Subject: Re: AAAA/A6 thing

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 01 May 2001 11:33:21 +0900

>Right or wrong.  Paul's comment is valid.  A6 will be deployed at least on
>BIND (well it is now actually) and on Microsofts DNS is my read.  
>
>As one of the people to fund BIND future development and with others we
>believe it should not be implemented for greater than 3 levels of
>hierarchy till more testing and experimentation is done. But A6 will be
>shipped on the street and its a done deal.
>
>Do I like A6 no.
>Do I think a better solution exists yes.
>But do I advocate deployment of A6 yes.
>Why because its time to move forward.
>
>I also thought continuing private address space was a bad idea in v6. I
>still do.  KNow what I hope to help build that feature in our products.

	what I am worrying is that A6 is contributing negatively to the
	deployment of IPv6, due to less availability in code.  it may have a
	positive impact if it gets deployed worldwide (less signing cost on
	renumber), but i guess the negative impact (to deployment) is bigger
	than the benefits from less signing cost.
	today there's no commercial/free software OS (i know of) that ships
	with A6-chasing resolver.  not sure they will ever migrate to BIND9
	resolvers, many of them are still stuck with BIND4 resolver (with
	security fixes, of course) because of binary backward compatibility
	issues and local changes they have made.

	maybe this feeling is because I'm from very IPv6-deployment-aggressive
	region.  i really would like to see IPv6 NS records to be available
	everywhere, including root, and A6 is one of the obstacles for IPv6
	NS record deployment.

	anyway, i'll shut up and write up a draft.

itojun
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---

From: Bill Manning <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 23:40:42 -0700 (PDT)

% >What will not get done here is to get users to not embed addresses in
% >configs and there is no incentive for vendors to prevent them from doing
% >it.
% 
% 	it is very hard to ensure it, and there are wacky timing constraints
% 	(specifically interactions with DNS cache TTL).
% 
% itojun

	With RA/ND running & multiple egress paths, which IP address
	will the DNS server have that folks need to talk to?

-- 
--bill

---

From: Dan Lanciani <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 May 2001 16:08:01 -0400 (EDT)

Robert Elz <[email-masked]> wrote:

|  | It's relevant unless you eliminate 6to4 and any other scheme that generates
|  | portable v6 address space from v4 space.
|
|Yes, that's a good point.   And one I see has been discussed a bit in
|the past 24hours ...
|
|But even granted that that continues to exist, and can't be shut down,
|it still only creates a numbering space of 2^32 entries (absolute
|maximum - and since much of that space is already allocated in larger
|chunks, actually lots smaller than that).

I never argued that it was a problem, only that there is an interaction
between portable v4 space and portable v6 space, contrary to what you had
stated.

|It certainly isn't beyond
|possible that bigger hardware can sometime not too far away manage routing
|to a flat space that big

As I mentioned, the hardware caught up a long time ago.  Think old 64MB palmtop.

|So the 6to4 space doesn't bother me all that much - even if those with
|permanent IPv4 space want to keep on using it forever.  As a problem
|space, it is bounded, and while that might be a large number, it is a drop
|in the bucket of the overall IPv6 space.   It is the latter that needs
|to be controlled.

Sigh.  Back to controlling the address space rather than even thinking about
solving the problem.

|  | |For most sites renumbering internally is already cheap -
|  | You must be very lucky; I have yet to encounter such a site.
|
|My home is one.   It has more systems than your average house I
|suspect (though nothing like as many as some people I know).   But
|renumbering it is real real easy.   Of course that probably wasn't
|what you were thinking of as a "site" - but it certainly counts, and
|there are millions of such sites.

Your home is obviously very modern and well managed.  All the sites I have
encountered are more like my own home which is an incredible pain to renumber.
Changing the address of the Imagen involves a dodgy configurator disk that
usually has to be reconstituted from an image.  The sun3's and 4's require a
very specific cleaning of YP bindings (that I always forget how to do in the
times between renumbering) else they come up in a nasty hung state.  The unix
vaxes aren't bad, but I can't even remember how to set Multinet's address on the
VMS machine.  Then there are all the PCs, most of which multi-boot to several
operating systems each with several tcp/ip products installed.  Naturally, my
own tcp/ip products are easy enough to reconfigure, but some of the others have
their IP address in way too many places.  Not that I think my home is typical
either, but it resembles most sites I've dealt with.

|I deleted all the stuff about ISPs and their practices.

You also deleted all the "stuff" about portable identifiers and routing table
size.  That's unfortunate, since the point was to contrast the benefits of a
solution like portable identifiers with those of a partial/non solution like A6.

|I'm not going
|to argue about random other people's motives.   I would just point out that
|if all those ISPs are charging too much, and doing so by charging for the
|wrong things, you have a perfect business opportunity in front of you.
|You can offer a service to people which is closer to what they want (charging
|for the right things) which should make you popular - and you can charge
|(overall) less than the others do - so there should be no disincentive to
|anyone choosing your service.   You could do a public good, and make a lot
|of money at the same time.   And given that, you should have no particular
|difficulty getting investors (large profits doing public good are rather an
|attractive idea...).   Of course, this presumes you're right about the
|current set of ISPs and their practices.

Leaving out only the last step, ``but if you are right then someone else
would already have done this, so you must be wrong.''  It's a good try at proof
by contradiction, but the argument is flawed.  First and foremost, _an_ ISP
can't offer its customers portable address space (or portable identifiers).
These are concepts which by their very definitions have to be supported by the
whole community of ISPs, and that in turn requires that they be part of the
architecture.

Even for non-portability aspects, an ISP cannot operate in a vacuum.  It is
constrained by peering agreements with other ISPs and by address allocation
policy from (ultimately) ARIN.  The current models are very well engrained
under IPv4 and attempting to run contrary to them is a non-trivial exercise
(requiring one to deal with edicts of the month like, ``if you assign any
static address to a dialup user you can't have any more address space ever'').
The transition to IPv6 offered an opportunity to open the market to a variety
of models.  Some ISPs could have continued to operate much as they do with v4
while others could have done as you suggest above, all without stepping on each
others' toes at a technical level.  Free market competition could have sorted
out the results.  None of this can happen if IPv6 imposes exactly the same
constraints as (current) IPv4.

				Dan Lanciani
				[email-masked]