Subject: Re: Enforcing unreachability of site local addresses

From: Dan Lanciani <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2003 15:28:13 -0500 (EST)

Kurt Erik Lindqvist <[email-masked]> wrote:

|> But, doing this would put research efforts to a halt. 10 years down the
|
|On the contrary. It will buy us time and give us experience.

And besides, a looming deadline might accelerate rather than halt research.
Currently solutions to the renumbering/allocation/aggregation problem get
very low priority exactly because of dependency on the PA hack.  Hmm, for
that matter, where is all this research that we are worrying about halting?

|> 10 or 15 years ago, we gave away swamp space to anyone that wanted it
|> because nobody thought that it would ever have a scalability issue. 4
|
|I wasn't around then, but from what I have been told and read I think 
|everyone was very aware of the scaling issues. But decided to put them 
|forward and buy time.

Well, I was around and I don't recall any major concern.  We were aware
that there might ultimately be a problem but we were much more open-minded
about solutions relying both on faster hardware and on new protocols.  I
think that's why some (a lot?) of us were more than a little annoyed at
being sandbagged by the "CIDR" two-step.  What was supposed to be a temporary
fix quickly evolved into the effective extinction of new portable addresses.
Since then, hierarchical allocation has become so ingrained that some people
have trouble even conceptualizing other solutions.

				Dan Lanciani
				ddl@danlan.*com
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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 05 Feb 2003 09:26:03 +0100

Dan Lanciani wrote:
...
> Well, I was around and I don't recall any major concern.  

This is hard to reconcile with some of the words in RFC 1380,
or what I remember when I first arrived in late 1992. My recollection
is of a consensus to buy time with CIDR. (Just as PA addressing in IPv6
buys time; this was in fact strongly debated during the formative
stage of IPng in 1993/94.)

> We were aware

It's true that RFC 1380 assumed hierarchical allocation. But it also
clearly expressed the distinction between interim solutions (specifically
CIDR) and the long term. What I think it missed was the whole topic
of identifier/locator separation. That seems to be what we (for
some definition of "we") need to focus on now.

I don't think most people whose BGP tables were exploding felt in the 
least sandbagged by BGP4.

    Brian