IPv6 PI allocation

[Iljitsch van Beijnum]

On 17-mei-2007, at 17:10, David Conrad wrote:

> Do we have a ROUTING TABLE PROBLEM now?  Nope.  Don't worry, be happy.

Strange. I distinctly remember spending two days in Amsterdam last  
fall with with a group of people that included half the IESG and IAB  
and builders and users for the largest routers, and the consensus at  
the end of that meeting was that there is a problem, and that it's  
fairly urgent.

In my experience, when some people say there is a problem X and some  
other people say there is no problem X, there IS a problem, although  
it's not necessarily X.

Unfortunately, the decision making process in our industry is  
fundamentally flawed. Within the IETF, it's only possible to do  
something if the vast majority agrees about the action, with the  
result that many necessary actions are never undertaken. Address  
allocation policies have global impact, but are created in five  
regions more or less independently, by people who mostly represent  
themselves and their own particular interests. This way, you can  
easily end up working on a mechanism for scalable multihoming  
(shim6), and then have non-scalable multihoming (PI) introduced just  
as the scalable mechanism is defined.

The interesting thing with global routing is that it can't fail.  
Since any change is visible throughout the network within one or two  
minutes, anything that breaks global routing will be rolled back  
immediately, rather that be allowed to break what we have today.  
Obviously using a 15 year old routing protocol that can be  
characterized as "RIP on steroids" and the insistance that all  
routing information injected into the global table anywhere in the  
world must be visible throughout the entire network is going to have  
bad consequences in the long run.

Let me know when the I* community is ready for something better.