Daniel, On Tue, 2011-02-15 at 20:41 +0100, Daniel Roesen wrote:
We're allowing PIv6 for "multihomed" (whatever that means really) sites. Those could "just simply" use PA space from any ISP they connect to. Why do we make Internet multihoming special compared to Internet-plus-others? With the "multiple IPs per device" argument there cannot be PIv6. I thought we've left that behind by now.
So I was wondering "why do we allow PI for IPv6 for multihoming?", and realized "that's how we do things in IPv4". AIUI people don't consider it reasonable to get one ISP to carry routes from another on behalf of their customers. Fair enough. ---- In this IPv6 PI discussion people say it is too expensive to be an LIR. This strikes me as weird... even cheap network gear costs way more than the LIR fee, and certainly the personnel costs are many times that, even in countries where technical folks are poorly paid. But anyway.... On the other side we hear the concerns about unchecked routing table growth. This has been addressed many times; it is usually presented as a basic "tragedy of the commons", where the costs of the increased size are borne by everyone but the benefits go to each network which advertises any given route. This position is directly refuted by Geoff Huston who claims that memory is cheap, what we really need to care about is update frequency, which is not actually closely related to the total number of routes today but is more related to a number of problematic AS (see chart at end): http://bgpupdates.potaroo.net/instability/bgpupd.html Further, in IPv6 we're much less likely to have multiple routes per organization (although of course as companies merge and diversify this won't be 100% true). Plus we have the advantage that as IPv4 gets more scarce, it is likely that the number of addresses per advertisement will get smaller, so the IPv6 will be able to use whatever technological means is used to keep IPv4 creaking along. So... it may be there is no routing reason to hold back on PI blocks. ---- Is there another reason to want to limit PI assignments? There may be. Certainly the folks over in abuse-land think we should have super strict controls over all addresses, and revoke them at the first hint of naughtiness. Or there may be administrative reasons - an entirely different kind of infrastructure is needed to manage hundreds of thousands of low-fee (well, NO fee now) PI-holders than thousands of high-fee LIRs. I don't know. So... do you think we should simply remove all restrictions for IPv6 PI and issue space if someone wants it, period? If not, what possible restriction would there be? ---- Finally, I think what bothers me about PI in general though is that once the initial assignment is made... that's it. At least with RIPE 452 we have *some* contractual relationship with the PI holder, but that's about it. I guess the "LIR middleman" model comes from the mists of time, long ago in history. It certainly reduces the burden on the RIPE NCC, but it never really struck me as sensible. After all, isn't the whole point of PI space that you don't want to have to depend on an LIR? -- Shane