[6bone] semi-newbie Q on IPv6 address planning

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Thu, 1 Aug 2002 07:06:47 -1000 (HST)
    From:        Antonio Querubin <tony@lava.net>
    Message-ID:  <Pine.BSI.4.44.0208010704390.21654-100000@malasada.lava.net>

  | For us, assigning on nibble boundaries for multiple-subnet sites scales
  | much better too than the one-size-fits-all /48.

If you are assigning nets to sites, then /48 (or /47 or similar in perhaps
some very rare cases) is what you should be assigning.   There's a reason
for that one, unlike the "every subnet must be exactly /64" that some people
advocate.

The reason is so that the assignment size from one assigning organisation
will be the same as that from another, preventing a client org from being
captured because no-one else will give them the address space they (feel
they) need.

That's a legitimate concern, and one that should be accounted for, when
one organisation is assigning addresses to others, it should always
assign /48.

But when an organisation is dividing up the space assigned to it, for
its own purposes, it is for that organisation to decide how the divisions
should be done (it is all an internal matter, affecting no-one else).
Always assigning /64 (even for p2p) is a perfectly valid choice, and
most likely has a whole bunch of benefits (for the organisation, it
matters nothing to anyone else), but there's no reason to compel that.

kre