At the risk of having an Internet AD accuse me of SPAMming or trolling...
"David R. Conrad" <David(_dot_)Conrad(_at_)nominum(_dot_)com> writes:
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
Here's what I am lost with.
I thought that when one connects to an IPv6 provider,
one's border router automatically acquires a range of
addresses from that provider, which it then parcels out to
other internal routers and/or hosts.
That is, _number acquisition_ is fully automatic.
Moreover, as noted in [SELECT] IPv6 hosts and routers can
have multiple addresses per interface, thus allowing any
new prefix to coexist with the old one. The trick is
to make sure that the (source,destination) tuple chosen
for a conversation is selected optimally.
It was asserted to me very vigorously in Pittsburgh that
the border router could instruct "inside" hosts & routers
to deprecate or prefer addresses, depending on topology,
effectively as a tool to control routing policy decisions
made on end systems.
Ignoring the problems of an explosive number of
per-interface addresses, highly complicated [SELECT]
policies, the difficulty of helping hosts optimize their
routing decisions, and having sessions survive the
disappearance of direct connectivity to a v6 upstream, or
having subnets deal with dynamicism, this at first glance
seems to make it very simple to start testing out site v6
connectivity. "One just connects to an upstream".
From time to time I run into the "you will have to
renumber" comment (it's not just you David), and wonder
about the validity of that, or whether my understanding of
how it's supposed to work is at variance with how it
really does (or will). I get flavours of that uncertainty
too from various comments about acquiring addresses here
and there, even from people who are v6-informed. (Indeed,
that is at the root of my question about, "who cares if
the addresses used by unconnected persons are random, or
about the renumbering burden when the connect?")
If the _acquisition_ of a range of IPv6 prefixes _ALWAYS_
matches the real-or-virtual topology, and the
_acuqisition_ is automatic and non-disruptive, then IPv6
has done something very different from IPv4. In fact, the
trade off here is fewer globally visible prefixes
introduced in support of additional inter-entity
connectivity for some scaling issues concerning the
_removal_ of connectivity and more importantly the rate of
change of connectivity between subnets and their
topological parents.
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.
... and something which should not hurt you when you
connect to the v6 Internet for the first time.
Sean.