> Joe Greco wrote: > > One of the goals of providing larger address spaces was to reduce (and > > hopefully eliminate) the need to burn forwarding table entries where > > doing so isn't strictly necessary. When we forget this, it leads us > > to the same sorts of disasters that we currently have in v4. > > And if you are encouraging /48 handouts, /32 isnt large enough to > prevent that on the global level.
I don't know that I'm *en*couraging /48 handouts, but on the other hand, I'm not sure I'm *dis*couraging it either. On one hand, there's a reasonable argument to be made that the average home user does not currently have enough devices to fill more than a /124's worth of space. But. You have RFC3041 and similar techniques, stateless autoconfig, and a variety of other general things that make it really awful for the default ethernet network size to be something besides a /64. Further, it seems clear from most discussions I've had, that people really do want or need the ability to have multiple networks, for a variety of practical reasons. Many of these have to do with keeping different zones firewalled in particular ways, So, really, I think the question is, how many unique firewalling policies is a household likely to have, and then, maybe how many other neighbors/friends/etc are also freeloading on that connection, each with the same needs? A /56 allows up to 256 networks. For today, that's pretty clearly all that I can reasonably imagine even a sophisticated home network along with several neighbors needing. Probably even within the next ten years. At some point, however, it is possible that a /48 would be a better choice. I would definitely prefer to see a /56, or maybe a /48, handed out today. If we get into the practice of handing out /64's, it is just going to encourage bad hacky design compromises and CPE/SOHO gear kludges in the future? ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
