Re: shim6 @ NANOG (forwarded note from John Payne)

["Per Heldal" <heldal@eml.cc>]

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 12:08:42 +0100, "Iljitsch van Beijnum"
<iljitsch@muada.com> said:
> On 26-okt-2005, at 18:08, Geoff Huston wrote:
> 
> > Public thanks to Dave, Geoff, Vijay, Ted and Jason for their
> > involvement in bringing shim6 to the NANOG conference.
> 
> I just looked at the stream and I can't say that this made me vary  
> happy. </understatement>
> 
> Some of the comments made were nothing short of ridiculous, with  
> people claiming authority over the traffic engineering decisions made  
> by their _customers_. Understanding of what shim6 is and what it does  
> was sorely lacking.

I share most of your views, but you are missing an important point:
Frustration in the ops-community stems from inconsistency between
operational policies and technical capabilities.

Consider:

* Current V4 multihomers (content providers in particular) are not
willing to adopt V6 without a MH-solution.

* RIRs currently don't support MH for v6 endsites. 

* shim6 is currently the only technical initiative to bring MH to V6. It
is therefore expected to bring any and all MH and TM-related
functionality from day 1 (even far beyond just what's possible with
BGP-tweaks).  That is about as realistic as expecting to find
features related to stateful inspection of packet-streams in modern
products (firewalls, load-balancers etc) explicitly described in the
original TCP-specification.


In 5 or 10 years, when supporting tools are in place for (near-)
immediate renumbering or to add/remove prefixes to/from sites of *any*
size including directory (DNS .. whatever) updates, and with tools to
manage/coordinate traffic on any number of shim6-capable boxes within a
site this will no longer be an issue. 

In the meantime, if we want to give shim6 (or alternatives) time to
evolve there are 2 options.

- Openly and wholehartedly discourage v6 deployment for purposes where
global reachability is expected till the technology is complete.

 . or .

- Work with the RIRs, possibly with recommendations through IANA, to
implement routing-policies for v6 which will work with existing
technology.



//per

-- 
  Per Heldal
  http://heldal.eml.cc/