Re: my action items from sunday's rssac meeting

[Rob Austein <sra@hactrn.net>]

At Thu, 13 Nov 2003 13:21:00 +0900 (JST), Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino wrote:
> 
> 	for the purpose of root server operation, just ignore "IPv6 anycast"
> 	(like "anycast" flag to ifconfig in *BSD) and configure as if it is a
> 	normal address for the machine.  that is what i called "pseudo anycast"
> 	in the anycast-analysis draft, and it should work okay if (1) routing
> 	changes are not frequent, and (2) protocol roundtrip (i.e. DNS query to
> 	reply) is short.

with apologies for not having reread either your draft or the relevant
portion of the ipv6 addr arch doc in the very recent past:

on one level this answer is fine.  on another, it's a bit strange,
because this is pretty much the same answer we seem to give to every
actual use of anycast.  that is: since all known uses of anycast seem
to be what itojun calls "pseudo anycast", this begs the question of
whether ipv6 anycast is useful as specified.  this is the topic i
proposed to work on with itojun.

one way of looking at this is that the attempt to specify all the
interesting properties of ipv6 anycast proper is well intentioned but
is perhaps more useful considered as a set of warnings about ways in
which anycast can or can't be used than as a specification for form of
anycast that's different in any fundamental way from ipv4 anycast.