Yes, this is definitely a "WTF?" moment in the history of Slashdot. I suggest that you all just move on to the next story and refuse to feed the troll by asking him questions.

Slashdot, obviously, has to innovate in order to stay current. Thus, they are now taking the next step after "Anonymous Cowards". The new "Identified Troll" feature will include interviews of people who have prostituted their personal credibility to some company's calculated disinformation campaign.

I last tried a Debian install around the time of Dayton Hamvention, so a few months ago. I don't have a bug #, I tried to debug GDM for a while but didn't have enough time. I can try another install sometime soon.

Well, a Core i5 tablet with two parallel screen digitizers is an odd enough bird that you can't expect it to run on the somewhat aged Debian stable. And indeed the older GNOME there handles the touchscreen incorrectly.

Because it has a touchscreen and a separate pen digitizer on the same screen. And now with the keyboard, it also has a Cirque touchpad, for a total of three digitizers.

The Toughpad has a touchscreen and a pen (with a separate digitizer!) and the touchscreen doesn't work properly in the older GNOME in stable.

There is a video of someone throwing around my model, without the keyboard, here.

After something like 20 years I finally found a system that won't run Debian unstable right now. My Panasonic Toughpad FZ-G1 magnesium tablet + iKey Jumpseat magnesium keyboard. Systemd and GDM break. Bought (for less than full price) because I am a frequent traveler and speaker and really do need something you can drop from 6 feet and pour coffee over have it keep working.

But because of this bug I have ubuntu at the moment, and am not having fun and am eager to return to Debian.

We are in a War on Faith, because Faith justifies anything and ISIS takes it to extremes. But in the end they are just a bigger version of Christian-dominated school boards that mess with the teaching of Evolution, or Mormon sponsors of anti-gay-marriage measures, or my Hebrew school teacher, an adult who slapped me as a 12-year-old for some unremembered offense against his faith.

Hm. The covenant of Noah is about two paragraphs before this part (King James Version) which is used for various justifications of slavery and discrimination against all sorts of people because they are said to bear the Curse of Ham. If folks wanted to use the Bible to justify anything ISIS says is justified by God's words in the Koran, they could easily do so.

18 And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan.
19 These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.
20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:
21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.
22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.
23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.
24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
26 And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.
27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

Get rid of your dictator and adopt a representative democracy and it will be over. Indeed, nobody could have thought it would go on this long.

because we couldn't possibly have good service from an ISP.

Don't most ISPs sell good service at a premium? I think that was the entire point with having poor service in the first place. The only other reason I could imagine would be to drive customers to the competitors, and that doesn't seem to make sense from a business point of view.

I have no imagination, so I have no idea what we might get in the future if we actually had the infrastructure to support it.

I can come up with a couple of additional usages for some /64s. One /64 could be used to harden your recursive DNS resolver against poisoning. The 16 bit transaction ID in DNS is way too small. The entropy you can get from randomizing port numbers help a lot. But you will still only get a total of 32 bits of entropy that way. Some have gone to great lengths to squeeze extra entropy into a DNS request, for example by mixing lower case and upper case in the domain. But that doesn't give a lot of bits. If you allocate a /64 to the recursive DNS resolver, you can put 64 bits of entropy into the client IP, which instantly gives you more than a doubling of entropy almost for free.

A modern OS is a multi user system, imagine if each user could get their own IP address. You could allow users to use privileged port numbers on their own IP address, and all port numbers on their IP address would be protected from usage by other users. You could do this by responding to neighbor discovery for as many IPs in your link prefix as you have users on the node. But a more secure and more efficient approach would be to route a prefix to each node.

a prefix that just got compressed might get split quickly, and vice versa

There is no need to combine the routes, if there is still free entries in the CAM. Once the CAM is full and another entry need to be inserted, the pair which has been a candidate for combining for the longest time can then be updated. That algorithm would keep the number of updates down.

However as the number of routes approach the limit of what can be handled, even with combination of routes, the frequency of updates needing to combine and split entries will go up. It may be they are already doing this, some sources say the problem did cause reduced performance, which would be consistent with such behavior.

all Comcast needed to do was write "56" in their config files rather than "60"...

One has got to wonder if that's how it happened. Did some admin arbitrarily decide to write 60 in a configuration file, where he could/should have written 56, and then that was how it was going to be? Or did a lot of bean counters get together and decide on a policy (possibly not even based on real data), and then admins had to implement it like that without asking questions.

But that's not what we should be targeting. We should be targeting "enough for pretty much everybody", and "for the foreseeable future" -- including for any new, fun things that become possible because of easily-available address space.

Even in many areas where there is tough competition among ISPs, it is hard to find even one trying to capture those customers, who want IPv6. That's how bad it looks today. And that's why I would happily take a /60. Hopefully once IPv6 is the norm (which it likely will be before the end of the decade), the ISPs will start competing on prefix lengths as well.

I can't yet imagine what I would use more than a /60 for. But if I get a /60, I might soon come up with ideas on how to use a /56. All it takes to get that competition among ISPs started is two people independently of each other coming up with something really cool you can do to put your entire /60 to use.

Next, IPv6 addresses are of course 4 times larger than IPv4 addresses. Even if your IPv6 routing table has 5 times fewer entries, you're not getting a 5 times saving in memory. You're only getting a 5/4 times saving or tables that are 80% of the IPv4 - nowhere near as dramatic.

In IPv4 all 32 bits are used for routing, though on the backbone you tend to only accept /24s. In IPv6 the first 64 bits are used for routing, though on the backbone you tend to only accept /48s.

Either way, you only need twice as many bits in the CAM to handle an IPv6 route compared to IPv4. So what you call a 20% saving is more like a 60% saving. The picture is a bit more complicated, because two CAM entries at half the size is not the same as one of the full size. So you may have to decide at design time, how you are going to use that CAM.

Routing tables growing with the size of the network, in terms of # of entries - even if not at all fragmented.

I'd love to take part in solving that problem. Any realistic solution is going to start with a migration to IPv6. And I don't see how we could expect the solution to be deployed any faster, so if we start now, we could probably have it in production by 2040.

it is possible that IPv6 is actually too small to be able to solve routing scalability.

That algorithm has a major drawback. The address of a node depends on which links are up and which are not. You'd have to renumber your networks and update DNS, every time a link changing somewhere cause your address to change. If we assume that issue can be fixed, it doesn't really imply that addresses would have to be larger.

The algorithm in the paper assigns two identifications to each node. The first one could very well be the IPv6 address assigned to the node. The second address is computed based on the first address and structure of the network. However their routing looks awfully similar to source routing. So really the solution might just be to make source routing work.

I can think of a couple of other reasons to consider IPv6 addresses to be too short. That paper isn't one.

Teredo and 6to4 are two "automatic" tunnel protocols. Both embed IPv4 addresses inside IPv6 addresses. Due to the use of NAT, Teredo needs to embed two IPv4 addresses and a port number inside the IPv6 address. That doesn't leave room for a site-level-aggregator or host part. If you wanted one unified protocol which could replace both Teredo and 6to4, you'd need at least 192 bits in the IPv6 address.

After IPv6 showed up, people realized that it is sometimes convenient to embed cryptographic information inside the IP address. That was unthinkable with IPv4. With IPv6 it is doable, but you have to chose cryptographic primitives that are not exactly state of the art, due to 128 bits being a bit short for cryptographic values, and not all of them even being available for that purpose.