On Thu, Jun 24, 2004 at 10:11:47PM +0200, Gert Doering wrote:
LIRs who operate closed/private networks appear not to qualify because the address space in these networks will not be advertised. Was this the community's intention? At the time this was written, "site-local" addresses where considered as the solution for these networks. Since then, they have mostly been deprecated, but a new solution (draft-ietf-ipv6-unique-local-addr-04.txt) seems to be in sight.
Which is a good thing. Site-local would bring up the same problems, RfC1918 space did (to organisations connecting to each other, both using 10/8 => Double NAT). With globally unique local addresses this would be solved. I just did a quick read of the document (did not have the time for slow reading), but I think the most interesting question still open is "how do I get my globally unique local address prefix". But that concept would sort out a lot of the existing problems we have with IPv4 today.
Of course there are large numbers of enterprises that operate closed networks, but does anyone have numbers about the number of *LIRs* that purposely and permanently do not connect their PA-allocated network blocks to "the Internet", while still paying yearly RIR membership fees?
I do not have real numbers, but know a few providers doing that. When they manage their customers networks, they use globally unique addresses for that. Currently this can only be done with IPv4 PA/PI space, as RfC1918 addresses are not unique. So they use addresses out of their assignment to have guaranteed uniqueness. Also I know of some of the big customers of ours doing it. Reality is though, mostly they assign the complete block and then just nullroute it, if traffic comes from the outside, as I think of it. So the block is is announced, but not reachable, though not "connected to the internet". But if globally unique local addresses (can I get an acronym for that, that is way too long ... and GULA even sounds nice) become reality this would be an alternative, as uniqueness seems to be the only reason for using these addresses. Nils -- Schützt ungeborenes Leben -- esst weniger Obst