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Re: OMB: IPv6 by June 2008

  • From: Brad Knowles
  • Date: Mon Jul 04 08:05:01 2005

At 12:25 PM +0200 2005-07-04, Andre Oppermann wrote:

     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?
John Doe at home is never going to see any of these issues. He'll see that BIND or NTP doesn't work correctly on his IPv6 implementation and then go to the appropriate mailing list or newsgroup and see that it works fine elsewhere, but that's as far as he'll go.

Moreover, we're still in the very early phases of IPv6. We've learned how to move, but I'm not convinced that we're at the crawling stage, much less walking or running. There are a lot of issues that still have to be resolved.


In comparison, where were we with IPv4 this many years after it was invented? We had, what, probably something less than 200 nodes on the ARPAnet, and DNS wasn't even a gleam in anyones eye?

We're already way, way past that point with IPv6. Yes, we've got a long way to go, but we've also come a lot further a lot faster than anyone or anything else before. Give it a little time.

 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.
AS numbers can be recycled. It is not politically feasible to insist that all those under-used address blocks get turned back in and more size-appropriate blocks get issued, so recycling of address blocks is both more difficult and happens more rarely.

The problem with IPv4 space limitations is not the theoretical one of having more machines on the 'net than we can assign addresses to, although that problem will occur soon enough. The practical problem we have is that much of the address space has already been allocated, and was allocated in a manner that was not very space efficient, thus leaving us with a very nasty upcoming crunch.


Now, if you honestly think you can solve that problem without going to an expanded address solution such as found in IPv6 (with IPv6 being the only practical model on the radar that I can see), then I would encourage you to do so and to report back when you're done.

--
Brad Knowles, <[email protected]>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.