Paul,
A couple of points in-lined...
Paul Francis wrote:
>
> I took Steve up on his suggestion of looking through the archives on this
> topic.
>
> With some effort I found three threads, all initiated by Christian, in May
> '97, Dec '97, and Nov '99. I saved the relevent messages...you can find
> them at http://www.aciri.org/francis/IPv6_site_id_threads.txt if you are so
> inclined. This is probably not exhaustive, so if anyone can point me to
> other threads that would be helpful.
>
> I didn't see any major ideas in the previous threads that weren't in the
> latest thread.
>
> A problem I found when looking over the threads is that a complete picture
> of what a site ID would be and how it would work was never generated, with
> the end result that different people were talking about different things and
> to some extent talking past each other.
The definition of what a site ID would be was intentionally undefined.
That is, a site ID was supposed to be implementation dependent.
However, we found in developing the APIs and the InetAddress TC that
we needed something a little more concrete. Now, the site ID is,
in essence, a 32-bit integer.
>
> Having read the arguments, I still believe that there is something to be
> said for the site-ID notion. The site-ID would be for sites that want to
> have their own number space for internal communications, with reasonable
> assurance that nobody else is using the same space.
What exactly will be reasonable assurance? If your "site ID registry"
allocates you a unique site ID, why would the site local address
created with that site ID not be globally routable?
>
> The site-ID would not supplant the use of site-locals by other sites who
> wanted to use them. Site-locals would remain as defined.
>
> A site-ID would also not by itself identify what is and is not in a given
> "site". In other words, one couldn't take two addresses with site-IDs and,
> in the absense of any other information (DNS entries or routing tables) say
> definitively whether they could or could not reach each other using the
> site-ID addresses.
If a "site ID registry" is giving out the ID's, I would think it would
be in their best interest to allocate unique numbers. If two site
local addresses have the same ID in them, why would they not be in
the same site, given the above assumption?
>
> I'm inclined to write a draft specifying this so that we can have a focused
> and consistent (and dare I say difinitive?) discussion about it. Is there
> anyone out there who in principle likes the idea of site-IDs and would care
> to work with me on this?
I used to think that having a unique ID in the site local addresses
would be useful. However, I gave that up a few years ago after
thinking about what it would take to come up with and manage that
number space.
If anything, I could see allowing an administrator to specify his/her
own ID's. This would allow the NOC to map its site local addresses
to some administratively controlled "space".
Regards,
Brian
--------------------------------------------------------------------
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]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
