Subject: [Idr] BGP in an IPv6-only environment

From: "Walt Lazear" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 20 May 2006 15:56:33 -0400

I was looking at RFC 2283 (Multiprotocol Extensions for BGP-4) and in
the overview, it mentions that any BGP speaker has to have an IPv4
address (to create the BGP Identifier attribute).  This does not bode
well for the future of IPv6, to which I am sensitized by some ongoing
Government work.  

Talking to some who have created IPv6-only environments, it seems that
they are only dealing with single subnets or very simple topologies, so
BGP has not been an issue.  I also looked back in the IDR archives for a
rationale, but could not find such a discussion recently.

So, what is someone to do who wants to create an IPv6-only environment?
Is it up to those defining (the future) version BGP-5 to create BGP
identifiers longer than 32 bits or AS numbers longer than 16 bits (while
we're at it), to accommodate the incredibly larger world of IPv6 (with
128-bit addresses)?  Or was it a compromise in RFC 2283 to ignore the
IPv6-only world (assuming it won't really happen on operational networks
for decades) and therefore retain backward compatibility?  That's
valuable in the short term, but not forever.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

Walt Lazear

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From: Enke Chen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 20 May 2006 13:28:58 -0700

Hi, Walt:

Please take a look at these documents:

   draft-ietf-idr-bgp-identifier-07.txt

   draft-ietf-idr-as4bytes-12.txt

-- Enke

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From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 20 May 2006 15:28:44 -0700

I believe that the authors of RFC 2283 were taking the IETF  
recommendation wrt IPv6 deployment seriously: initially, don't deploy  
IPv6-only, but rather deploy dual stack. The network of which you  
speak will have to figure out how to support IPv4 equipment, if for  
no other reason because not all equipment will be upgraded  
simultaneously. It is in that network's best interest, I believe, to  
go dual stack initially and only switch to IPv6-only when the  
equipment is supports has all been upgraded to also support IPv6.

That said, your point that BGP needs to be able to operate in an IPv6- 
only environment is valid. I believe that a solution may be to have  
it associate router IDs with addresses, and use router ids in these  
three places. Not that I wouldn't like to replace BGP with something  
new, but I don't see that happening in the near term.