I think a transition is possible but only if people stop sitting arround waiting for it to happen. The key in my view is to work on the NAT vendors, instead of viewing NAT boxes as an obstacle they should be seen for what they really are, an essential and important part of the internet infrastructure. Simply repeating the end to end dogma is not going to provide a solution. The internet people are using is not end to end. NAT boxes and firewalls play an important and necessary security role. We need a standard for a superNAT box that provides both security and protocol bridging functions. There is no reason this transition cannot be made seamless from the enduser pint of view. Phill -----Original Message----- From: Ronald van der Pol Sent: Tue Jun 17 08:05:32 2003 To: Keith Moore Cc: Ronald van der Pol; pbaker@verisign.com; aarsenau@bbn.com; ietf@ietf.org Subject: Re: myth of the great transition (was US Defense Department formally adopts IPv6) On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 08:05:23 -0400, Keith Moore wrote: > I see it as a transition also. But I think there will be a long period > in which v6 is used mostly for new things, and only when v6 is more > ubiquitious than v4 will we see some of the core services migrate. There is a big difference between planning/engineering for a transition and planning/engineering for a coexistance. There seem to be forces trying to steer to the latter. Seems like an important question. Why would we want an internet with two protocols with the same functionality running in parallel? Should that be the goal? rvdp