Re: A simple question

At 05:28 PM 4/19/2003, you wrote:
> IP networks not connected to the Internet have become
> vanishingly rare.
Umm, how do you know? If they're not connected, you may just not be aware 
of them. Please let's not base standards work on unquantified assumptions.
Example of usage: I use RFC 1918 space for private networks within server 
farms. There's no connection to the public network from this private 
segment. Servers connect to both public and private networks. Backups, NFS 
mounts, SNMP and SQL data flows over the private network. The isolated 
network segment keeps traffic off the public network for performance reasons.
In my experience it's common to find configurations of this sort in server 
farms. Often the setups use several levels of isolated networks, with VPN 
access for administrative users. Sometimes it's done as a 
belt-and-suspenders, providing a measure of additional protection (if you 
can't route packets, they won't come) beyond whatever protections are in 
firewall and server configurations, but more often it's for performance 
reasons.
All the world of private addressing is not NAT, regardless of how many 
times people say it is.
Now back to the IPv6 discussion.

I am saddened by the fact that Tony's simple question could not be 
addressed. Site local addressing in IPv6 is a concept which has been 
mentioned in RFC 1884, 2373 and 3513, the progression of Proposed 
Standards. This is a string of documents dating back to 1995. For eight 
years this concept was apparently considered a good thing. The discussion 
on the mailing lists makes it sound like site-local addressing is a new 
idea. I'd like to know why it's taken eight years for folks to decide it's 
bad. Is it that folks are just now implementing IPv6? Is it because the 
documents these eight years never made the concept clear, and now it 
appears too hard to implement? In all those years, has no vendor 
implemented site local? Are there any other features we should reconsider 
as long as we're ripping the documents open?
It is not unprecedented to change or remove a feature as a document 
advances through the standards track. Such changes, however, can have 
significant impact on already-implemented and deployed solutions. Such 
matters should be considered carefully in that light. Perhaps removal of 
features should receive substantially more scrutiny after publication on 
the standards track.