Abdussalam Baryun wrote:
> In
> USA they already discussed in the past/public what public-technology was
> stupid and what was intelligent, and some other new communities are
getting
> starting to discuss it in public.
Thank you for your attempt to defend me. But I should point it out
that bashing IPv6 is a repeated and, in some sense, favored topic in
NANOG (North American Network Operators' Group) ML, against which
IETF has no control. Of course, there are both kinds of people who
are arguing for and against IPv6.
While we can enjoy discussions there having certain (maybe
minimal) respect to others, there is no one there to say bashing
some technology is "uncivil".
The last such thread was initiated on March 19th this year
with an initial subject of 'IPv6 "bloat"'.
But, the thread surprised me because William Allen Simpson (many of
us personally know him as a major contributor for IPv6) joined
the thread *AGAINST* IPv6 as a person who have detailed
knowledge for internal decisions for IPv6.
His first message to the thread is
https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2022-March/218457.html
which should be quite enlightening for most, if not all, of us.
> In USA they already discussed in the past/public what
> public-technology was stupid and what was intelligent,
An important point of the thread is why IPv6 address is
so lengthy. And the history around it recognized by the
thread with my understanding is that:
1) There was a L3(?) protocol called XNS, which use L2
address as lower part of L3 address, which is layer
violation, which disappeared and IPv4 won the
battle at L3.
2) Though IAB tried to force IETF to accept CLNP
(developed by OSI) as an alternative for IPv4, it was
denied by democratic process in IETF and a project to
develop IPng, which should be different from CLNP, was
initiated in IETF.
3) the project resulted to choose SIP, which has 8B
address, as the primary candidate for IPng though
some attempt to merge it with other proposals
(though such mergers usually result in worse results
than originals).
4) then, all of a sudden, a closed committed of
IPng directorates decided that address should be
16B long to revive an abandoned, with reasons,
address structure of XNS, which is not a
democratic process.
5) we, including me, was not aware that 16B address
is so painful to operate, partly because I hoped
most initial bit can be all zero. But...
That is the recently recognized history of IPv6 and most, if
not all. of my points in it can be confirmed by the link for
a mail from Bill Simpson.
It should also be noted that unnecessarily lengthy address
of IPv6 may be motivated to revive CLNP addressing against
the democratic process. See rfc1888 for such a proposal.
Masataka Ohta
