Also...... (I need to re-read your post to get a better understanding of the mechanism in IPv6)... how will self-allocating addresses affect summarization...... part of what's killing BGP/internet routers is that addresses are scattered around and makes the table much larger than what it should be. If the lower order bits were based on MAC addr, it seems that there would be a huge waste of address space...... i.e. if the MAC addr of a NIC is used as the last (least significant to everyone but IBM) 48 bits, wouldn't that mean the smallest scope would contain 2^48 addresses (i.e. the first 80 bits are "assigned" and the last 48 are MAC based).... which is 65536 times more than all IPv4 IP space combined..... So when Joe Blow opens a couple of furniture store and puts 5 PCs in, he'll have 2^48 addresses assigned because that's the smallest scope? I'm way off in speculation land at this point..... so feel free to publicly humiliate me to set the record straight.... =)
I'm sure I'm missing something and I need to read and learn more about IPv6 (when's your book coming out? =)... however, it seems in an attempt to make addressing a convenience (where it doesn't take skill to understand and do it), there will be wasted space...... The only people that want "auto-addressing", IMHO, want it out of laziness... I mean, technologies like DHCP can handle dynamic assignment of addrs from a given scope, so why concentrate on fixing something that's not broken. Why bother wasting time with "convenience" of auto-addressing and just fix what's wrong with our system now (i.e. it's 32-bit which the 128-bit will fix, and the fact that IPs weren't handed out in a way that was condusive to summarization, which can be fixed when they start handing out IPv6 addrs).... Mike W. Message Posted at: http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=42925&t=42913 -------------------------------------------------- FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]