On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 23:15, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote: You seem to be indirectly answering the parent posting in much of what you say. That is fine, I just wanted to point it out.
It's a commonly accepted, well-defined convention to save humans effort while not sacrificing readability. There are weirder things in technology.
I don't think it's all that weird and it's a major savings in writing out IPv6 addresses and being able to read them (except in lists of varying sized addresses (please, when dumping routing tables and such, just keep the optional zeroes or give us a flag to choose). In practice, the :: usually ends up being placed between the network number and the host number for things with static addresses and rarely appears in EUI-64 based addresses, so, I don't see this as a problem.
FWIW, I do not see it as weird or as a problem, either. "There are weirder things" does not mean the thing I am referring to is weird itself :)
I don't see a problem with people not assigning customers /56s so long as they go in the correct direction and give /48s and not /60s or /64s.
Many ISPs will end up handing their customers /64, /62 or other less-than-ideal prefixes. As soon as a customer needs to subnet their /64, the real fun starts. There is nothing we can do about it, other than trying to educated people and hope for the best.
I honestly think I never explained (as in, after I understood the matter, myself) netmasks other than as a bit vector. Unless you mean "write 255.255.255.0 in there cause that's what right for you".
Then you are young and never had to deal with systems that didn't know about bit-vector syntax. I have had to explain the translation between bit-vector syntax (/n) and bit-field syntax (255.255.255.240) to many people. It's easy when n is a multiple of 8. After that, it can be quite hard for some mathematically challenged individuals unfamiliar with binary and BCD to wrap their heads around.
I wish ;) Either the person can grasp that a dotted netmask can be transformed into a bit vector or I tell them "use 255.255.255.0 everywhere, it will work for everything you will ever need." 80/20 and all that.
Removing bitmath from operations where possible is a good thing that reduces outages caused by human factors. It's just good human factors engineering. We can't do so in IPv4, there aren't enough bits to do it. We seek to do so in IPv6 with ARIN draft policy 2010-8 and proposal 121.
If by bitmath you mean ending netmasks not on full bytes only, I could not agree more. This will reduce a lot of useless overhead. I really wish the RIRs would get unique a name space for their respective drafts. If even my person object needs a -RIPE suffix, I don't see why drafts etc don't.
Should we all sing kumbayah now?
Only if you bring a tambourine.
Basically, as I recall the earlier discussions of this and the IETF arriving at the decision to use colon (:), it boiled down to the simple fact that colon (:) is the worst choice except for all the others.
Agreed. Richard