[arin-ppml] IPv6 Transition Policy (aka Soft Landing)

[Owen DeLong]

On Oct 9, 2010, at 10:46 PM, Christopher Morrow wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 12:00 AM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
> 
>> We will cause harm by being stingy with address space beyond these points.
> 
> you've mentioned (at least 2x in the last 3 days) that /48's for
> consumer end sites permit heirarchical dhcpv6-PD, can you explain how
> the you see this working? and more importantly why you can't do PD on
> ... just about any other boundary? Why can't I do PD of a /64 or /60
> inside an already PD'd /56 to my home gateway? (or is this just
> inconvenient?)
> 
For better or worse, /64 as the end subnet size is pretty well codified
and required for SLAAC. So, PD of /64 is a non-starter.

A /60 allows you a flat network of 16 subnets. If you don't have
a 16-port router, but, instead have a stack of routers, then, how
do you go about dividing up those bits?

At a minimum, you could use 2 bits per layer and allow for
each layer to contain 4 routers each of which could have 4
ports (subnets) attached. With 4 bits, that means you get
essentially 2 layers.

There are a lot of technologies being developed for sensor
networks and home automation that will require significantly
deeper layering. You may think this absurd, but, imagine
your refrigerator is a router. It contains a collection of subnets
which contain RFIDs and RIFD readers to address what is
in the refrigerator, the state of various operational
characteristics of the refrigerator itself, etc.

You could, literally, be able to use the web browser in
your phone and have the refrigerator inform you of what
you do and don't have left in it while you are at the store.
Absurd? Perhaps, but, people also bought pet rocks.
The technology for this is real and I do not think it is that
far off for you to start seeing it deployed, if the addressing
issues stop being a barrier to the process.

I'm sure there are other examples. Tony Hain actually
does a much better job of explaining it than I do. I'll CC him
here in hopes he will respond, since I'm not sure whether
he follows PPML or not.

Owen