New Document available: RIPE-233

Havard,

> Havard Eidnes wrote:
> I have to ask a rhetorical question here, what is a "block" in
> this context?
> Is it a single routing announcement?  Surely, it cannot be,
> because the different root name servers are placed at different
> points in the topology.

The very purpose of placing them at different points is to have
redundancy; so yes, for the same reason they must have different blocks.


> I'll claim that the actual numeric sequence (or non-sequence) of
> the IPv6 address blocks allocated to the root name servers do not
> matter; the identity of the blocks will be well-known anyway, so
> there is no robustness gain to be had from picking "obscure" or
> "scattered" numbers.

There is an advantage to scattered numbers, IMHO. Since they are
scattered, nobody will try to aggregate them and suppress the specific
announcements. Martian configs do happen; not often but they do.


> I do however agree with those which have said that a root name server
> should not have its address changed when it moves between RIR regions;
> the whole point of this "special" assignment to the root name servers
> is to avoid *any* renumbering because the DNS bootstrap data is
> (currently) distributed in a static configuration file.

There are (at least) two ways to achieve this:
1. Two-space systems (the servers would have a unique identifier and
multiple changeable locators).
2. "special assignement" otherwise called PI.

I think the RIRs have acted responsibly so far in not showing the bad
example of allocating themselves a PI block. A short-term fix to this
would be a two-space system where the locator initially assigned could
be transformed into the identifier later.

Michel.