[ppml] question on 2006-2 v6 internal microallocation

[Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com]

> It's also worth noting that some networks attached to private
> internetworks may also have an attachement to the public Internet,
> which makes further demands on unqiue addressing, even when many of the
> routes are nto exposed to the public Internet.

Yes, in fact we could say that *ALL* organizations
who connect to other internetworks also have Internet
connections. Sometimes, the organization has a single
internal network and controls traffic flow using routing
policy and firewalls. In other cases, an airgap is enforced.
It all depends on which other internetwork is involved
and how much importance is given to multiple layers of
security.

> That's rather
> troublesome when they've decided to just use random space in IPv4.  (At
> present, it's still in IANA reserved space.  That won't be true at some
> point, and then it gets "exciting".)  global uniqueness, even for
> non-attached networks, is a vital rquirement.

I know one company that built global internetworks and 
used the same set of "random" IPv4 addresses in each
one since they were all "separate". There were at least
three global IP internetworks using 1/8 addresses.

In the vast IPv6 address space, globally unique addressing
should be easy to achieve for everyone who needs it.
We just have to make the policies fit the real world
needs.

> I don't understand the concerns with microallocations either.  I think
> Jason has outlined a serious problem.  If you use BGP, this is an
> issue.  I'd probably be in favor of a policy that hands out a /48 for
> this purpose when you get an AS.  (A numbering scheme that makes the
> allocation identifiable with the AS would be ideal.)

One could envision a special class of AS number, using the
extended 32-bit AS numbers, which would come with an IPv6
/48 block attached in much the same way that 16-bit AS
numbers come with a block of IPv4 multicast space attached
to them.

>  This really feels
> like were repeating the mistakes of the past.

It is hard to get people to see that the networking world
of today is vastly different from the 80s and 90s. Take
multicast for instance. People thought that this would
enable a kind of Internet video broadcasting. Instead, the
main use of multicast is to deliver the live stock market 
data that used to be delivered over ticker-tape machines.

--Michael Dillon