a long time, some one or few
organizations should look into buying a block of IPv6 space, setting up
a few routers which can handle lots of tunnels, and build a virtual IPv6
upstream. Yes, they can even charge money for this and if it's not
outrageously expensive, folks might even find it useful.
The key factors required are that the users have a way to get real
addresses allocated properly, and that it be possible to successfully
talk to any other IPv6 host that's connected to ANY provider which has
begun IPv6 deployment.
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Daniel Senie dts(_at_)senie(_dot_)com
Amaranth Networks Inc. http://www.amaranth.com