On Thursday 2nd of February 2020, Tom Bird wrote:
> Morning,
> 
> Given the RFC for this is something like 20 years old now, but I
> still see /30s being used by just about everyone, is there still a
> good reason for this?

There are at least three major reasons that $EMPLOYER has not embraced
/30 for customers.

One is that CE support is sketchy. E.g. you can configure a /31 on a
RouterBoard and it will simply fail to work. Instead you have to do it
the pre-RFC way with a /32. This works for basic connectivity and some
routing protocols work as well. If it breaks you get to keep both
pieces.

Another is that user education is lacking. Give a customer a /31 and
they will invariably be on the phone asking how to configure it.
Looking up how to configure yet another random brand CE is not a
productive use of support resources.

The last one is that with /30 you can use DHCP to hand out the single
CE address. I have no idea whether DHCP supports /31, but I am
confident that even if it does, most CEs will not handle it correctly.

If a customer asks for a /31 specifically they can certainly have it.
When they ask, they generally (alas, not always) know whether their CE
does it correctly.

Personally I would much rather see widespread support for 4rd (RFC7600)
in CEs than support for /31. Or really, any other 4-over-6 standard, as
long as almost every CE supports it.


/Benny



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