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RE: [arin-announce] IPv4 Address Space (fwd)

  • From: Kuhtz, Christian
  • Date: Tue Oct 28 10:52:28 2003

> >> Does anybody honestly think companies will commit the 
> capex needed to 
> >> implement IPv6?
> 
> > William Leibzon wrote:
> > Not without additional benefits.
> 
> I agree, and they're all gone now. To my deepest regrets, 
> IPv6 has become nothing more than IPv4 with more bits (it's 
> actually worse than IPv4 as of today).

Excuse my rambling and what some may consider heresy even :), but..

One question to ask is whether IPv6's approach is the right one, furthering
a particular way of doing things rather than really reinventing itself.  Do
I really need global awareness of address space?  Why isn't address space a
tool, services is what you're really after, and why not build an
infrastructure centered around context of a service rather than reachability
of an address?  If we're going thru all this trouble in providing support
for it, why not make it a more revolutionary approach?  Is it really
realistic to have some of the features in IPv6 employed in the way they are
designed?

The debate around NAT in IPv6 circles clearly show that there's an (more or
less) academic desire to expose every address on the planet to every other.
Is that truly required by way of the way IPv4/v6 work today?   There are
very convincing arguments to be made to say that this isn't desirable and
that I don't particularly want everybody to get to every address  (and once
you accept that unrestricted, 100% reachability of every globally assigned
address is unrealistic, many of the arguments behind the need for vast
address space go away..).  I really don't necessarily care what somebody's
address is, if or if not it gets translated, as long as reachability
exists..  So, as long as I can make the service work, what does it matter?
Per hop architectures do seem to work nicely.

The addressing allocation debate and that we to this date do not have a
fully functional and working 'multihoming address space to multiple
providers' approach that matches reality is another problem to be solved.
And notions that try to explain the need for multihoming away rather than
admitting that strictly hierarchical address space may be a dead end path
and that a new solution is needed, are disturbing to me. 

Both of the last points are real issues, IMHO, not just rambling.  And, no,
I don't have a solution to instantiate right now and here, but I do have
some ideas as to what I would or would not like to see included in a
solution.

I'm not saying IPv6 is dead, but I think a leap, rather than an incremental
improvement may be needed.  Unless somebody actually does come up with an
IPv6 killer app... 


My $.02,
Christian


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