how 200 /48's fails the job [Re: [address-policy-wg] Policy proposal: #gamma IPv6 Initial Allocation Criteria]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Iljitsch van Beijnum" <iljitsch at muada.com>

>Nobody can transport an IP packet faster than 300000 km/s (well, more like 
>200000 km/s in practice) no matter how much money they have.

You can't proof I can, so telling me what I can and can not based on todays 
technology isn't too clever.
(sidenote: the speed of light is not relevant to how fast you can transport 
IP packets)
It breaks down to time and money and how much you want to spend of it.

>> I don't see an economical reason for why normal network providers 
>> shouldn't be able to handle 500,000 IPv6 routes.

>It's too expensive. Don't forget that a typical router takes a bunch of 
>full feeds (or equivalent in partial feeds) from different peers, so 0.5M 
>routes probably means your router needs to support 2 - 5 M BGP routes. And 
>of course you need a FIB that's large enough and can be searched fast 
>enough.

If you think it is too expensive, then I think I just made my point? :)


> With that in mind, isn't this what you are looking for: A natural way to 
> limit the amount of multihomed autonomous systems/amount of prefixes 
> without enforcing unreasonable policies?

>That's why I proposed "provider-internal aggregation based on geography" 
>but this fell on deaf ears. Go for the quick fix PI block and let someone 
>else clean up the mess seems to be the prevailing attitude.

I guess it was either a messy idea or the internet isn't ready for it yet.
(I did hear your speech but never made up my mind about it so I can't tell)


>A fixed prefix length is very useful because that way you only have to 
>renumber the top 48 bits when you switch ISPs.

And you still don't see why I think it's silly?

>This makes life much easier.

Well. Easier than what?
The number 48 is arbitrary. Renumbering will be just as easy with any number 
between 0 and 127 as long as the new prefix is equal or larger to the 
previous. With dhcp it doesn't matter.
You can allocate a 48 on the paper for all I care, but you can't enforce 
customers of a LIR on how their network should look. Not even LIRs (usually) 
do that.
I am aware of rfc3177 saying "a company with several nets gets a /48 and 
allocate /64s for each of their subnets". But let's not mix the word 
recommendation with must. Why we allocate a /124 on our lan instead of /64 
is not of anyones concern but us and therefore the enforced 48 number is 
unreasonable. Since the 48 number is in generally only for looking good on 
the allocation paper, then whats the point of it?
I know the whole point with IPv6 is to waste as many IPv6 addresses as 
possible, but for a network using /124s subnets per lan then a /48 prefix is 
pretty much 100% waste. I am sure some of the old folks said something 
similar back in 1983 with IPv4. IPv6 _will_ run out of addresses. No need to 
argue on that.

A more specific problem with this allocation policy:
You would expect that if a /64 is the standard allocation size of a lan, 
then we can all start filtering on /64s instead of /128s if we want to do 
per-ipv6 filtering, right?
Cause I am sure we can all agree on that we still want per-ip filtering, 
right?
What do we do with the /128 assignments recommended by rfc3177 on lans with 
a single device then?



Cheers,

Joergen Hovland ENK