Hi Dan,
Please help me to understand something. I have been trying to get people to look at the portable identifier/routing problem for _years_.
Various people _have_ been looking at this problem for years. In fact, the IPv6 WG toyed with it for a while in the mid-1990s. I agree that this is _the_ problem that we (the IETF, not necessarily the IPv6 WG) need to fix if we want to have an architecturally clean Internet that scales. Is there a particular solution (or type of solution) that you favor?
-When (and how) did site-locals become the main obstacle standing in the way of solving the routing/identifier problem?
I don't see site-locals as an obstacle to solving this problem at all. So, if I said something that gave you that impression, I must have been unclear. The only obstacle to solving the routing/identifier problem (that I know of) is that we haven't found a solution to it (yet).
So, people are currently forced to choose between global-routability and provider-independence in a particular address; no address has both properties. Some people will choose provider-independence over global-routability for (some of) their addresses. So, until we can solve the routing/identifier problem, we will be stuck with some type of provider-independent, local addressing.
I just happen to think that site-locals (the FECO::/10 prefix, with the semantics currently defined in the scoped addressing architecture I-D) are a very poor way to provide local, provider-independent addressing.
While local (non-globally-routed) addresses will always, by definition, be unreachable from some portions of the network, there is no reason why they need to be ambiguous. The ambiguity of site-locals creates a great deal of complexity, and imposes unnecessary limitations on their use.
As long as people use firewalls for security, we will have unreachable addresses, and there really isn't any fundamental difference between an unreachable local address and an unreachable global address. Applications already have to deal with the fact that some addresses will be unreachable, and people who intentionally make some of their addresses unreachable already have to deal with the consequences (split DNS, inability to use some applications, etc.).
But, there really isn't any excuse for creating ambiguous IPv6 addresses and expecting applications, routers and other parts of the protocol stack to deal with them...
-When (and how) did all the other reasons that have been advanced to stymie any work on the routing/identifier problem evaporate?
I never once suggested that there is a reason not to work on this problem. In fact, I think that it is vitally important to solve this problem, and people are working on it (in the IRTF and the multi6 WG, among other places). If you have a viable proposal to solve this problem, I'd love to see it.
Margaret
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