[6bone] Is minimum allocation /64 now?

[Gert Doering]

Hi,

On Sun, Oct 26, 2003 at 12:12:53AM +1000, Dan Reeder wrote:
> The problem is that, perhaps because some of us have had to live under the
> strong arm of apnic, that the tendency to want to conserve addressing is a
> bit of a habit. Personally whenever I see things like /48s being given to
> users left right and center I get reminded of the consequences of Stanford
> being given a v4 /8 way back in the early days. It just reeks of
> wastefulness. 

Yes, it reeks so, and every time this is discussed, someone comes up with
"and 640 kbyte RAM is enough for everybody".

Just do the math:  inside FP 001, there are 2^45 /48s, which is over
a 1000 /48s per person if we assume a world population of 10 billion.

> Just because we can, and just because some (antiquated?)
> documents say so, does that mean we should?

Yes.  This is about the only reason to go for IPv6: *plenty* of address
space, and no haggling, no questions asked.

Get rid of your "conservation is the major goal" mindset (which is something
that is very dominant in the IPv4 world of today)!

[..]
> Why can't someone bite the bullet and just develop a daemon like radvd that
> will simply use pretty much any prefix length thrown at it? I've got a /64
> on my lan here. If the advertisement software supported it operationally
> speaking it would make absolutely ZERO difference if I changed it to /80...
> or /112 or even a /120. And I bet it would make almost zero difference to
> the majority of the readers on this list (i'm not really talking about ISP
> network operations/addressing here though)

The way autoconfiguration works today, you need something larger than a /80
to be able to base your IPv6 host part on the 48 bit MAC address.  The
nice thing about EUI-64 based addressing is that it is "dirt simple to
implement".  No need for a stateful DHCP server that keeps track of
addresses or whatever, just roll your own.

[..]
> I can't help but cringe at the thought of some geek in a few hundred years
> time thinking what clowns we all were by greedily taking /64s and /48s for
> our kitchens and bedrooms and living rooms and bathrooms.... 

If we figure out that we've done very bad mistakes in this addressing
scheme, we still have 6 other FPs to try again (remember that allocations
are only done from FP 001, and everything else is reserved [simplified]).

> and I can't
> help but think that there will be an IP shortage somewhere in our solar
> system similar to what asia pacific is currently suffering under v4.
> But ooooh its 128 bits... it'll never run out, especially with properly
> monitored and allocated addressing, right fellas? Oh wait. *grumbles
> something about /48s assigned to children*

IP is not particularily well suited for solar distances anyway.

Gert Doering
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