[ppml] a modified proposal 2005-8

[Scott Leibrand]

On 03/11/06 at 4:44pm -0800, Lea Roberts <lea.roberts at stanford.edu> wrote:

> On Sat, 11 Mar 2006, Randy Bush wrote:
>
> > >    The following guidelines may be useful (but they are only guidelines):
>                                                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > >    - /56 for small sites, those expected to need only a few subnets
> > >      over the next 5 years.
> >
> > 256 is a few?  if you have to nibble away at it, isn't a /60 more
> > like a few
>
> I don't disagree...  we just put out some talking numbers and thank you
> for your suggestion(s).  I think one thing I would like to know is what
> people think about providing generous assignments with the justification
> being to make sure to provide flexibility to adapt to new architectures
> that we have yet to imagine.  That's been the argument for /48 everywhere
> and I don't want to fall into the tighten it too much trap.  I believe it
> is *really* important to try to make sure that everyone who needs lots of
> subnets can get them easily.  This needs to be balanced against careless
> waste of the address space.
>
> that said, do others think we should add the /60 "for a few" to the
> guidelines?

I don't think we should encourage anything less than a /56.  I can think
of all kinds of network topologies just for home users that might need
more than 16 subnets.  For example, an autoconfigured mesh network (where
everyone provides backup connectivity for their neighbors) might be
implemented by automatically allocating a /64 to each of your neighbors.

-Scott