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Re: OMB: IPv6 by June 2008

  • From: Andre Oppermann
  • Date: Mon Jul 04 06:27:20 2005 
Brad Knowles wrote:

At 12:14 PM +0200 2005-07-01, Andre Oppermann wrote:


 Huh, Europe is moving to IPv6?  I must have been asleep at all industry
 meeting in the past few month and years...
From what I've seen at the RIPE meetings, Europe is definitely moving towards IPv6. Maybe not as fast as some parts in Asia, but it's definitely moving that way. Moreover, it's moving towards IPv6 much faster than the US.
I don't care what you see at RIPE meetings.  You have to look at how
many servers/services are reachable via IPv6.  Nothing else.  Sure,
many European ISPs have got their IPv6 prefix and some even announce
it via BGP, but actually using it for anything more useful than "hey,
I can ping6 you!" is far off.
All the other stuff and the different address scopes are
not only impractical but confuse the average consumer and MCSE admin to
no end (and those are the people that have to deal with it all the time).
IPv6 has its problems, yes. There are implementation issues that confuse programmers at Sun working on Solaris, and confuse network application programmers with a hell of a lot of experience under their belt. If you can't talk directly to Jinmei himself, you're likely to be well and truly screwed.
Ain't this *the* problem???  If not even Joe OperatingSystemEngineer
can understand it, what is John Doe at home supposed to do?

You know, there is one thing Steve Jobs / Apple is getting right.  That
is getting out of the way and make *functionality* available to the average
user.  And it's the *functionality* that sells these things, not the
technology.  Technology is only the means to get the functionality to
the user.  IMO this is the main thing engineers constantly fail to
understand.  Users don't want technology, they want easy and intuitive
functionality available to them provided by whatever technology they may
end up with.
But just because IPv6 has problems doesn't mean that it doesn't solve the fundamental address space problem in IPv4, and doesn't mean that it is anything less than the best available alternative.
What fundamental address space problem?  I'd say we run out of AS numbers
about a year before we run out of IPv4 addresses, whenever that is.

--
Andre