Re: [Int-area] Review of draft-narten-ipv6-3177bis-48boundary-05

[Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@gmail.com>]

On 2010-08-21 13:29, Mark Smith wrote:
....
> Protocols like IPX and Appletalk were easier to use because they were
> designed to be user friendly - with the users of the protocols being
> both the end users and the operators of the network (if the network
> was large enough for them to exist). 

Oh, archaeology is called for.

The direct inspiration for the /64 boundary in IPv6 was IPX (or,
to be historically correct, XNS). And a lot of the thinking behind
promoting /48 as the one-size-fits-all prefix length was also
based on IPX/XNS (and a little bit on DECnet).

IPX and Appletalk directly inspired the decision to have built-in
stateless autoconfiguration as part of IPv6; ND and RA were of course
invented anew, but the main goal was zero-conf ease of use.

At that time, IPv4 was a manual configuration nightmare, because
DHCP wasn't yet deployable.

But we have moved on since then, and I believe that 3177bis hits
the mark fairly accurately (given that we now have DHCPv6 where
needed).

    Brian