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Re: draft-ietf-nat-protocol-complications-02.txt

2000-04-26 19:30:03
At 2:42 PM -0700 4/26/00, David R. Conrad wrote:
Perhaps it is obvious to you, however it has been implied that one of the
advantages of v6 is that it has a limited number of TLAs which would be found
the the DFZ of the v6 Internet.

The truth is subtly different than what what was implied or thought to be
implied, as I have tried to explain (with limited success, obviously), but
that's beside the point of your message:

My point was that this is not an advantage of v6 but rather an advantage
of starting fresh and that the limitations on TLAs is not an artifact of
the v6 protocol, but rather an administrative limit established by policy

Yes, that's right.  If I understand correctly, you are upset by the
imprecise shorthand of saying "this is an advantage of IPv6 over IPv4"
and would prefer that we were careful always to say "this is an advantage
of the IPv6 addressing plan over the addressing plan of the existing IPv4
Internet, an advantage of starting fresh".  Fair enough.

Or are you asking us not to mention it at all, perhaps because there is
a plan to undertake a major renumbering of the IPv4 Internet so that
there will be a similarly small limit on the number of globally-advertised
IPv4 prefixes required to ensure reachability of all IPv4 customers?

-- something quite malleable over time (perhaps more so
now given the creation of ICANN).

In what way do you think the creation of ICANN might have made it easy or
easier to impose address changes on IPv4 customers?

IPv4 could in theory have 2^32 TLAs and IPv6 could in theory have
2^128 TLAs.  Are you saying that 2^32 TLAs would be OK?

No more than I would assume you'd say 2^128 TLAs would be OK.

So you agree there is a need to limit the number of TLAs to a number less
than that permitted by the address size, even for IPv4.  The longer address
of IPv6 does not introduce a new problem in this regard, contrary to what
you seemed to imply -- whatever method or policy you would use to limit
the number of TLAs in IPv4 could just as well be used in IPv6.  Or do you,
perhaps, think we really ought to be moving to a version of IP with 16-bit
addresses, to avoid the risk of creating too many TLAs?  :-)

Steve



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