IPv6 Addressing Considered Harmful DRAFT:this needs a lot of tightening up this dates from may 2011, wish I had

d written it a couple of years earlier, but it is still valid Dennis Farr Treefrog Enterprises (www.treefrogenterprises.com) I remember a time before area codes on phone numbers and zip codes on letters. ('Letters' refers to snail mail, an ancient form of social networking.) Both of these changes to addressing systems were in response to explosive growth and the need to automate connections over worldwide distances. Both extended the address length as needed to reach out beyond a boundary of an area where the old simpler addressing scheme remained unchanged. This note is a result of wondering why IPv6 is NOT an extension of IPv4, by analogy with area codes and zip codes. Example: instead of 2345:6789:0ABC:DEF1:2345:6789:0ABC:DEF1 for my neighbor, why not keep <br> 10.0.0.1 for my neighbor, <br> 100.100.100.100:10.0.0.1 for someone in a different organization,<br> 100.100.100.100:100.100.100.100:10.0.0.,1 for someone across the country, <br> and 100.100.100.100:100.100.100.100:100.100.100.100:10.0.0.1 for someone on the other side of the world? One possible reason in favor of the large flat address space is so that there is no penalty, address-wise, in dealing with the guy on the other side of the world. In many ways that is an admirable idea, but it tends to hide the fact that some things are close and others are very distant in the real world. An objection to the nested address is that it is a form of source routing in slightly disguised form. this is not necessarily true. The actual routing of a message will still depend on the routing tables of the routers the message passes through. It is also possible that these routing tables will scale better than IPv6 routing tables, since the hierarchical nature of the encapsulation will lend itself to scalability. In favor of an extension of IPv4 is the fact that networking hardware is optimized for 32bit addresses, and running IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time on a box requires an additional set of code and duplicate data structures, which increases the load on the box nonlinearly. Running hierarchical 32-bit address chunks would permit much more code and data structure reuse. Direct dialing [with area codes] was gradually instituted throughout the country, and by the mid-1960s, it was commonplace in most larger cities. International calling adds a few more digits to the number. For the most part you didn't need it until you made a long distance call. IT EXTENDED BUT DID NOT REPLACE THE EXISTING PHONE NUMBER SYSTEM.<br> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Numbering_Plan The ZIP code was introduced in the US at about the same time. IT EXTENDED BUT

DID NOT REPLACE THE EXISTING MAIL ADDRESSING SYSTEM.<br> http://inventors.about.com/od/xyzstartinventions/a/zipcode.htm IPv6 was started in the early 90s so the people involved were all about my age and should have been familiar with these successful experiments in address enlargement. Why did they choose to go a different way? First, did they have a choice? It certainly seems likely that one could devise a system of envelopes so if a packet was going off-campus it would be encapsulated with a larger address, if going out of the local area, that encapsulation could be further encapsulated, and so on for as many levels as needed. And why go from 32-bits to 128 bits? why not just go to 64 bits? Consider that the Internet is now responsible for about 10% of the world gross domestic product. When IPv6 was created the Internet was small, and a complete overhaul might not have seemed like such a radical idea. Now, it may not be such a good idea, considering the risks. The large flat address space defies the objective of making addresses human readable. With IPv6, the address of your next-door neighbor, who you may interact with frequently, is just as large as the address of someone on the other side of the planet. Also this means that every packet has 96 more bits for each address in the packet compared to IPv4 32-bit addresses. And you can no longer talk to your next door neighbor as before. You have to learn an entirely new, foreign address for everyone you communicate with, so the change is extremely intrusive. One argument in favor of IPv6 is that it fixes some problems with the IPv4 protocol and thus it is an incompatible replacement, instead of an extension, by design. This argument does not really supply any justification for the large flat address space, however. There are three discernible waves of problems to come with IPv6. First wave: implementation errors and security holes in the new protocol. Second wave: competition for hardware resources when IPv6 usage grows. Third wave: buyer's remorse as IPv6 deficiencies become widely appreciated, and something else is implemented. An argument against the large flat address space approach to IPv6 is that however large, it is NOT EXTENSIBLE, so there is the potential to go through this exercise all over again for IPv8, where we will presumably extend the address to 1024 bits. If we had adopted an encapsulation approach, truly unlimited address lengths would be supported with no change in the underlying architecture. It is as if we saw the address depletion problem in IPv4, realized the danger of a finite limit to the address space, and said: "We could fix this problem the correct way, just like the area and zip codes. We could...NAH, let's not!" http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7ms9a_saturday-night-live-theodoric-of-yo_fun Is it too late to do anything about this? Perhaps not. The history of the computer revolution is riddled with technological bad ideas that were driven out by better ideas. (Look these up: PHIGS, ethernet ring topology, MULTICS,

minicomputers. Add a few of your own examples.) Cisco has made tremendous profit in the past by leading the standards process rather than following along. Cisco has had and continues to have the strongest collection of talented engineers in the field of networking. If any organization could turn back the rush to IPv6, and reap tremendous benefit from it, it is Cisco. Conversely, going along with a flawed standard is dangerous and leads to missing the next wave when enough people become disgusted with IPv6 and someone else out there works out the correct solution. (So we need to be prepared to buy that person out before he or she buys us out.) IPv6 was presciently called IPng in the old days, meaning IP next generation, and so it comes to pass that a generation later it is finally becoming implemented, although we aren't feeling all the pain this is going to cause yet. Get ready for gaping security holes, massive identity and financial theft, and communications breakdowns as everyone learns a new system. The incomprehensibility of the long addresses is just an added source of confusion and stress. Maybe a new generation of geniuses should come up with something better. Additional paragraphs: After just a little time spent with IPv6, I am convinced that the IPv6 address at 32 hex digits is too long for humans to deal with except for cut-n-paste. The address is just too long to keep in short term memory. It is well documented that most of us are comfortable with 7 +/- 2 digits in short term memory (phone number, DDTS ID, email address, ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two So the prospect of humans dealing with IPv6 addresses and not making a huge number of mistakes is real and imminent. One can foresee the evolution of a new set of 65536 symbols so the IPv6 address can be represented as a string of eight of these new symbols. The Chinese may have the lead in this regard as their language already has thousands of symbols. Unicode already has a system for representing 16 bits in one character space so we might spin off the new symbols form this as a starting point. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters, see for example Ethiopic, or http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/ethiopic.html)