This the first time I agree with everything in an IETF mail. Thank you to be candid enough to have writen this.
May I just suggest one tunning: "Investigate" rather than "Create the mobile Internet"? To preserve the possibility that there is not such a thing as a "mobile", or a "multilingual", or a "local", or a "secure", or an "objects" etc. Internet (or by the way an IPv4 and an IPv6 Internet). But a more elegant way to conceive an Internet's single architecture, to permit every host and agent to be (virtually) mobile, multilingual, local, secure ... as every of the related features and services might be used, one way or another, by every interconnecting box.
Thank you. jfc
On 09:53 06/11/2004, Harald Tveit Alvestrand said:
Noel and Tony,
thanks for offering such wonderful foils for a technical discussion!
I'm going to do my best to rile the feathers of both of you, by appearing to take a strong stand, but actually remaining solidly perched on the fence between your positions, and manage to rile some so-far unruffled feathers in the mix.
How's that for stimulating interesting discussion??????
One of the slides I use regularly says about what the IETF does:
- Maintain the IPv4 Internet - Enable the IPv6 Internet - Create the mobile Internet
Frankly, folks, IPv4 is what IBM used to call "functionally stabilized". And it's got NATs in it. NATs stink. But (sorry, Brian) - IMHO, they are going to stay in the IPv4 Internet forever. So a major part of "maintenance" is learning to live with the little monsters.
News for you, Tony - 52 months is more than 4 years, which is bigger than the effective lifetime of Gopher. Still plenty of time for another dot-com boom'n'bust cycle.... and as I see it, we're never going to run out; the market will just raise the price of IPv4 addresses until the market balks. Just like crude oil, but quite a few years sooner. Luckily, unlike oil, alternates exist!
So the death of IPv4 isn't going to happen with a bang. More like a protracted series of whimpers - from the accountants paying for those pesky numbers.
In IPv6, I see our job as standardizers to make sure the thing we have defined is well-defined enough to let it work, and then get the hell out of the way.
At this time, it's the users and the network builders who will decide whether we've succeeded or failed. Not us standardizers.
We can do minor maintenance and "hey, we didn't mean it that way", but the best we can do for IPv6 is to point out all the stuff that is done, stable, and is NOT going to change any time soon.
And despite the best efforts of the people overselling benefits of IPv6 that actually aren't v6-specific, and the people clamoring for "just another fundamental tweak to the architecture", I think this is succeeding.
But on mobility, I think we blew it.
Our first attempt - Mobile IPv4 (or Tethered IPv4 as I called it after I understood what a Home Agent really is) is a failure, in no small part because its design ignored firewalls and NATs (the nasty little buggers).
So app-level switched to the "mobility by DHCP" instead - get a new IP address and let the applications do the reconnect dance, each according to its own nature. Baroque enough to make grown GSM engineers weep.....
It's possible we're going far enough back on a reset that Mobile IPv6 (which I do NOT understand) does better, and that the "mobile networks" thing is finally understanding the reality that a device is no longer a single thing - clusters of them move together.
But we've still got lots of fun and games here for years to come.
Food enough for thought?
Harald
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