Re: (ngtrans) Update to Provider Independent addressing format drafts

[Tim Chown <tjc@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On Thu, 25 Oct 2001, Keith Moore wrote:

> > Renumbering a 100-router, 300-server, 24x7 $1M/day revenue generating
> > room is quite another one.
> 
> I've been involved with renumbering of ~300 IPv4 machines of widely varying
> platforms, in less than an hour, on multiple occasions.   It took prior 
> planning, a bit of coding, and a mechanism for quickly finding the machines 
> on which the renumbering failed.  But it wasn't rocket science.
> If we had standard tools to do this it would be even easier.  

Hi Keith,

Is that 300 servers, or mostly clients?  If you have a few hundred, or
thousands of domains with (virtual or otherwise) mail, web and other
(perhaps black box) services hosted then while I agree the renumbering
isn't rocket science, it's not much fun logistically.   There's domain
registrations to update, firewalls to change, a fair few Windows
applications which insist on IP numbers being keyed in manually, smooth
mail transitions, updates on other people's references to your IPs, 
and plenty of places where IPs are hard coded on Unix systems.  I agree 
prior planning is key, but to suggest most sites can press a button
and have it done in an hour seems optimistic :-)

At present operators such as Worldcom have smaller enterprises over a
barrel for bandwidth charges.  As bandwidth costs fall, and you see rival
operators prices looking far more attractive, perhaps up to 50% less,
it's not a no brainer to move operator because you have to renumber,
and your current operator knows that, and can keep their fees higher for
you regardless.   If IPv6 were able to offer less painful renumbering
(which will need help from the likes of Checkpoint and Microsoft), or
we had some non-NAT form of provider-independent addressing, great.  But
as it is, smaller enterprises who don't have leverage to take address
blocks with them suffer when seeking competitive bandwidth rates.  With
NAT perceived as the "easy" form of provider independent addressing, I'm
not convinced we won't see IPv6 NAT.

tim