IP addresses for the RIPE NCC

Hi,

On Thu, May 09, 2002 at 11:38:52AM +0200, Pim van Pelt wrote:
> | What is "the 6bone" anyway?
> I find it strange that somebody who is at ripe meetings presenting
> routing table information (and brokenness) never took the time to
> actually find out what 'these weird 3ffe' addresses are!

That was ironic - I know what "6bone space" is (look it up in my
slides ;-), and we started out with 5f* and later 3ffe space (from
UUnet)) - but as a matter of fact, everybody means different things 
when speaking about "6bone".  So the term is not *that* clear.

When talking about "routing policies in the 6bone", one could argue
that the RFC was written with the 3FFE test addresses in mind, but one
could argue as well that "it logically extends to production IPv6 
networks".  Which it might or might not, depending on consensus among
those that do try to run production IPv6...

[..]
> It grew, policy was made, people joined the 6bone to test on ISP rollout
> and such things. Due to the costs involved with LIR allocation (either
> pay ARIN, or pay an engineer to fight with RIPE for 4 months), lots of
> people stuck to 6bone space.

Hmmm.  My application to RIPE took me about 2-3 hours of work (and two
weeks of waiting), and half of the work was due to the fact that the form
still had some rough edges.  So "4 months" is definitely not fair to the
RIPE people.

[..]
> Another strange situation is that because nobody had a decent shared
> medium to create native IPv6 peerings in the old days, people would
> erect tunnels to just about everywhere. For example, an Amsterdam based
> company would peer over a tunnel to someone in California and in New
> York. Because the AS path lengths are almost always NOT an indication
> on how the traffic flows, traffic simply bounces around everywhere and
> not taking the optimal routes. This should be avoided of course in the
> production network (which still tunnels quite a bit, of course).

Which is why I'm currently working (with some others) on a BCP proposal
for "how to do BGP in the face of many tunnels so that other peers
can see that this prefix with the nice-and-short path isn't as good
as it looks like".  Will be presented "soon".

Gert Doering
        -- NetMaster
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