> Exactly. The last thing we want to do is establish yet another numbering
> space that needs to be globally administered, which then becomes another
> ICANN political football (like our existing global name and numbering
> spaces), and for which we have to figure out some sort of allocation
> mechanism/policy to prevent anyone from coming along and grabbing
> such site IDs by the millions ("Hey, I'm going to be the next McDonalds,
> so I'm going to need a million site IDs! Trust me."), and for which
Speaking rationally, 38 bits of address would allow ICANN to give out 100
prefixes per second for the next 90 years. They could give them out almost
freely (say, in chunks of 10000 to virtually anyone who asked) without any
concern for running out. Since the numbers don't have the same value as DNS
names, and since they are not scarce like TLDs, then speaking rationally,
there should be no issue.
Of course there will be issues, but one can't but hope it wouldn't be near
the political football as the other ICANN assignments.
> allocator's revenue stream). And the other thing that would likely
> happen is that sites would obtain these non-globally-routable site IDs
> and then a few months later some of them would shop around to find an
> ISP who would agree to inject their (unaggregated) site IDs into the
This requires collusion between the ISPs (they would have to explicitly
agree to advertise "local" addresses). This would probably be harder than
getting ISPs to advertise longer prefixes of the existing globally
aggretable addresses, so we probably aren't making the likelihood any worse.
>
> One could possibly finesse the problems of establishing a new
> numbering bureaucracy by exploiting an existing one, e.g., by
> saying that site can choose, say, one of its own Ethernet addresses
> (that is, a globally unique number from a space managed by the
> existing IEEE bureaucracy) to stick into the empty field of its
> site-locals -- unfortunately, there aren't enough free bits
> there to hold an Ethernet address.
You could do this if you really wanted. You need 46 bits (take away the
group bit and the global bit). If you use two of the unassigned 3-bit
prefixes for this purpose, then you'd have enough space. But what a waste!
> How about using IPv4 addresses
> for that purpose? Well, some sites today can't get even one IPv4
> address, and that's likely to get worse. Besides, we already have
> half a dozen IPv6 address formats that have IPv4 addresses embedded
> in them somewhere, and I shudder to have to explain yet another one.
IPv4 addresses can't be used this way because they are not owned by sites.
The sites need a number they can own forever no questions asked.
PF
--------------------------------------------------------------------
IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List
IPng Home Page: http://playground.sun.com/ipng
FTP archive: ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng
Direct all administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
