Hi Jordi, On 31 May 2007, at 11:12am, JORDI PALET MARTINEZ wrote: [...]
It would be helpful to people considering requesting a PI IPv6 prefix and the RIPE NCC if the policy gave a clear statement of what is required.
Not sure if that's so easy, and I'm not really sure is really needed. Do you have any idea ? We could also apply that "idea", may be, to the standard IPv6 allocation policy.
It will be good to understand if the staff is having problems there, or it is just enough the way they are doing and it may be applied then here the same.
One of the three principles guiding the policy process is that "it is transparent. All discussions and results are documented and freely available to all."[1] If the criteria for a decision are too difficult to define in the policy text then there's something wrong somewhere.
I think in some situations, the staff needs to have some flexibility. Is not a matter of wrong policy, is a matter of avoiding a complex one with too many cases, because every ISP may be one, and we have already guidelines such as RFC3177 and utilization, which the staff, I guess, uses to understand if the right prefix is a /32 or a /30 or whatever. May be having a reference to that is enough ?
I agree that flexibility is good and a complex policy will not work for all cases. Nonetheless, without a statement of what the policy is both the registry staff and the potential requesters are in the dark and that's not really fair to either of them. The policy needs to define some basis for determining the length of a PI prefix so that everyone knows what the policy actually is. The first attempt might not be the right answer but that's not a problem as we know that the IPv6 policy is an interim policy and it will be reviewed in the future when we have more experience in the administration of IPv6.
Also, the proposed text does not define a maximum size for an IPv6 PI assignment. When this is combined with a lack of definition for the qualification requirements it seems that a /32 of IPv6 PI could be assigned. Is that intended?
Not at all, it is not intended to assign a /32. However, if the case justify it, we aren't closing the door. I really think it is difficult to find a case that could justify that, in fact probably is very difficult to justify cases that justify something shorter than /44, but you never know how big can be a data center or content provider, for example.
I think it's difficult to define a case justifying it, too. But that doesn't mean that unreasonable requests won't be made. And if you don't have a clearly defined set of criteria you make things needlessly difficult for both the requesters and the registry.
Same as above, if the utilization based on RFC3177 recommendations is a good parameter, then the criteria can be defined in a simple way that accommodate all the cases while hostmasters have a good point to check.
I think we need something a little better defined than the text in RFC 3177. It says: - Very large subscribers could receive a /47 or slightly shorter prefix, or multiple /48's. Unfortunately, "very large" isn't quantifiable and changes according to your perspective. I'm not sure what the appropriate utilisation requirements should be. I do know that this proposal isn't intended for ISPs that need address space as they can get at least a /32 allocation. Maybe we should be asking for input from people that have already deployed IPv6 on large enterprise networks, at university campuses and so on to describe their experiences and help us work out a quantifiable utilisation requirement for receiving more than a /48. Regards, -- Leo Vegoda IANA Numbers Liaison