[retronet] RetroNet globally-routable address allocation policy

[Mantas Mikulėnas]

Hello. I found this project through the TUHS mailing list. I'm interested
in old protocols like X.25 and ATM, though I don't actually have any
software nor hardware to use them with.

On Sun, Sep 2, 2018 at 8:53 PM Michael Kjörling <michael at kjorling.se> wrote:

> >> Note:  I'm allocating a /48 to each member so that they can divide it
> >> into many /64s.
> >
> > A /48 would be the smallest block I'd want to dish out as well.
>
> /48 gives plenty of room for subnetting, but is there an appropriate
> IPv6 block to carve them out of? It doesn't _really_ matter as long as
> nobody cares about global routing on the same host, but could
> potentially complicate routing for multihomed hosts unnecessarily. Or
> are we willing to rule out use on multihomed systems?
>
> There's the old, deprecated site-local space, which would provide
>

Hopefully there isn't some mismatch between old systems actually treating
them as site-local unicast with the special rules, and modern systems
treating them as global unicast.


> sufficient room. Properly done RFC 4193 space doesn't; that gives only
> a single /64.
>

RFC 4193 says that "locally assigned" prefixes (i.e. in fd00::/8) have a
40-byte unique ID and give a /48 prefix. So you can assign a /48 per user,
there is no problem.

But RFC 4193 doesn't define any specific method for assigning prefixes in
the "centrally assigned" fc00::/8 range. If cjdns can get away with
littering the entire /8 with pubkey-based addresses, you could also get
away with assigning fc00:<ipv4>:<ipv4>::/48 or fc00:<idx>:<idx>::/48 to
each user.

I would also consider 3ffe::/16 (old 6bone) – unlikely to be reused anytime
soon, and with nostalgia already built in.


> Or ffff:<ipv4>:<ipv4>::/48? But I think that's special-cased by a lot
> of software...
>

All of ff00::/8 is multicast addresses; you really don't want to use that
for unicast. (Though it sounds like you're mixing it up with
0:0:0:0:0:ffff::/96, which is another special case.)

-- 
Mantas Mikulėnas

(Apparently my presence in this list is a blatant violation of chivanet.org
terms of service. I had hoped that something like RetroNet would have
included the old idea of a global internet without country or continent
borders, but oh well.)
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