Re: [Fwd: I-D ACTION:draft-lear-multi6-things-to-think-about-00.txt]

[Brian E Carpenter <brc@zurich.ibm.com>]

Pekka Savola wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 16 Dec 2003, Tony Li wrote:
> > I'd submit that if it cannot be easily ported back to IPv4, that it
> > bears closer examination.  v4 and v6 are architecturally very
> > similar.  Any solution that does not apply to both is either a
> > kludge or is exploiting an odd property of one of the two.  In
> > either case, it would bear close examination.  You know, the kind
> > that you give things when the fire alarm in the building goes off...
> > ?  ;-)
> 
> I have to heartily disagree here.  IPv6 address *does* have more bits.
> Different problem spaces have leveraged that property before as well,
> leading to solutions which are not easily backportable to IPv4.
> 
> Maybe one could reword this differently: the solution beas some
> thinking about if it doesn't rely on the 128bit address length of
> IPv6, and is not easily IPv4-capable.

Yes. But this is the IPv6 multihoming WG, so while applicability to
IPv4 is an interesting question to ask, it cannot be a decision
criterion.

I would counter-argue against Tony in another way. If we had variable
length addresses (as some people strongly suggested for IPng) a whole
new class of multihoming solutions might be available. But we don't,
so they aren't. Thus, you cannot argue that solutions *must* be independent 
of address length considerations.

(Please don't kick off a thread on variable length addresses... at
least not here.)

  Brian