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Re: shim6 @ NANOG (forwarded note from John Payne)

  • From: Iljitsch van Beijnum
  • Date: Fri Mar 03 12:50:05 2006

On 3-mrt-2006, at 17:04, Stephen Sprunk wrote:

Keep in mind that current RIR allocations/assignments are effectively leases (though the RIRs deny that fact) and, like any landlord, they can refuse to renew a lease or increase the rent at any point.
I can only imagine the fun the lawyers are going to have with this:

1. Get address space from Internic, no questions asked
2. ARIN is formed and starts making policies that say address space isn't owned
3. ARIN never enforces these no ownership policies (that I know of)
4. ARIN tries to take away the addresses

That's the best advertisement IPv6 could ever hope for: "no lawyers!"

So even if it's free, deploying IPv6 today isn't all that useful. But when you're the last one running IPv4, you'll really want to move over to IPv6, even if it's very expensive.

Ah, but why? As long as IPv4 has similar or better performance characteristics to IPv6, why would anyone _need_ to migrate? Add to that the near certainty that vendors will create NAT devices that will allow an entire v4 enterprise to reach the v6 Internet...
Don't they teach you IPv6 network design in CCIE school? Once you've worked with link local addressing/routing and generating addresses from EUI-64s you never want to go back to the tedious address and subnet management that's necessary in IPv4. So building boxes just so you can stick to IPv4 when the rest of the world is already on IPv6 seems a bit backward to me.

Since you can't express the IPv6 address space in the IPv4 address space (the reverse is easy and available today), the translation needs to happen a bit higher in the stack. When I was testing running IPv6-only I installed an Apache 2 proxy in order to reach the IPv4 web from my IPv6-only system. But it worked the other way around too, of course: using the proxy, I could visit sites over IPv6 with IPv4- only systems.