On Mon, 2005-10-17 at 04:43 -0700, David Barak wrote:
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.
See the HD ration + proposals about sizing it down to a /56 as mentioned in my previous mail to this list.
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...
SDP, uPnP, DNSSD etc and most likely also using ff02::1 and other multicast tricks. The important thing here though is that you already have a local address
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?
Because this gives you an automatic unique IP address. Also some L2's (firewire comes to mind) have 64 bit EUI's.
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.
One could, at least in theory and afaik not tried yet, run IPv6 as L2 :) Greets, Jeroen