Subject: RE: Proposal for site-local clean-up

From: "Brian Zill" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2002 12:32:08 -0800

I strongly disagree with this suggestion.

Site-local addresses (and more generally, scoped addresses) are a
fundamental part of the IPv6 architecture.  They are an important
feature of IPv6, one of the great improvements that makes IPv6 better
than IPv4.  It would be a serious loss to IPv6 if site-local addresses
were only allowed to be used on disconnected networks (not to mention a
wholly unenforceable edict - I would rather we engineered things to work
when people inevitably mixed global and site-local addresses on the same
wire).  Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Margaret writes:
> I would support this change.  However, I doubt that we
> will get consensus to make this change before the
> addressing architecture is issued as an RFC.

I think we just spent the last 500+ emails on this list proving that
point.  Why restart that argument?  Just leave site-locals alone.

> >Alternatively, we could spend the next 5 years
> >discussing the unnecessary complexities of using
> >site-locals on connected sites.

Actually, I think most of the issues have already been resolved.  How to
use site-locals on connected sites (and on hosts connected to multiple
sites), has been fairly well understood for several years now.  I'm
totally mystified as to where this opposition to site-locals is coming
from.  I understand that the human mind has a tendency to reject new
concepts just because they are different (the classic not-invented-here
syndrome), but surely this isn't that hard a concept to wrap one's mind
around.

Another way of looking at this is that site-local addresses have been
part of all the standards-track documents for some time.  It would seem
to me that if there are people who want to change this at this late
date, the onus falls on them to provide strong *technical* (not
political) arguments as to why they won't work.  Otherwise those of us
who went to the trouble to create working implementations in good faith
will have a hard time understanding the motives of those who now desire
this restriction.

--Brian

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2002 16:43:33 -0500

> wire).  

This discussion has produced no technical justification for statements 
like the above, and plenty of reason to believe that SLs aren't worth
their cost except for isolated networks.

> Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Agreed.  But I think you're mixed up about which is the baby and which 
is the bathwater.

Site-locals are the bathwater - they once were thought to be useful
but now don't seem worth very much.   Forcing the baby to stay in
the bathwater isn't good for the baby's health.

Keith