[ppml] article about IPv6 vs firewalls vs NAT in arstechnica (seen on slashdot)

[Tony Hain]

It is time to be blunt. The BS about being an end-run on PI is a tacit
acknowledgement that people demand the utility of PI and will do whatever it
takes to work around attempts to thwart them. The only reason ULA & PI are
related is that there is no global acknowledgement that PI is necessary and
will exist despite short-sighted attempts to squelch it. 

Also, just because someone else has a different deployment model off to the
side that you don't see doesn't make it wrong. Enterprise networks need to
keep private interconnect routing sorted out from their public side routing,
and while complex IGP entries and ACLs will do the job, a simpler approach
is to use the routing system for the job it was designed to do and use a
local prefix for the non-global interconnect. 

PI does not solve the locality problem, so ULA is needed as well. For those
organizations that don't want to consider even the remotest possibility that
there will be an address collision with a future merger/acquisition/partner
(having been burned on 1918), ULA-central makes more sense than ULA-local.
Every PI block should automatically come with a ULA-central block. One could
even argue that every RIR member should automatically receive a ULA-central
block. Use is up to them. It has no ongoing cost so it would be cheaper to
just set one up while doing the requested service than to have to come back
and add it later. There is no shortage here.

The RIR membership should really get past their preferred religion and start
thinking long term revenue here. ULA-central doesn't cost anything
substantial, yet provides a reason to justify RIR membership for those who
don't consider ULA-local to be unique enough and would not otherwise become
a member.

Tony


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Owen DeLong [mailto:owen at delong.com]
> Sent: Friday, May 11, 2007 9:12 AM
> To: william(at)elan.net
> Cc: Tony Hain; vixie at vix.com; ppml at arin.net; address-policy-wg at ripe.net
> Subject: Re: [ppml] article about IPv6 vs firewalls vs NAT in
> arstechnica (seen on slashdot)
> 
> ULA Central is intended so that some subset of the internet can reliably
> use it to interconnect while not being "globally" routed.
> 
> The problem I have with this theory is that the delta between a
> collection
> of networks routing by mutual agreement and the internet is:
> 
> 	A.	Fuzzy
> 	B.	Non-Existant
> 	C.	There is no difference
> 	D.	Meaningless
> 	E.	Any and/or All of the above
> 
> Pick your favorite answer from the above and you've pretty much got it.
> If ULA central were limited to not exiting the local AS (in some
> meaningful
> way, like routers won't forward routes or traffic to ULA addresses to
> external
> adjacencies), then, I might see it as something other than an end-run on
> the RIR process.  However, in it's current state of "license for
> anyone who
> wants to run a competing RIR for networks that choose to interoperate
> on this basis" I think it's a pretty bad idea.
> 
> Owen
> 
> 
> On May 11, 2007, at 12:03 AM, william(at)elan.net wrote:
> 
> >
> > I don't understand your point about why ULA need to be registered if
> > its not going to be globally routed. Also PI is not the same as ULA -
> > PI do come from RIRs and in IPv6 there was no way to get PI (except
> > in a few special cases) until recent ARIN's micro-allocation policy.
> >
> > On Fri, 11 May 2007, Tony Hain wrote:
> >
> >> I agree that this will help inform the debate, and while Iljitsch
> >> did a good
> >> job of outlining the issue, he left out a significant point:::
> >> People explicitly chose to be in the state of "as there is
> >> currently no
> >> obvious way to make services only available locally" by insisting
> >> that the
> >> local-scope addressing range have a global-scope as far as
> >> application
> >> developers were concerned. Now the application developers are
> >> complaining
> >> about the consequences of their choice, because the alternative to
> >> 'no
> >> routing path for an attack' is to insert a device that has to make
> >> policy
> >> decisions with limited information.
> >>
> >> The current ULA-central discussions will be directly involved in
> >> this issue.
> >> It is critical that all of the RIR's have policies establishing a
> >> mechanism
> >> for registering ULA-central prefixes & PI. For those who don't
> >> recall, the
> >> reason ULA-central was tabled was that it was seen as a potential
> >> end-run to
> >> acquire PI space in the absence of appropriate policy to do so out
> >> of a
> >> range recognized for global routing.
> >>
> >> The need for keeping some things local while others are global is
> >> real, and
> >> the lack of appropriate mechanisms to accomplish that through the
> >> routing
> >> system that is designed to deal with path selection leads to entire
> >> industries for fragile work-arounds along with their increased
> >> complexity.
> >>
> >> Tony
> >>
> >>
> >>> -----Original Message-----
> >>> From: ppml-bounces at arin.net [mailto:ppml-bounces at arin.net] On
> >>> Behalf Of
> >>> vixie at vix.com
> >>> Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2007 9:59 PM
> >>> To: ppml at arin.net
> >>> Subject: [ppml] article about IPv6 vs firewalls vs NAT in
> >>> arstechnica
> >>> (seen on slashdot)
> >>>
> >>> i think that this article will help inform the debate around the
> >>> ipv6
> >>> transition:
> >>>
> >>> http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/ipv6-firewall-mixed-
> >>> blessing.ars
> >>> _______________________________________________
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> >>
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