Bill, [ Apologies for the following rant... ] On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 12:38:50PM +0000, bmanning@vacation.karoshi.com wrote:
On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 12:18:52PM -0000, michael.dillon@bt.com wrote:
Many entities will have no use for the /56 you're planning on giving them.
In general, I agree with those who oppose this proposal. But another problem with the proposal is that it will lead many organizations to design their IPv6 network based on a /56 rather than a /48 which is more normal. Organizations really should think about how they structure their IPv6 network and only squeeze it into a /56 if they need to.
"normal" is a very odd way to couch this argument. why not /35 & /32, or the /56 & /64...
pragmatically, a network operator would be working in the /88 to /110 space. the massive waste in delegated and unused/unusable space is almost entirely the result of protocol designers who had little or no network operational experience.
IPv6 - 96 more bits, No Magic.
I was a fly on the wall in one of the early discussions where /48 was presented as a recommendation (just when I was starting with this Internet stuff, done in a small circle of interested folks). One assertion was that "allocations must be on byte boundaries" - the reason given was hardware optimization. I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now. But the overriding idea was that it *must* be the same size for everyone, otherwise someone might charge more for a larger block, or simply not offer the same size. So people might end up either with a smaller block than they need, or migrate from a larger to a smaller network and not want to renumber. Which means they might use NAT. So, as far as I can tell, the "one size fits all" idea is an attempt to further the IETF anti-NAT jihad, and has nothing to do with anyone's operational needs. :-( -- Shane