[ppml] Re: [address-policy-wg] Is the time for conservation over?

[Michel Py]

> Owen DeLong wrote:
> If I have a box with two /128s assigned to it, how does it
> know which one corresponds to the provider that is up and
> routing packets and not to use the one that is down at the
> moment?

It's called "magic", don't you know. It just happens, you don't have to
know how :-)

This is besides the point anyway. Save for small home/soho like setups,
the idea of having more than one address per host is not an option.
Imagine each host can have three addresses: triple firewall config,
triple access-list config, triple internal routing config, triple
problems. In large corporations I have talked to, only M$ appears to
think that multiple addresses per host are a serious option.


> To me, the whole point of multihoming is reliability. That means,
> my packets get through as long as at least one provider is up and
> has reachability to/from the peer I want to talk to.

That's only one feature of today's multihoming (which is tied to PI
addresses). The other two being provider independence (because
renumbering a large network is painful) and global load balancing
(because transporting traffic from Asia to North America in your own
network costs money, therefore you are much better off go to the right
location in the first place).


> Does v6 require me to run a routing protocol on EVERY host
> in order to do local address selection for sourcing new
> conversations?

There have been some proposals to the IETF, some of which suggesting
RIPNG as the routing protocol. Although they never had much momentum
Lord knows what the IETF can do.

Michel.