I-D Action:draft-azinger-scalable-addressing-00.txt

[David Conrad]

Mark,

On Sep 25, 2010, at 9:00 PM, Mark Smith wrote:
> So renumbering not being easy is an obstacle that the IETF has put in
> place to hold back adoption, as per the original assertion? 

Apologies for being too terse.  Let me try again:

One of the issues facing acceptance of IPv6 was initial assertions by the IETF that for the Internet to scale, IPv6 address allocations had to be strictly hierarchical (see RFC 2450 for an example of the mindset).  This might (_might_) have been acceptable to end users if the downsides of provider aggregatable addresses had been dealt with.  However, as Brian (et al.) documented in the RFC I referenced, one of the key downsides, that renumbering is hard, was not (and still has not been) addressed by the IETF.  The result (in my view) was a long period in which the RIRs, attempting to abide by recommendations made by the IETF, did not have policies for allocating address blocks to non-ISPs.  Not surprisingly, those non-ISPs indicated the lack of ability to obtain provider independent addressing was a show stopper.  Since that time, all of the RIRs now have policies that allow for allocation of provider independent addresses[1].

There are, of course, other examples (lack of DHCP as ISPs were used to/wanted, lack of routing scalability, etc.) but I suspect the inability for enterprises to obtain IPv6 addresses was one of the  larger impediment to acceptance of IPv6.

> IOW, are you
> asserting that renumbering is actually easy, but the IETF have chosen
> to make it hard?

In my view, the decision by the IETF that identity and location are overloaded into a single value in IPv6 (just like in IPv4) pretty much guarantees renumbering will be hard.  The fact that the initial recommendations on address allocation policy made by the IETF ignored the fact that renumbering is hard greatly reduced the desirability of IPv6 to larger scale end users.

Does that clarify?

Regards,
-drc

[1] The fact that this is likely to result in routing scalability problems in the long term does not seem to be a major concern. I suspect analogies can be made to CO2 production and global warming, but that rathole isn't particularly relevant here.