In a message written on Mon, Nov 08, 2004 at 10:46:48PM +0100, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
Well, if they can manage to interconnect all those networks a tiny amount of coordination isn't too much to ask for. Also, with the proper hashing this shouldn't be much of a problem even without coordination. Yes, no coordination and bad hashing won't work, but guess what: don't do that.
It is too much to ask for, because you assume it's one company day one. What happens when AOL and Time Warner merge? There was no chance of coordination before that. Or how about Cisco? They buy what, 100-200 companies a year? My problem is that even with good hashing it doesn't take long for there to be a collision. And once there is a single collision the whole system is suspect. It's the promise of "if you do this extra work you'll never have to renumber" without delivering.
Your argument is that people are going to be stupid so we should skip ahead and give them the result of their stupidity. Now obviously there will be people who do it the stupid way, but at least unique site locals allow the people who don't do it the stupid way certain benefits. I don't see how this can ever be a bad thing.
No, my argument is that it only takes a few stupid people to make this entire system not work at all. Since the draft seems to promise it will work it is misleading people. Indeed, I have "proof" the IPv6 crowd realizes this won't work at all, and it's the other draft. If this draft had a chance of working then there would be no need to create a central registry to guarantee unique addresses. The very existence of that draft shows some people realize this method will not work.
- It is not good engineering to give something away for free with no method of recovery, even if that resource is plentiful.
So we should play telco and sell a service that is so cheap that the users are basically only paying for the billing? (= metered local calls)
No. My argument is not about money. In this system anyone can get something for free anytime they want. "Lose" your address block? Make it unusable for some purpose (eg, blacklisted)? Just want a second (third, fourth, millionth) block, just go get it. Get a block, then die? Well, no one else can ever use your personal block. If you get a personal block, then die, no one else can ever reuse that block. Every failed dot-com, that's address space we'll never be able to use again. I realize there is a lot of space, but this proposal really seems to ask the question "how fast can we waste space if we try", which is very dangerous in my opinion.
That's nice. But it simply can't be done for any significant number of PI prefixes. That's why we're going through so much trouble to create a multihoming mechanism that doesn't kill the routing system.
Bah, hand-waving that makes no sense. There are 33,000 allocated ASN's today. Give each one a PI prefix (however they might get it). That's 33,000 routes. Given my routers are fine with 140,000 now, and are being tested in labs to well over 1 million and I fail to see the issue. Let's assume they all have two PI prefixes for load balancing, ok, we're at 66,000, still no problem. More to the point, if most network admins have the choice of running a full overlay network and updating software on every end host to be more complex to make it understand the overlay networks or puting a few more prefixes in the routing table and upgrading your router I bet they will all pick the latter. The problem is not routing PI blocks for all the existing ISP and even companies. The problem is routing blocks for individuals. If ISP's fall to pressure to route these prefixes between themselves (after all, they are globally unique, so what's the harm?) and then you inject individual's prefixes into the table you now have a melt down. As with most system failures it takes multiple steps. However, I think these steps are likely. ISP's in Asia have complained forever that they don't get a fair share of the space. Well, here they can take, take, take and use as much as they need. ISP's in Africa have complained space costs too much (ARIN's fees, though low by US standards are several years sallary in some countries), and want a way around it. If those groups used this space even only internally at first between each other (after all, the purpose is to allow routing between organizations, just not to the global internet) eventually there will be great pressure to add them to the global table. It will be phrased as "UUNet won't accept prefixes from all of Asia" or similar. Then we end up having to accept them with none of the controls the RIR system puts in place for setting policy or anything else. Prefixes will instead be randomly assigned worldwide out of a single /7. Distilled down the proposal makes no sense. 1 You can have globally unique addresses. 2 You can use them between organizations. a If your organization is an ISP, please don't allow them on the "Internet". -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/ Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org