[arin-ppml] Proposal - Remove Initial Small Assignment Requirements for IPv6

[hostmaster at uneedus.com]

When NCP was changed to TCP in a hot cut, no one even considered that 
maybe that would have been a good time to increase the number of bits in 
IPv4 addresses.  Because that was a hot cut, that would have been the 
perfect time to do this, but of course this would have increased the work 
load to do so, since every piece of network software assumed 32 bits at 
this time and would have had to be updated and recompiled.  At this time, 
the number of nodes was under 1k and a billion addresses seemed like it 
would never run out.  If we slid that to say 64 bits at that time, I doubt 
that IPv6 (IPng) project would have ever been started.  But it did not, 
and we still are stuck with a 32 bit IPv4 address.

During the entire time since TCP over IPv4 started, the "default" 
expectation was that each workstation or server would be given its own 
public address. The same thing is also considered the default in IPv6, and 
the idea of NAT on IPv6 was not seriously considered is the fact that 
every network already has more public addresses than all of IPv4, thus 
there is no real need for NAT for address sharing.

It was during the 1990's that NAT first started.  I used it in Linux with 
SLIP and later PPP.  Each of these gave you a single dial up public 
address, which I could then share with other workstations over ethernet. 
During the dialup age, I used to provide Dial on Demand boxes that would 
bring up a dialup connection during the time when full time connections to 
the internet were rare and hard to get.  When ADSL became available, that 
modem set on its own ethernet card with its single public address, and was 
shared by all the workstations on the LAN which was another ethernet card 
operating on RFC1918 addresses.

During this time, we did NAT not for lack of addresses, but for a easy way 
to connect additional workstations to the public address that I had. It 
was also common during this time to use routers connected to the modem to 
share the single IPv4 address, just like today. This was initially done as 
a cost saving measure to avoid paying extra to route a network of public 
addresses when a public address was not needed on each of the attached 
workstations.

Eventually, the idea of obtaining a public address for every workstation 
became uncommon as ISP's started charging for more than one address.  This 
became especially true when the IPng started with the 6bone, and we could 
see that the IPv4 free pool would run out, which happened in 2011.

The true answer to this is to to get the IETF or others to figure out how 
to get routing to work correctly on a network that has more than one 
router and more than one available PA network address block.  This 
configuration could not only be used for multihoming, but could be also 
used as a means to increase available bandwidth on a given network by 
obtaining additional bandwidth from another provider.  The v6 stack in 
common OS's need to learn how to adjust routing when perferred lifetime=0 
broadcasts are received when a link is down, and also to properly divide 
bandwidth use between the available networks that are up.  The only part 
that seems to currently universally work is the assignment of an address 
on each network when there are more than one available.  After that, many 
OS's including windows choke, especially if the specific network the 
workstation has chosen as its default route happens to fail.

Albert Erdmann
Network Administrator
Paradise On Line Inc.

On Mon, 13 Sep 2021, Joe Maimon wrote:

>
>
> JORDI PALET MARTINEZ via ARIN-PPML wrote:
>> 
>> Definitively any organization or even an individual user that want to have 
>> its own IPv6 PI must be able to get it.
>> 
>> Anything that can promote ULA+NTPv6 (which by the way it is an experimental 
>> protocol, not to be used in production), is evil and for that, we better 
>> don?t waste our time to move to IPv6 and instead promote infinite levels of 
>> IPv4 NAT.
>> 
>> 
>
> The unceasing controversy over NAT has done nothing but delay IPv6 adoption. 
> Standardize it and let people use it or not, as they may choose. Stop 
> channeling BOFH.
>
> Joe
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