[address-policy-wg] 2014-09 New Policy Proposal (Language Clarification in “IPv6 Address Space Policy For Internet Exchange Points”)

On 23/10/2014 14:28, Marco Schmidt wrote:
> A proposed change to RIPE Document IPv6 Address Space Policy For 
> Internet Exchange Points is now available for discussion.

the tl;dr for my objection on this proposal is that it doesn't make much
sense from the IXP point of view.

The equivalent ipv4 policy notes: "This space will be used to run an IXP
peering LAN; other uses are forbidden".  That's kind-of ok for ipv4 - not
perfect by any means, but ok (as a reference anecdata point, INEX is still
using a single /24 assigned in 2004 for both peering and management,
because it was hard to justify more at the time).

For IPv6, it would be normal to assign a /64 per peering LAN, leaving 65535
other /64 subnets unused in the /48 assignment.  For better or worse, many
IXPs in the RIPE NCC service region use some of the other space in their
/48 for management purposes.

If this policy change goes through, then the RIPE NCC is mandating that
they renumber this management into other space.  The RIPE community doesn't
have the authority to mandate this for existing IXPs.

For future start-up IXPs, it often makes more sense to use a single prefix
to provide address space for both peering and management, where management
connectivity is handled by policy routing from the IXP's ASN.

Maybe it might be appropriate for the IXP to use separate prefixes at the
stage when an IXP has grown to the point that it attracts enough DDoS
traffic directed at the IXP lan to cause trouble, but not before.  Even
then, this is a decision that the IXP should make: it's not the job of the
RIPE community to tell the IXP how to manage their policy routing.

Nick