Subject: RE: globally unique site local addresses

From: "Michel Py" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2002 18:12:46 -0800

> Mika Liljeberg
> Still, I think that there is something to be said for
> being able to put together a routed site-local network
> with the same level of convenience as sticking together
> a bunch of switches.

This sounds like a terrible idea. Site-locals are not for everyone, and
we certainly don't want to encourage their use by making it plug and
play.

Site-locals are for use in a certain number of specific situations, by
networks architects that have a design and *not* by people that can
barely figure out how to get the router out the box.

We MUST NOT encourage the use of site-locals, whether they are globally
unique or not.

Michel.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
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-masked]
--------------------------------------------------------------------

---

From: Mika Liljeberg <[email-masked]>
Date: 24 Nov 2002 12:08:39 +0200

> we certainly don't want to encourage their use by making it plug and

Agreed, for site-locals alone it is a terrible idea.

Philosophically I'm with you, although I tend to be somewhat cynical
about it (and I must confess to playing the Devil's advocate a little
with my proposal). Site locals are here and I'm convinced that people
will find all kinds of uses for them, whenever they are convenient to
use or meet a specific need that globally routable addresses don't. It's
not very fruitful to concentrate on discouraging the use of site-locals.
Rather, the focus should be on eliminating the reasons that make people
resort to them.

Plug-n-play router configuration is a worthy goal in itself (and I'm not
only talking about site-locals now), since with IPv6 "people that can
barely figure out how to get the router out the box" suddenly find
themselves with plenty of address space and are likely to be setting up
networks of their own. I hope the zerouter BOF comes to something. We
need a good solution for this.

	MikaL