Re: [lir-wg] Discussion about RIPE-261

[Andre Oppermann <]

Gert Doering wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 03:03:24PM +0200, Andre Oppermann wrote:
> > Can anyone tell me why an IP address should be geograhically
> > significant in this way? Doesn't this open a can of worms of
> > potential abuse all over the place?
> 
> One motivation I can see for it is to permit more-specific announcements
> inside a region (because it's interesting to find "the shortest way"
> to the destination network) but to summarize the routing information
> "from the outside".

How often did your routing policy change over the last seven years?
How often do you point a default route towards one of your upstreams?
Does is matter if only a holy batch of ISPs are allowed to run real
routing at all?
Since when has geography anything to do with network topology?
Routing is not about the shortest path, it's about the cheapest
path along the policies of the AS it is passing through?

> For us, as a small german ISP, it's not really important who is hooked
> up where in the US or in the AP region - so a summary route "all this
> stuff is in the US, send this to our upstream" (simplified) is likely
> to suit us fine.

Yes, not every ISP is a small german ISP...

You try to fix an routing protocol issue at the network level. Major
mistake. Things like this are normally not handled on the data plane,
they are handled on the control plane. Which means routing protocol.
So we are back at BGP.

> [..]
> > Why do we try to fix an engineering problem (scaling global routing
> > mesh (BGP)) with unworkable IP address distribution policies???
> 
> Because nobody came up with a fix to the BGP scalability issues yet...?

Hmmm... Moore's law? If I remember correctly ten years ago your
average (backbone) router had a Mbyte of RAM. Today 128MB is average
and more 256MB is quite commmon. CPUs have also come a great way
since then. Effectively there is nothing preventing a global BGP
routing system from having 500'000 prefixes and 65'000 AS (except
of course the price tag of a Cisco box with some old M68k processor).

We don't have a BGP scalability issue as such at all. We are now at
BGPv4, which means there have been some previous iterations in the
matrix. What do we need for BGPv5? More AS numbers. What else? More
CPU and more RAM to store more AS number and IP prefixes.

> [..]
> > What point does it make that we have got an IP address space so
> > large so we can assign an IP number to every grain of sand on this
> > planet if it can't keep the number?
> 
> IPv6 routing, using todays technology, is only going to work if you can
> have enough hierarchy in the routing system.  And yes, this means
> "renumber".

And how is that different from IPv4 + NAT? I hardly see any IPv6
"routing system" at all.

You are making a very big mistake by just looking at today's structure
and needs. Going from there is never giving you a scaleable and adaptive
network for the future. Why don't you take your current IPv6 ideas and
(virtually) put them on top of the Internet ten years ago? See what
happens?
Keep everything on it's level and don't move routing policy from the
policy level to the forwarding level. It won't work. Also
have a look at every month of the last 10 years. Watch how the
Internet, the link capacity, the CPU power, the memory sizes and so
on have developed. How many times had the harddisk bus IDE/ATA to
be extended to acomodate the new drive capacities? In 1993 I was the
proud owner of a i386sx16MHz PC with 1MB of RAM. Today I've got two
GB of RAM in the very PC I'm writing this email on. What the heck,
I've could even stick four GB in there, it's only €320 nowadays.
About the price of an average high level 3d graphics card for gaming.


The hardest thing is always to stick to the simplest principles. That
is why so many greatly engineered things fail.


What has made the current IPv4 Internet scale to the level we see
today? I'm not only talking about the routing but also new applications
like WWW/HTTP, Napster, Peer-to-Peer and so on. Think about it and
see how many of those simple principles are being broken by todays
IPv6 state of affairs (plus all the nice proposals out there for
fixing problems we didn't even had before)?

> (Apart from that, IPv6 is not about numbering grains of sand :) )

Ok, but what is it about then? I haven't found an advantage of IPv6
over IPv4 yet that would gain me anything (easy of use, cheaper,
less work, etc).

-- 
Andre