On Oct 17, 2014, at 5:16 PM, James Woodyatt <j...@nestlabs.com> wrote:
> p1. It looks like you agree that locally generate ULA prefixes should be 
> allowed to expire. What I don't see is any conceptual outline for deciding, 
> in a distributed methodology, which prefixes to renew and which to release 
> when their valid lifetime expires. Without seeing that, I can't agree that 
> you've proposed anything that solves the problem I keep yammering about, much 
> less offered a better solution than the one I proposed earlier in the thread.

Please don't put words in my mouth.

I did explain how to do that: before the network partitions, divide the ULA 
into 64k /64 prefixes, and distribute these evenly among attached routers.   
Routers other than the ones that own a particular /64 are not allowed ever to 
use that /64 unless the router that owns it relinquishes it to them explicitly. 
  Prior to partition, an agreement is made that one of the routers gets to keep 
the ULA in the event of a long-term partition.   When a partition happens, the 
routers that aren't able to reach that router anymore need to start a process 
of deprecating the ULA and adding a new ULA.   Presumably after something like 
half the total partition/abandon timeout period, they generate a new ULA and 
deprecate the old ULA.   If the network is reconnected after that, the new ULA 
is deprecated, the old ULA is advertised as preferred, and things heal.

> p2. I also remain confused about the reasoning behind calling for a 
> persistent locally-generated ULA prefix. In a previous message you said that 
> it's okay for locally-generated ULA prefixes to expire, because there is no 
> need for hosts on home networks to have any guarantee that at least one of 
> its interface addresses is invariant over time, just that at least one of 
> their addresses is never flash renumbered when a delegated prefix changes. As 
> Lorenzo has demonstrated earlier today, this quality of never being 
> flash-renumbered is easily met by delegated ULA and ordinary GUA prefixes.

No, I actually said that it's worth making some effort to avoid having ULAs 
expire.   But it's impossible to eliminate situations in which they must.   My 
goal is simply to avoid having things like simple reconfigurations of the 
network topology result in the generation of new ULAs.

> Returning to my question: why do we always need a locally-generated ULA 
> prefix?  If it's to provide a time-invariant locally routable address to 
> hosts, then locally generated ULA prefixes cannot ever be permitted to expire 
> for any reason.  If they are ever allowed to expire, then they don't provide 
> the time-invariant property.  However, if we don't actually need the 
> time-invariant property, then what does a locally-generated ULA prefix do for 
> us whenever one or more delegated prefixes is also present? It's not clear to 
> me they are anything but absolutely redundant and unnecessary in that 
> situation.

This is a bit of a straw man (see previous comment).   I think trying to keep a 
permanent ULA is a good thing.   We can't always succeed, but we can make the 
set of circumstances under which we fail as small as possible.   This is in 
contrast to what you are proposing, which is that we essentially set out to 
fail, and see deprecation events whenever the upstream network goes down.
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