All, I fully agree with Brian Carpenter's note of Tuesday, December 11th at 10:55:05 +0000. I support his perspective as expressed in that note.
I have read, but am NOT persuaded by, the responses from Remi Despres to Brian's notes. Further, I note that the combination ( U==1 a&& G==1) already has a well defined meaning -- namely a global-scope multicast identifier. These are not widely deployed today, but there are various folks looking into using precisely those identifiers for global-scope multicasting -- in a way compatible with IEEE 802 definitions of the EUI-64 with (U==1 && G==1). Also, I'll note that the IID portion of an IPv6 address is carefully designed to be algorithmically translatable, from an IEEE 802 standard EUI-64 identifier. That algorithm is trivial, and is universally deployed today, in a wide range of devices. The definitions of U and G bits do NOT derive ab initio from IETF documents, but instead are fundamental parts of the IEEE 802 EUI-64 architecture. The IETF architectural choice to use a (trivially-modified) EUI-64 in the IETF's IPv6 addressing formats was foundational, correct, and ought not be changed at this point. Last, according to the IANA web site (URL below), the IETF *already* has several different ways of mapping IPv4 addresses into IPv6 addresses. The 4rd folks need to show that none of these could be used for their purposes, and also need to show that none of the mapping techniques already used could work. Neither of these have been shown so far. If the 4rd advocates can't make an existing mapping (between IPv4 and IPv6) work, they ought to define a new mapping that does NOT modify the semantics of either the U or G bits. Yours, Ran Atkinson -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPv6 working group mailing list ipv6@ietf.org Administrative Requests: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipv6 --------------------------------------------------------------------
