When Will IPv6 Addresses be Assigned?

Panel moderated by Allison Mankin


The Thursday afternoon plenary hour was primarily devoted to four brief
presentations, towards answering the question ``When will IPv6 addresses
be assigned?''  It is important to realize that IPv6 addresses using
IPv4 as a base are well-defined, and can be deployed wherever the IPv6
stack is by upgrading the DNS server to offer AAAA records.  But
non-IPv4 compatible IPv6 addresses must be made available soon, in order
for us to refine the addressing architecture and make way for the
full-scale deployment of IPv6.  Only with 128-bit IPv6 addresses will
the autoaddressing and other growth-handling features of IPv6 be used.

The talks were:


   o Bob Hinden, The IPv6 Addressing Architecture
     This talk summarized an Internet-Draft of the same name.

   o Daniel Karrenberg, Address Registries' Readiness for IPv6
     This talk described the national registries system currently used
     for IPv4.  The background can be found in Karrenberg's presentation
     published in the proceedings of the Amsterdam IETF (July 1993).

   o Yakov Rekhter, The Preferred Provider-Based IPv6 Address Format
     This talk summarized an Internet-Draft of the same name, with
     revisions that will be in the document by February 1994, and which
     are discussed in the minutes of the IPng Working Group in this IETF
     proceedings.

   o Jon Postel, A Suggestion for Initial Allocations of IPv6
     This talk proposed a use of the Ethernet organization identifier to
     provide an initial set of provider identifiers for 128-bit IPv6
     addresses.  An Internet-Draft of IANA views on the IPv6 address
     space is in preparation.