[ppml] Resurrecting ULA Central [was: Re: Policy Proposal 2006-2: Micro-allocations for Internal Infrastructure - to be revised ]

[Thomas Narten]

On 4/14/06, Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote:

> fwiw, after discussion with jason, i would support a more simple, direct,
> and clear proposal to the same end.
>
> randy

Question:

I gather that resurrecting

http://tools.ietf.org/html?draft=draft-ietf-ipv6-ula-central

would also solve the technical problem at hand (since the technical
requirement seems to be globally-unique address space, with no
need/desire to have it be globally routable).

I understand that RFC 4193 style addresses are not "unique enough" for
that purpose.

Would there be interest in resurrecting the ula-central document?

Pros:

1) globally-unique space would be available to everyone, including end
   sites. I.e., for pretty much any purpose. Even during the ARIN
   meeting, it was pointed out that anyone with an ASN could/would
   presumably want something like this.

Cons:

1) ARIN pretty vocally shot down the document a year or more ago, and
   the IETF basically decided "we don't need this so badly as to have
   a showdown with the ARIN community". Having said that, I (and
   others) still think the idea has some merit and would be willing to
   push on it on the IETF end, assuming we wouldn't get a repeat
   reaction at future meetings for our efforts...

   Note: AFAIK, no such reaction seemed to come out of APNIC or RIPE.

2) Does solve Jason's problem, but perhaps there is no desire to fight
   the larger battle at the expense of just solving the narrow/simple
   problem (i.e., just for ISPs). Note, however, that it will
   presumably take at least another 6 months (until the St. Louis
   meeting) to make progress on this. (Realistically, it would
   probably also take 6 months to get the ula-central document through
   the IETF, assuming there was no significant opposition from ARIN,
   so I'm not sure either approach is necessarily longer).

3) Would make such address space available to everyone, including all
   end sites, not just ISPs. Not sure this is necessarily bad, but it
   will result in orders of magnitude more such addresses in use. And
   the concerns raised in the past centered around the fear that ISPs
   would be  asked/forced to route them...

I know that there is at least one person willing to resurrect the
ula-central document, but I (personally) don't want to invest cycles
in it if it's going to get a frosty reception in ARIN again. Been
there, done that.
   
Thomas