Hi, On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 09:38:46AM -0700, Alec H. Peterson wrote:
I'm still quite surprised by the way in which the fully justified conservatism of the registries for IPv4 space is being over-extrapolated to IPv6 space. If you look objectively at the argument that Gert gives, and consider how the size of the IPv6 prefix space compares to the total IPv4 space, /32 just isn't risky, and it gets rid of yet another judgement call.
The issue that I and many other people on the ARIN AC continue to come back to is that this sounds a lot like the logic that was used when deciding how to originally allocate IPv4 address space.
I have heard that argument before, and my response boils down to "how much harm can we do?". We are currently allocating 1/8th of the IPv6 space. So if we *really* get everything wrong, we can try 7 additional times. In that 1/8th, we have 500 million /32s. I proposed to give out 2000 of them per region. So roughly this is 0.001 per cent of the available /32s in the 1/8ths that we're currently using. Yes, I vote for "let's waste that 0.001 per cent", and then reconsider. If we give every single LIR in the world a /32, long before the /32s run out, the *handling* of those registries will make be a HUGE problem (imagine a RIR having to handle 2^20 = 1 million!) LIRs. I do not opt for carelessness (I'd like a /8 for me, of course), but the numbers are so big in comparison to the number of potential candidates, and the scaling issues that would hit other places long before the IPv6 space runs out, that this really shouldn't be an issue. [..]
Memory can be very short. We must learn from history, or we will be doomed to repeat it.
We have enough addresses this time, so the lesson HAS been learned (yes, I know, everybody will shout at me about "640kbyte is enough", but there's only so much addresses that you can put on every square inch). (If we want to be conservative, stop putting /64s on local broadcast media, and stop handing out /48s to anybody who happens to have two different subnets in his home network. THAT is "wastive" - but everybody agrees that "we have enough /48s". Be consequent, and check the above numbers). Gert Doering -- NetMaster -- Total number of prefixes smaller than registry allocations: 71770 (72395) SpaceNet AG Mail: netmaster@Space.Net Joseph-Dollinger-Bogen 14 Tel : +49-89-32356-0 80807 Muenchen Fax : +49-89-32356-299