Dan, Margaret,
> > |Some folks have argued that easy renumbering would eliminate the need > |for enterprises to have provider-independent addressing, but I don't > |agree. Addresses are stored in many places in the network besides > |the interfaces of routers and hosts, such as access control lists, > |configuration files, .hosts files, DNS configurations, ACL lists, etc. > |In many cases, addresses are stored in nodes on other subnets. So, > |being able to renumber the interfaces of hosts and routers on a > |particular network or subnet doesn't even solve half of the problem. > > Those who earnestly argue that easy renumbering would eliminate the need > for PI address space (and please don't confine the need to enterprises-- > the stability of my home network is more important to me than that of any > enterprise) are typically talking about a complete solution that would > pervade all the areas that you mention and would require massive interaction > with a variety of tools. IMHO this is not impossible, but those that claim > that it is an easier problem than the PI route problem or even the site local > semantic problem are way off base. > Indeed. Providing a complete solution for renumbering a network is a non- trivial problem but the need for a complete solution has always been implicit given that the only game in town has been PA addresses. Site-local addresses, in spite of what has been claimed on this list, were always viewed as a way to ease some of the burden of renumbering by allowing internal communication, and configuration to be stable across renumbering. The fact that this group hasn't made as much progress in this area as it might have is a testament to the difficulty of the problem and in some cases a lack of understanding of how essential it was if only PA addresses were going to be available. It is obvious that PI addresses offer substantial advantages to end users and protocol designers alike. If we don't have to solve the general renumbering problem we will be very lucky indeed. I would love to avoid reading the mountain of protocol specifications that will be required to provide a complete renumbering solution. There seem to be at least a couple of possible PI schemes that are being or have been kicked around in the past. Dan referenced a solution that he has worked on and Tony Hain's geographic scheme, while currently targetted at the multi-homing problem, might well offer a solution. If we are seriously con- sidering doing PI allocations then we should probably start the process of collecting proposals for how to make it scale. Tim Hartrick Mentat Inc. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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] --------------------------------------------------------------------
