> Erik Nordmark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > |Being the probable guilty party for introducing this thought back in > |draft-*-site-prefixes-00.txt I can offer a slightly expanded perspective. > | > |I don't think stable addresses per se is the key thing - it is > |the robustness of the communication that is important. > > |This robustness has at least two factors that are relevant in this > |discussion: the stability of the addresses, and the leakage of > |non-global scope addresses. I think the question is how to weigh those > |together. > > Ok, but it isn't clear that these two factors are of even remotely similar > weight. Leakage is a problem that can be addressed, but there are a lot of > things that simply will not work without stable addresses (at least not > without a complete overhaul of many higher-level protocols).
Agreed that stable addresses are necessary, but experience suggests that it is very difficult to 'address' leakage of addresses. Every application is another path by which addresses can be leaked. For that matter, so is every mobile host. > |In terms of the stability of the addresses one has to take into account > |both stability as it relates to local communication and stability for > |global communication. > > We have always been told that stable global v6 addresses will not be available > to end users, or at least will not be available to end users at a low cost. I think this depends on what you mean by "stable". For some reason the community has been reluctant to specify a number here, and the result is that people have widely varying ideas about what we can expect in practice. I don't think we want to let the reliable operation of applications be an accident, nor do I think we want to trust market forces to sort this out. > Unless you are proposing to revise the whole address allocation architecture > *and* have a way to force ISPs to change their business models I think we must > accept this as a given. I don't think it's necessary to "force" anything, and casting things in these terms makes them seem more difficult than they really are. > I think you have made an unreasonable leap by dropping the "stable" qualifier. > The value/importance of _stable_ local communication is almost certainly much > higher than the value/importance of _stable_ global communication. No. You erroneously assume that different applications are used for local and global communications, and you are over-generalizing the case for stable global communications from two very specific cases. Too many people think that the Internet only needs to support web and email. If that were the case we wouldn't need IPv6 at all. The 'local' versus 'global' distinction is a false one. I run NFS over TCP over IPv6 over long distances, and it works. And yes, I'm screwed if my ISP changes my IP address (fortunately they have agreed to not do that). I also regularly send print jobs over the same connection. > |In any case, for a home user I suspect that the value/importance of > |local communication would typically be less than the value/importance > |of global communication. > > Again assuming we are talking about _stable_ communication, I believe that > you are incorrect. Granted those of us who depend on our home networks for > automation and such are currently on the bleeding edge, but what about the > future when every stereo and tv is on the net? It's one thing to have to > re-click that remote link in the browser, but quite another to have your > stereo refuse to change channels. Consumers are not going to pay their ISP > a premium to keep their stereos working. I know it sounds nice in theory, > but look what happened to Divx. If you take away scoped addressing we _will_ > use NAT. Threatening to destroy the utility of IPv6 if you don't get your way won't get you much support here. Perhaps you should take another tack. > I'm having trouble parsing the above. ISPs currently offer unstable v4 > addresses (unless you pay extra) and they aren't satisfactory for the > peer-to-peer communication we used to have back when address space was > portable. People have worked around this with various application-level > kludges. You obviously recognize that stable addresses have value, so > I don't understand why you expect that ISPs will suddenly stop charging for > that value. I don't understand why you expect that ISPs will treat v6 exactly the same as v4, when if they do it this way there is no reason for their customers to pay for this additional service. perhaps ISPs will charge more for v6 than for v4, and they'l claim that they're doing so because v6 addresses are stable. > Depriving users of the tools necessary to make productive use > of their networks without paying for stable globals for all internal nodes > will just encourage yet another round of kludges. Bottom line is that we need addresses to be (reasonably) stable at both the local and the global level. It's not sufficient to just have stable local addresses - especially given the problems that SLs cause. > |So let's not loose sight of the fact that the goal is a robust network. > > I think that the goal is a useful network--useful not only for ISPs and > application vendors but for consumers. I don't think anyone would disagree with that - but that doesn't mean that a network with SLs is more reliable/useful than one without. Keith -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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] --------------------------------------------------------------------
