[sclug] Re: Firewalls

[Rick Payne]

--On Monday, January 20, 2003 1:56 am +0000 Will Dickson 
<wrd at glaurung.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> At the risk of going waaay off-topic, does anybody know
> what the situation is with IPv6? It appears to have gone off
> the mainstream's radar. Presumably NAT has relieved the
> IP address crunch sufficiently to allow it to be held off for
> a little longer.

The problem with IPv6 is that it requires a significant investment in new 
hardware for most folks (at just the time when traffic growth and capital 
constraints don't allow for that) - due to the fact that any serious router 
uses hardware forwarding of some description.

Couple that with the fact that the real issue folks hit is the churn in the 
routing tables, and the growth of route announcements - a topic that IPv6 
helps only marginally - then you can understand the lack of enthusiasm.

The thing thats going to help route-announcement growth is something to 
solve the 'I need to a /19's worth of address space, so I can announce it 
to all my providers, and access to my important webserver will be more 
resiliant' issue. For instance, take E-Bay. They're announcing a /19 - 
thats 8192 addresses. I'm sure they need a fair number, but do they 
*really* need that many?

I'd wager that they do not - but they *do* for sensible business reasons 
need to be resiliantly connected to the network. Currently that means 
getting a fair chunk of address space and announcing it to multiple 
upstreams. As many backbone providers are filtering small announcements - 
people tend to require a /19 as a minimum to multihome.

A fair few folks believe that the solution to this 'multi-homing' problem 
will result in a shift in the way things work. It would be a *whole* lot 
neater to get that sorted out *before* a move to IPv6. Unfortunately, for 
some silly political reasons, Asia are driving the early deployment of IPv6 
by giving tax breaks on IPv6 capable equipment from what I hear. I'd rather 
the technological decisions be made for better reasons that tax breaks.

Rick