ietf
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: IPv6 networking: Bad news for small biz

2012-04-05 22:47:16

On Apr 4, 2012, at 12:39 AM, Greg Daley wrote:

Renumbering in small organizations _is_ a big deal, especially when they 
don't have in-house skills to manage systems.

I tried to look at that in RFC 4192. The question isn't whether it's a pain or 
not; it's what makes it painful. If building and deploying a protocol that will 
automagically renumber devices in a network will solve that, let's spruce up 
RFC 2894 and make it happen.

In the discussions we had, it turned out to be that any automated service 
solved the easy 99% of the problem, whether it's done using DHCP, and fancy 
protocol, or a database back end. The real issues in renumbering aren't so much 
the process of distributing prefixes (IPv6 networks, route maps, ACLs, and so 
on) as much as dealing with broken software that makes silly assumptions about 
addresses - that an address that is meaningful to me is meaningful to you, that 
addresses once assigned never change, that a host or service has exactly one 
address, that given that knowledge one doesn't need to worry about names, and 
so on. Unfortunately, when one actively goes out of one's way to bypass 
anything that would allow us to automate the procedure, automated procedures 
can't help us.

I agree that renumbering is a pain. I'm not certain what we could do in the 
protocol that fixes "stupid".

That said, I'll put in a plug for RFC 6296, or for ILNP. ILNP would be a 
superior solution if I thought I could change TCP and UDP; I think RFC 6296 is 
a pragmatic step that is actually deployable (and deployed).