[governance] IPv6 address allocations to DOD

[McTim]

One last try...

On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 9:08 AM, Ian Peter <ian.peter at ianpeter.com> wrote:
> Well after all of that, my two basic questions remain. I appreciate John
> Currans hands are tied, and that ARIN is acting in the best interests of the
> Internet community, but my questions remain.

Easy enough to find the answers yourself, but if you really must know,
I have special consulting rates for CS ;-)


> How many IP addresses have been reserved for US military use? (in plain,
> simple numerics). John only tells me what has been allocated, while
> mentioning more have been reserved.

Reserved might be too strong a word. When a RIR makes an allocation,
it uses a "sparse allocation system".  You can read more about that
here: http://www.ripe.net/docs/ipv6-sparse.html#3

and here:
http://www.getipv6.info/index.php/IPv6_Addressing_Plans

"Sparse allocation for IPv6 addresses
is strongly recommended. If allocated address blocks are not adjacent
to each other then when a customer says, "I need more addresses,"
there is a strong probability that you can grant the request by simply
changing the prefix length. This keeps your routing table small and
tidy. You get lots and lots
of IPv6 addresses, so if you only break them up into a dozen pools you
still have plenty with which to do sparse allocation. If you break
them up into pools for each of the hundreds or even thousands of POPs
that you have and/or create two levels of aggregation (first by POP,
second by area), you won't have enough to do effective sparse
allocation."

In other words, while the larger block is available for the DoD to
grow into, it is possible that another network COULD be allocated
numbers within that range.  This applies to all IPv6 allocations, not
just DoD.


 Its the latter figure I am interested
> in, and as yet I don't have a denial or correction of the
> 42,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 figure

right then, go to the link that John sent and multiply the number of
IPs in a /22 times 14.  it's not rocket science.  The number one gets
is at least one order of magnitude smaller than the one above.

advanced at
>
> royal.pingdom.com/.../the-us-department-of-defense-has-42-million-billion-
> billion-billion-ipv6-addresses/
>
> Nor do I have any denial that this is the largest allocation or reservation
> to date.

There is no way to search the WHOIS for the "largest block" in a
Database.  Not for the public at least. The RIRs may have hostmaster
tools that would allow this. you will have to ask them via
hostmaster at .  As I said before, it seems likely that the worlds
largest IPv4 holder would also be the largest IPv6 holder.

>
> What I do have, following McTims research, is that the justification appears
> to be a concept called NCW (Network-centric warfare).
Would it not be fair,
> then, to allocate and reserve blocks of the same size for the military of
> each nation state so that we have a level playing (sic) field for
> network-centric warfare?

Hmmm, on the one hand you are bitterly complaining about what you
perceive as waste of Ipv6, but at the same time are advocating wasting
~200 times that?  What is "fair" is that organizations get the IPv6
space they need.  No more or less.

If the military of say Belgium (an example of a  a small country), can
only justify a /32, why on earth would you g9ve them 14 /22s.

We are meant to be wasteful of IPv6 space, but not profligately so.
If you want someone to blame for what you obviously see as a fiasco,
blame the IETF for IPv6 addressing architecture, not the RIRs or their
members/users of IP space.  That would be unfair!!


 Or would we rather create a couple of dominant
> nations and then aim for a network-centric warfare non proliferation treaty?

You are conflating two things you should not in addition to making the
mistake that 2 nations are unequal in terms of NCW because they have
different amounts of IPv6 space.
If Belgium can do network-centric warfare with a /32, then isn't there
a level playing field?

>
> I remain suspicious that the shoulders of ARIN were lent on not too gently
> in the reservation of  42,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
> addresses (or whatever the figure is). I can't see that the allocation would
> have been made otherwise.

And you'll probably write a blog post about it, or IGP will, or
someone without a clue will, and this will only serve to feed the
fires you spoke about earlier.  Let's put out these fires with facts
and knowledge instead.  Perhaps the IGC would like to sponsor an IGF
workshop on the scale of IPv6 and why thinking in terms of numbers of
addresses is misleading?

Perhaps you could just accept the fact that sparse allocation combined
with 64 bits for interface IDs combined with HD ratios (and not
percentages of IPs in use) for utilization measurement combined with
Ipv6 subnetting means that only a small fraction of the possible
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,770,000,000 Ipv6 addresses
will ever be used.  As Chris Gunderman says at

http://weblog.chrisgrundemann.com/index.php/2009/address_space-mac_v_ip/

"Even assuming over 4,000 hosts per segment as an average, the
utilization would stand at: 0.0000000000000222044605%"

That's the way it was designed. Get used to it, or advocate for change
to the IETF.

>
> But we may never know.


Ah, but we DO know that allocations are made based upon justified
need.  I sent you the presentations because they show years of work
inside DoD to prepare and plan for IPv6 deployment.  I can't imagine
what a headache it would be to gather all of this information on all
of the networks that DoD is responsible for administering. No wonder
it took a year to sort out!


-- 
Cheers,

McTim
"A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A
route indicates how we get there."  Jon Postel
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