On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 23:15, Owen DeLong <o...@delong.com> wrote: You seem to be indirectly answering the parent posting in much of what you say. That is fine, I just wanted to point it out.
> > It's a commonly accepted, well-defined convention to save humans > > effort while not sacrificing readability. There are weirder things in > > technology. > > I don't think it's all that weird and it's a major savings in writing > out IPv6 addresses and being able to read them (except in lists of > varying sized addresses (please, when dumping routing tables > and such, just keep the optional zeroes or give us a flag to choose). > In practice, the :: usually ends up being placed between the > network number and the host number for things with static > addresses and rarely appears in EUI-64 based addresses, > so, I don't see this as a problem. FWIW, I do not see it as weird or as a problem, either. "There are weirder things" does not mean the thing I am referring to is weird itself :) > I don't see a problem with people not assigning customers /56s so long > as they go in the correct direction and give /48s and not /60s or /64s. Many ISPs will end up handing their customers /64, /62 or other less-than-ideal prefixes. As soon as a customer needs to subnet their /64, the real fun starts. There is nothing we can do about it, other than trying to educated people and hope for the best. > > I honestly think I never explained (as in, after I understood the > > matter, myself) netmasks other than as a bit vector. Unless you mean > > "write 255.255.255.0 in there cause that's what right for you". > > Then you are young and never had to deal with systems that didn't > know about bit-vector syntax. I have had to explain the translation > between bit-vector syntax (/n) and bit-field syntax (255.255.255.240) > to many people. It's easy when n is a multiple of 8. After that, > it can be quite hard for some mathematically challenged individuals > unfamiliar with binary and BCD to wrap their heads around. I wish ;) Either the person can grasp that a dotted netmask can be transformed into a bit vector or I tell them "use 255.255.255.0 everywhere, it will work for everything you will ever need." 80/20 and all that. > Removing bitmath from operations where possible is a good thing > that reduces outages caused by human factors. It's just good human > factors engineering. > We can't do so in IPv4, there aren't enough bits to do it. > We seek to do so in IPv6 with ARIN draft policy 2010-8 and > proposal 121. If by bitmath you mean ending netmasks not on full bytes only, I could not agree more. This will reduce a lot of useless overhead. I really wish the RIRs would get unique a name space for their respective drafts. If even my person object needs a -RIPE suffix, I don't see why drafts etc don't. > Should we all sing kumbayah now? Only if you bring a tambourine. > Basically, as I recall the earlier discussions of this and the IETF > arriving at the decision to use colon (:), it boiled down to the > simple fact that colon (:) is the worst choice except for all the others. Agreed. Richard