Re: Draft: PI addressing derived from AS numbers

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com>]

On Thu, 27 Feb 2003, Kurt Erik Lindqvist wrote:

> > I know of several significant implementers who would be willing to make
> > significant changes to their IPv6 stack, IFF it would have significant
> > improvements for IPv6.  Getting multi-homing into a scalable state
> > would be one example of a significant improvement.  Making mobility a
> > first-order property, rather than a "Mobile IP" add-on protocol,
> > might be another one (not sure).

> I think you are right. However, I still think that we are trying to
> solve everything in one go. I think that we will have to go to a 8+8 or
> 16+16 model, but not from day one. We will have to realize that we need
> to change things a bit at a time. This will most likely also mean that
> getting adoption for changes is easier. So besides working on the end
> outcome we should also be looking at how to get there.

It all depends on whether you're going to do incremental upgrades that
work well with existing stuff or if you're going to break existing
implementations. In the latter case, you should do everything in one go.

Apart from that I'm not all that concerned with the size of the steps
but rather their direction. We need to establish some long-term goals so
we can keep our eye on the prize (and other eye on the price) when
making those smaller steps. We don't want to paint ourselves into a
corner. (Arguably, we already have.)

My ultimate goal would be to make applications and transport protocols
independent of IP by allowing anything that's suitable for an identifier
(hostnames, crypto stuff) and leave the addresses/locators to lower
layers. An intermediate step could be middleboxes that replace PI
identifier addresses with PA locator addresses for outbound and the
other way around for inbound traffic. An intermediate step before that
would then be to use these PI identifiers in IPv4-like multihoming for a
limited time.

Iljitsch