[ppml] Those pesky ULAs again

[mack]

Why is anyone even arguing this?
The chances of a collision are smaller than the earth getting destroyed by a meteor next year than a collision occurring in the next ten.
How many businesses have that in their emergency plans?

Any sufficiently large business undergoing a merger is going to have its own address space.
Presumably some of that space will not be publicly routed.

Will some business still use private IPs internally? Probably so.
Is this any different that current NAT scenarios? Probably not.
Is there a benefit to setting aside a single /8 as non-routable and proportioning it out as /48s to people who would not qualify for address space? This is already done but not implemented.

Please see RFC4193 for more details.
FC00/7 is divided in two halves FC00/8 and FD00/8.
Only FD00/8 is local and currently specified.

It is assumed from RFC4193 (and preceding drafts) that FC00/8 will be centrally managed in the future.

I think IANA is the correct group to distribute these to RIRs and the RIRs should be distributing them.
I don't think there needs to be a very high bar for these.
Charging $500/year will keep 99% from requesting one.

The leakage of these addresses to the rest of the world is an entirely different issue and should be handled the same for FC00/8 as FD00/8.
The issue for ARIN should be how they are distributed and who gets them.
The RFC suggests that everybody should be able to get one.
I would even suggest each site that can demonstrate the capability of routing IPv6 and some arbitrary number of computers should be eligible for a /48 from this space.
Most people will opt for FD00/8 space if there is any charge at all.

On the EUI64 auto-assigned addresses.
It is relatively easy to avoid collisions.
All numbers assigned with this scheme of converting a MAC to the EUI64 have the L bit (7th bit from the top) set to 1.
If you are assigning globally unique addresses this bit should be cleared.

If you have a good business case simply buy an OUI from IEEE and create EUI64 numbers that are guaranteed to be unique.

>From an ISP standpoint auto-configuration is useful, but not as useful as if it included DNS setup.
Someone can put a box on the network and software techs can log into it remotely and complete the configuration.
No more trudging from office to office or computer to computer to configure the IP address and netmask.

On routing table explosion.
There will be a day when routers will have /48s routed.
I hope I am retired by then, but it will happen.

--
LR Mack McBride
Network Administrator
Alpha Red, Inc.