From: Mark Smith nanog@85d5b20a518b8f6864949bd940457dc124746ddc.nosense.org
Why can't IPv6 node addressing be as easy to understand and work with as Ethernet addresses? They were designed in the early 1980s*. 28 years or so years later, it's time for layer 3 addressing to catch up.
Becase Ethernet addresses are only locally significant, are not manually assigned in the vast majority of cases, and changing a MAC by replacing a NIC has no bearing on the configuration of a { server | router ACL | etc }. Layer 3 addressing is globally significant, and the case we're discussing is addresses which are human-assigned rather than automatically configured. Link-local autoconfiguration in IPv6 works like a champ, and behaves pretty much the way I would want it to. Global addressing approaches, on the other hand, are highly optimized in directions which make them less flexible or have surprising consequences (hence this thread). David Barak Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise: http://www.listentothefranchise.com