On 10-mei-2005, at 14:21, Carlos Friacas wrote:
And that was precisely my point... Almost-unmanaged network are hard to foresee using more than a handfull of subnets...
Right. So there is currently no need to have more than a /60 for those networks.
I agree with that. Getting a /48 instead of "the default size" should be fairly easy.
Not just "fairly" but "very", even.
Yep. But should we read the RFC3177 "recommendation" as policy, and just stick with the /48 assignments only?
Obviously if "we" (and I'm not just talking about the RIPE community here) decide that something different is in order, there will be a replacement for RFC 3177.
I also didnt get the renumbering issue... renumbering from a /56 to a /48 should be painless... and the "BUT" above should prevent that someone has to renumber from a /48 to a /56... ;-)
The trouble is that when you start running out of a /56 so you need to move to a /48, you already have a significant amount of configuration going. It would be nice if we could renumber routers automatically, but as far as I know, that's not really possible now, and not likely to be possible in the forseeable future. So moving from a /56 to a /48 would be a lot of work. This means that giving out /56s is a poor choice, as it's not enough for some networks, but too much (if having too much address space is possible) for many. It's much easier to have to make the decision "tiny" or "not tiny" rather than "tiny to medium sized" or "bigger than medium sized / bigger than medium sized in the future".