[89188] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: shim6 @ NANOG
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roland Dobbins)
Sat Mar 4 23:49:47 2006
In-Reply-To: <BF65EB93-7CC0-43BA-82F3-075FE1DAE7D9@isc.org>
From: Roland Dobbins <rdobbins@cisco.com>
Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2006 20:48:58 -0800
To: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On Mar 4, 2006, at 7:06 PM, Joe Abley wrote:
> No support in big networks is required, beyond the presence of
> shim6 in server stacks.
Why do you say this? Enterprises who multihome need their client
machines (tens and hundreds of thousands of them) to be able to take
advantage of multihoming, as well. It's a requirement, not a luxury.
[Note that I do not address the blurring of client and server roles
which is happening even now, and which will almost certainly become
more prevalent over the anticipated lifetime of the success protocol
to IPv4.]
This fundamental misconception of the requirements of large
enterprise customers should be an indicator to proponents of shim6,
among others, that they do not have a good grasp of the day-to-day
operational and business realities faced by large enterprises. This
lack of understanding has led to such fundamental misconceptions as a
belief that large enterprises can accept frequent renumbering within
their organizations based upon changing business relationships with
their SPs (they cannot, see RFC 4192 for some of the reasons why
not), as well as underestimating the importance of multihoming for
client computers as well as servers.
shim6 is simply not viable for large enterprises, who are the
customers who require multihoming. I would argue that it's not
really viable for smaller organizations either, due to the complexity
it adds to the troubleshooting matrix for support staff. I hope that
the operational community will turn to more fruitful lines of enquiry
regarding IPv6 multihoming.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Roland Dobbins <rdobbins@cisco.com> // 408.527.6376 voice
Everything has been said. But nobody listens.
-- Roger Shattuck