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Re: about draft-baker-v6ops-l3-multihoming-analysis-00



On Nov 22, 2006, at 7:32 AM, marcelo bagnulo braun wrote:
El 21/11/2006, a las 20:59, Fred Baker escribió:
On Nov 21, 2006, at 10:03 AM, marcelo bagnulo braun wrote:
First, i think that the draft makes a good job in identifying that not all multihoming sites are the same...

Thanks for your comments. I think you and I very much agree that there are different requirements. For example, I think that a Fortune 100 company probably has the same address-independence requirements as an ISP has, while a homeowner changing his IP address when he moves from house to house seems very reasonable.

and when you change the isp of your home network? would it be acceptable to renumber in this case?

That's a question; it really depends on what changes when I change ISPs. I'll observe that I have one ISP, and when @Home went south they renumbered my home. It wasn't much of a big deal for me, in part because I run a NAT (like everyone else does, I suppose) for IPv4 traffic and don't have IPv6 service. The one problem that I encountered was that the VPN tunnel I use to go to work required that my company know what IP address I am coming in from and I had to advise them of the new one. The counterpart in an IPv6 world would be (see RFC 4192) that they configure my router (RFC 4076) with the new prefix, allow an interval for my network to make use of it, advise me that they have done so and give me time to adjust DNS and advise my company etc, and then withdraw the old prefix. In a PA situation, I don't see any reason that this would be inappropriate.

The question is whether PA is appropriate in a multihomed network. shim6 says it is, and would have each ISP provide its own prefix. GSE says it is, but leaves the hosts effectively ignorant of the prefixes assigned (within the enterprise network, the routers only look at the subnet number, and the hosts only look at the host identifier, and the border routers rewrite the part used by the ISPs). A variation on GSE would have the border router ICMP back to the host indicating that it should be using a certain "routing goop", and have the host resend using that. Metro and PI would simply have a single prefix on the edge network in the first place. If the distance and complexity questions are those of a typical home (see slides 3 and 4 of ftp:// ftpeng.cisco.com/fred/v6ops/Fred_network_paths.pdf for what I think a typical home looks like; the slide needs some updating now and in the coming years will have various large datarate home appliances added to it, but I suspect it's close) I can't imagine any of those having real operational problems. The big issue with multiple prefixes that I see are related to the hiccups around network changes.

One concern I have with the "/48 is what is assigned to the edge, even the PI multihomed edge" is that one-size-fits-all seems an uneasy solution. My canonical examples are my home and my company, and there is a lot of space in between, but consider my company if you will. Cisco has about 50,000 employees including temps and contractors, and puts a LAN (if it were IPv6, which it is not, it would be a /64) in many of our homes for home offices. Let's take a flier and say it put one in each telecommuting home. That would consume a /48, and it would have to be global in scope, not ULA. We have a lot of labs (a single test rack, used by a single engineer for unit or integration testing, might have a dozen LANs in it), a lot of buildings, and so on. A company the size of Cisco would find uses for another /48 easily just doing that, and for ULAs in test racks. I wouldn't be too surprised to find that we actually wanted to run /48s by continent or theatre. And while, yes, Cisco is #83 on the Fortune 100 list, many of the 82 above us on that list dwarf us in size. Consider Exxon Mobil, Ford, or General Electric... http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Fortune_500#1-100. It's not obvious to me that the assumption that a single 16 bit subnet number used throughout the corporate network makes sense; I would think the architecture has to allow for several /48s. In other words, I think we need to be able to use what GSE calls the "routing goop" within the enterprise network, not just in the ISP backbone.

That said, I'm hard pressed to describe anything resembling a home in similar terms. In fact, I tend to think that the authorities that assign prefixes have rational arguments for considering assignment of 44, 48, 52, 56, 60, and 64 bit prefixes to be service options that might be bundled with other aspects of the service or might be sold separately.

actually i would like to point out that RFC3582 is not a requirements document but it is a _goals_ document (its title is "Goals for IPv6 Site-Multihoming Architectures")

yes. That said, it is the closest thing we have to a requirements document, and it is what is thrown in my face as having not been met when various solutions are discussed.

I would also like to point out, that "portability" is not listed as a requirement in RFC3582, so there are absolutelly no considerations about renumbering/porivder lock in/portability in the document

OK, I pulled that in from another sector. Marla reports that many edge networks in nanog-etc want address portability, and I have heard it from other sources as well. If we can provide a certain level of address portability without screwing up the network, there is value in it, I think.

What might be helpful (thinking out loud here, not making a pronouncement; I wonder what people think) to the community at large would be a requirements document or set of documents that discusses not "requirements of a multihoming solution" but "addressing and routing requirements of an end to end network". It would have to discuss traffic engineering, from the perspective of saying what requirements were reasonable and solvable and what were not. It would have to discuss backbone and access ISPs and their business models,

i think this is very interesting point that you bring here....

Are we considering a multihoming solution for ISPs or for end sites?

I think the discussion has to take into account both ISPs and their customers, which might very well mean that it needs to be divided into separate discussions. For example, I have been told by some ISPs that they want PA addressing because it gives them a market lock, and by some of their customers that they don't want PA addressing because it gives ISPs a market lock. That kind of divide is a place where a single consensus is simply not going to form. That said, my statement above says "lets go beyond multihoming; what actually are the set(s) of requirements for routing and addressing end to end and in the middle?"

I mean i think it is clear that the requirements for a multihoming solution for an ISP and for an end site are likely to differ (or at least it is not obvious to me that they are the same or that the same solution could support both ISP and end site multihoming)

imho, different requiremetns sets should be determined including:
- small end sites
- soho end sites
- large sites
- ISPs

Probably there need to be different types of ISPs but i don't have enough background for this...

I guess I think of ISPs as being broadly divided into transit networks and access networks, although defining those terms crisply is going to be pretty tough. We used to talk about Tier 1 networks as global, Tier 2 networks as regional, and tertiary networks as being local; I tend to think of networks now as providing either interconnection between businesses or residential/SOHO access, and see FTTH as muddying that puddle.

imho it would be interesting to at least try to produce these documents and see if it is possible to reach concensous on the requirements for each scenario

I agree. It is likely to be input to the RAM discussion that the IESG is in the process of chartering, and may be more appropriately moved there at some point. Is there a part of that you would like to contribute to?

In the end, there are a small number of solutions that can be looked at generally to provide a scalable address management architecture.

scalable in which sense?

:-)

in the sense I used the term - or more to the point chose to not use the term - in the document referred to in the subject line. Since I couldn't find a crisp definition, I went in the direction of trying to enumerate the number of prefixes that each algorithm resulted in under a consistent set of assumptions that seemed to have some hope of being in the general neighborhood of reality. Larger and less firm numbers (as in "O(10^7)") are less desirable than smaller numbers (as in "O(10^5)") that have obvious derivations.

so multiaddressing does provide scalability for the routing system, but imposes a new way of doing a bunch of stuff

Each of the solutions on the table changes something. Multi- addressing, as you term it, is pretty straightforward if the end systems and routers directly support it, so while it is different it isn't all that scary to me. GSE is similarly straightforward - I implemented roughly the same set of algorithms in an XNS/IPX router in the late 1980's. Metro requires no changes to the ISP or customer premises equipment - it can be deployed today - but requires differences in business relationships. PI is something we are deploying today, and if the approach is to be applied to businesses with ten or more employees (Vince's slides from the IETF meeting) drives the amount of memory in a backbone router into the sky. There is some form of change in every one of these, and part of the discussion needs to be that for the viability of everybody's networks and businesses nobody's cows can be considered sacred. All options are on the table and the trade-offs have to be made with as little emotion as humanly possible.

GSE depends, for scalability, on rewriting part of the source address in a datagram, which helps with a number of the routing problems but begs the question of how the transport associates a request with a response. For example, if I use networks 1 and 2 and you use networks 3 and 4, and I send a message from 1::me to 3::you and get a reply from 4::you to 2::me, how do I identify that the datagram I received is a reply to the same session? Doing so requires the Endpoint ID to truly be globally unique, which is a tall order, or it requires some form of dongle at the transport layer that addresses the issue. One could imagine the locator/id separation resulting in a mandate for the use of IPSEC integrity mode to inform the transport's multiplexor.

i really don't see how this could work... I mean how would you establish any-to-any IPSec SAs that can prove endpoint ID ownership? I can see two ways of doing this, crypto ids or a third trusted party. In any case, you end up with the problem of how to delegate the capability of rewriting to the routers... and so on. My point is this can be made to work, but it won't be as simple and nice as the current proposal

I was pointing out a problem the current proposal doesn't solve... How does, for example, an RFC 3041 address gain global uniqueness? If a MAC address is used, how do we ensure global uniqueness for addresses that have the "local" flag set? If the endpoint identifier isn't globally unique, why do I believe that I can treat it as such an identifier without the routing goop that tells me which instance I'm looking at?

what it seems to be an insolvable problem (or at least extremely hard) is to build a solution that has the scalability required for a massive adoption (the one required for a small end site multihoming solution) and provides all the features required by big sites....

Personally, I don't think that is necessary. The obvious way to solve a fortune-something-company problem is to treat the fortune <something> company as if it were an ISP and give it a PI assignment comparable to an ISP. If that is a /32 and the guy only needs a /52, so be it. We're talking about a few hundred of these globally, and once they have a PI prefix they won't be back for a new prefix for a while. I'd like to see the policies of the RIRs say as much. That said, for SOHO networks and mid-sized companies (do they have different requirements?) that's definitely not the right solution, and we need an approach that works both for them and for the ISPs that serve them.