Joe Greco wrote:
One of the goals of providing larger address spaces was to reduce (and hopefully eliminate) the need to burn forwarding table entries where doing so isn't strictly necessary. When we forget this, it leads us to the same sorts of disasters that we currently have in v4.
And if you are encouraging /48 handouts, /32 isnt large enough to prevent that on the global level.
I don't know that I'm *en*couraging /48 handouts, but on the other hand, I'm not sure I'm *dis*couraging it either. On one hand, there's a reasonable argument to be made that the average home user does not currently have enough devices to fill more than a /124's worth of space. But. You have RFC3041 and similar techniques, stateless autoconfig, and a variety of other general things that make it really awful for the default ethernet network size to be something besides a /64. Further, it seems clear from most discussions I've had, that people really do want or need the ability to have multiple networks, for a variety of practical reasons. Many of these have to do with keeping different zones firewalled in particular ways, So, really, I think the question is, how many unique firewalling policies is a household likely to have, and then, maybe how many other neighbors/friends/etc are also freeloading on that connection, each with the same needs? A /56 allows up to 256 networks. For today, that's pretty clearly all that I can reasonably imagine even a sophisticated home network along with several neighbors needing. Probably even within the next ten years. At some point, however, it is possible that a /48 would be a better choice. I would definitely prefer to see a /56, or maybe a /48, handed out today. If we get into the practice of handing out /64's, it is just going to encourage bad hacky design compromises and CPE/SOHO gear kludges in the future? ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.