[arin-discuss] Trying to Understand IPV6

[Owen DeLong]

On Sep 13, 2010, at 1:17 PM, Mike Lieberman wrote:

> I have been reading all these discussions (mostly silently) for a long, long
> time. I understand what a /48 is and a /56, /64 and /128. I understand the
> notation. 
> 
> Quite frankly what I don't get is why anyone thinks that consumers want
> public numbers inside their home/LANs.  Once my customers understood the
> benefit of hiding behind a NAT, they embraced it quite emphatically. 
> 
Really? Wow, once my customers have understood the advantages of having
public addresses, they have thoroughly bemoaned the limitations imposed
by NAT.

> Put a private residence on public IPv6? Sorry but that makes no sense. 
> 
It makes a lot of sense. Stateful inspection has useful advantages and consumers
definitely should be behind stateful firewalls. However, there is absolutely no
advantage whatsoever to reducing them to NAT.

> Yes I agree that I don't know what people will need in 20 years. And YES it
> is nice that we will have address space in 20 years. But allocating a /48 to
> a home that today uses an IPv4 /30 with a private NAT seems beyond humorous.

Why?

> It just sounds insane. Using private addressing that home already
> potentially has access thousands of subnets and millions of addresses. 
> 
Right, but, they have no option of using their cellphone to log into the refrigerator
from the grocery store and find out what they are running low on. They can't put
up a public web cam without engaging some third party to proxy traffic for them.
They can't run a home PBX solution without registering it with some third-party
SIP proxy in order to receive calls. The list of limitations goes on and on and on.

On the other hand, the list of advantages provided by NAT (not the firewall, NAT
itself) is short... Here it is:


See... Very short.

> RFC 4193 provides even more addresses for use with firewall/NAT appliances.
> Why does a home or business using RFC 4193 need a /48 or even a /56 or /64. 
> 
RFC 4193 provides no way for those addresses to communicate with the rest of
the internet.

They are LOCAL addresses for local use. There is no NAT in IPv6.

> Just because we have the numbers does not mean we should distribute them.
> 
What better purpose can they possibly serve not being distributed?

Owen