--- Mark Smith <random@72616e646f6d20323030342d30342d31360a.nosense.org> wrote:
Why have people, who are unhappy about /64s for IPv6, been happy enough to accept 48 bit addresses on their LANs for at least 15 years? Why aren't people complaining today about the overheads of 48 bit MAC addresses on their 1 or 10Gbps point-to-point links, when none of those bits are actually necessary to identify "the other end" ? Maybe because they have unconsciously got used to the convenience, and, if they've thought about it, realise that the byte overhead/cost of that convenience is not worth worrying about, because there are far higher costs elsewhere in the network (including administration of it) that could be reduced.
Wrong issue. What I'm unhappy about is not the size of the address - you'll notice that I didn't say "make the whole address space smaller." What I'm unhappy about is the exceedingly sparse allocation policies which mean that any enduser allocation represents a ridiculously large number of possible hosts. The only possible advantage I could see from this is the protection against random scanning finding a user - but new and fun worms will use whatever mechanism the hosts use to find each other: I guarantee that the "find a printer" function won't rely on a sequential probe of all of the possible host addresses in a /64 either... Also, the 64-bit addressing scheme is sized to include the MAC address, right? Why would encoding L2 data into L3 be a good thing? The conceptual problem that I have had with v6 from the beginning is that it's not trying to optimize a single layer, it's really trying to merge several layers into one protocol. Ugh. -David Barak- -Fully RFC 1925 Compliant- David Barak Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise: http://www.listentothefranchise.com __________________________________ Yahoo! Music Unlimited Access over 1 million songs. Try it free. http://music.yahoo.com/unlimited/