Re: Taking two steps back (Was: Re: one question...)

[Richard Carlson]

I'm having a lot of trouble understanding what we are trying to accomplish with this email discussion. From my, probably simplistic, view we are missing a fundamental construct of IPv6 addresses. That construct is that v6 address have some kind of scope attached to them. That scope is meant to limit how far they can reach or where they can be used. Am I understanding the v6 address architecture correctly?

I think we all agree that there are Link Local (LL) addresses which can only be used for communications between nodes on a single link, i.e., completely non-routable.

There are also Global addresses which provide a globally unique IPv6 address to an Internet node. These addresses may be routed anywhere on the global Internet. Note: administrative filtering and address blocking may prevent Internet nodes from establishing an end-to-end connection.

In between these 2 extremes (LL and Global) there is a range of other scopes. Margaret pointed out some of these including different divisions in a single organization or manufacture/supplier relationships. The Site Local (SL) address was suppose to enable these types of relationships.

The talk of GUPI addresses doesn't seem to capture this limited scope function. Am I missing something?

From my perspective the base address document should make this idea of multiple scopes very clear.

We certainly have a good handle on what a global address should do, and the LL addresses are also well defined. The trouble is that we never had SL's before and the concept of a 'site' is ambiguous so its hard to figure out what to do with them. Since we don't have any operational experience with these limited scope addresses, we should leave the documentation of them to the future when this experience is gained.

Rich

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Richard A. Carlson e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Network Research Section phone: (630) 252-7289
Argonne National Laboratory fax: (630) 252-4021
9700 Cass Ave. S.
Argonne, IL 60439

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