[CUWiN-Dev] IPv6 for Community Networks: Back from the Dead.

[Sascha Meinrath]

Hi all,

The ongoing quest for IPv6 space continues (and is going quite well). 
For the past year or so I've been working to get a block of IPv6 space for 
CUWiN (in particular), Community Wireless Networks, and Community Networks 
in general.  Free Press has come on board to help create a 
process/structure that'll make it possible to get a /32 for the endeavor 
and mainstain the system necessary to make it all work.

We had a discussion about this on the old -dev list beginning August 30th 
of last year.  It would be great if we could revisit the discussion and 
formulate a techical solution for ad-hoc networks to utilize a /32 to 
ensure unique IPs for devices.

Keep in mind that we're only attempting to create a process for ad-hoc 
networks that use MAC addresses + some sort of geocode (our goal is to 
figure out a standard for what this would look like).  Let me know if you 
have any questions -- here's some background info from:

http://www.arin.net/policy/ipv6_policy.html:

     "Compared to IPv4, IPv6 has a seemingly endless amount of address 
space. While superficially true, short-sighted and wasteful allocation 
policies could also result in the adoption of practices that lead to 
premature exhaustion of the address space.

     It should be noted that the 128-bit address space is divided into 
three logical parts, with the usage of each component managed differently. 
The rightmost 64 bits, the Interface Identifier [RFC2373], will often be a 
globally-unique IEEE identifier (e.g., mac address). Although an 
"inefficient" way to use the Interface Identifier field from the 
perspective of maximizing the number of addressable nodes, the numbering 
scheme was explicitly chosen to simplify Stateless Address 
Autoconfiguration [RFC2462].

     The middle 16 bits of an address indicate the subnet ID. Per [RFC 
3177, RIRs-on-48s], this field will often be inefficiently utilized, but 
the operational benefits of a consistent width subnet field were deemed to 
be outweigh the drawbacks.

     The decisions to inefficiently utilize the bits to the right of /48 
were made under the knowledge and assumption that the bits to the left of 
/48 would be managed prudently and that if done so, will be adequate for 
the expected lifetime of IPv6 [RFC3177]."

***

Also, who will be at the Media Reform Conference in St. Louis next month? 
ARIN is sending staff to meet with me about this (yes, they are _that_ 
serious) -- if possible, I'd love to have some tech-heavies to help answer 
questions they might have.

Let me know,

--Sascha

-- 
Sascha Meinrath
President                 *   Project Coordinator   *   Policy Analyst
Acorn Worker Collective  ***  CU Wireless Network  ***  Free Press
www.acorncollective.com   *   www.cuwireless.net    *   www.freepress.net