--On Wednesday, February 06, 2002 10:13 +0100 Brian E Carpenter <brian@hursley.ibm.com> wrote:
Cathy,
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. The fact that people have figured out how to conserve IPv4 address space (dynamic addressing, HTTP/1.1 Host: headers, etc) is a tribute to the fact that it _can_ be done if need be. But that's just the point, it was only done out of _necessity_, not because it was the right thing to do. The concern is that if we go back to an attitude of 'we will never run out of addresses' then we will find ourselves in a very unfortunate situation once again. Memory can be very short. We must learn from history, or we will be doomed to repeat it. Alec -- Alec H. Peterson -- ahp@hilander.com Chief Technology Officer Catbird Networks, http://www.catbird.com