[ppml] 2005-1 status

Daniel Golding dgolding at burtongroup.com
Tue Jan 24 16:18:00 EST 2006


On 1/24/06 3:29 PM, "Scott Leibrand" <sleibrand at internap.com> wrote:

> I would agree that IPv6 PI space should be made available to anyone who
> qualifies for IPv4 PI space.  2005-1 as presented at L.A. was a bit more
> restrictive than that, with the 100,000 device requirement.
> 
> No, I don't think there is any working shim6 code.  However, as I've tried
> to say before, I think shim6 will provide a multihoming solution to those
> who've thus far not had one available.  IMO such a solution, if widely
> implemented, would likely be better for small sites than trying to run
> BGP.
> 
> -Scott
> 

There is also a time-frame issue that makes shim6 unworkable as an initial
IPv6 multihoming scheme. The top desktop OS is MS Windows. The next version
of Windows, Vista, is coming out sometime next year, presumably. It is
feature-complete - shim6 wouldn't be added, even if everyone agreed shim6 is
a neat trick, which there is not agreement on. The timeframe for widescale
deployment of shim6 capable code is (reasonably) past the date (choose one)
for IPv4 RIR depletion.

What does this mean? Any multihoming strategy must not require a host OS
code change (router code changes are easier). That suggestions (for the time
being) IPv6 PI with BGP.

Shim6 is an interesting future, but if IPv6 is to succeed, we must have this
functionality now. It seems that some folks in the IETF believe that
enterprises and carriers can be strong-armed by IPv4 address exhaustion into
implementing shim6 or some other suboptimal solution. This assumption needs
to be questioned rather seriously.

-- 
Daniel Golding





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