Hello to All from Bavaria, in my opinion it is very interesting to code additional information using the bits of an Ipv6 address. E.g. you can code geolocation data into the address (in June this year I presented this at the heise German Ipv6 Summit) Imagine a company with many voip-telefone equipment - in this case you could build the ip address with the telefone number. It is possible to build an ip adress with ascii codes and ... I think people will come to many ideas to make Ipv6 addresses more friendly and/or give them more meaning. Greetings from Bavaria Maximilian Weigmann Am Freitag, den 25.10.2013, 12:37 +0200 schrieb Shane Kerr:
All,
[ gah... hit the wrong key and sent this unfinished ]
We saw two presentations by network architects at the RIPE meeting that used bits in their IPv6 addressing plan to carry meaning beyond simple network topology and packet routing.
For example, declaring a specific bit in the address to be 1 for voice traffic or 0 otherwise.
There are motivations for doing this, which may or may not be valid in any particular case. There are ways to lessen the amount of addresses consumed by this (for example by assigning /56 instead of /48 to end users).
But I think that the important thing is that we have historically not considered this sort of use with address allocation policy. In face, RFC 2050bis was *just* published as RFC 7020:
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc7020/
This includes the long-standing historical goals of conservation, aggregation, and accuracy.
Using bits in IPv6 networks for other purposes is orthogonal to those goals.
What should we do about it?
Cheers,
-- Shane