Eliot, On Oct 15, 2005, at 2:34 AM, Eliot Lear wrote:
The IETF cannot legislate prefix lengths, but the argument behind conservation beyond /48 would be utterly silly and demonstrates a "revenue opportunity", plain and simple.
When multiple /19s and /20s have been allocated and there are rumors of much shorter prefixes which can be justified under the current rules, I'm not so sure discussions about conservation can be classified as "utterly silly".
This is a matter of timescale. Prefixes should be expected to change. In fact, SHIM6 should be able to provide equivalent of SCTP's ADD-IP to *devalue* prefix stability.
Unfortunately, since applications are aware of IP address structures (both v4 and, sadly, v6), you'll need to rewrite all applications, libraries, and kernels to tolerate changes in those addresses at arbitrary times or face broken connections or misdirected packets. An apparent base assumption in IPv4 was that addresses were stable over a "session" (be it connection-oriented or connectionless). This assumption permeates every IP stack. Given DNS root server IP addresses retired over 10 years ago still get 30 queries per second, I doubt prefixes can be expected to change by all applications in our lifetimes.
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