Re: The state of IPv6 multihoming development

["J. Noel Chiappa" <jnc@ginger.lcs.mit.edu>]

    > From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com>

    > The way I see it is that we really need some level of working
    > multihoming in IPv6 to get it deployed, and probably in a way that
    > doesn't require much renumbering, preferably none, for large
    > organizations. Guess what? PI does that, and nothing else is even on
    > the horizon. So either IPv6 remains a playpen for several more years,
    > or we get some form of PI.

Hunh. Why don't you write a spec that says that IPv6 negates the Second Law
of Thermodynamics? (Hey, that makes as much sense as a design which offers
"topological-location-independent topological-location-names".) That way,
IPv6 could solve the energy crisis *and* fix global warming, all in one fell
swoop. That ought to drive IPv6 deployment.


Let's try this one more time.

Multi-homing is an additional "service" (if you will) of the network, a
service that provides additional benefits. You don't get additional benefits
without a price. (The old "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"
principle.)

The benefit of multi-homing has a price - the only question is, who's going
to pay the price? Simple fairness demands that it *ought* to be the entity
which directly benefits. Multiple connectivity-based addresses do this; the
end-site has to pay the bulk of the cost (in complexity, etc).

Connectivity-independent addresses (such as Provider-Independent addresses)
don't have this characteristic. CI-addresses make everyone *else* pay for
that site's privilege in being multi-homed. (That is, unless we have a system
of charging for route advertisements, where the charge is directly related to
the scope over which the advertisement is seen, which seems rather unlikely
to happen.)

It's all very simple, really. Who's going to pay for the benefits of
multi-homing? That's the real question.

	Noel