On Sat, 06 Nov 2004 09:53:00 +0100, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote: > So the death of IPv4 isn't going to happen with a bang. More like > a protracted series of whimpers One of the great dangers of having a history of success is the way it blinds us to new ways to fail. In the case of IP addressing evolution, the blindness is that our community presumes that transition to IPv6 is inevitable. Hence, we have done a very poor job of providing compelling benefits for users and admins. We have a grand promise -- and frankly it often sounds a lot more like religious fervor -- about eventual benefits, but no claim of immediate benefit that grabs operations folks by their gut, driving them to adopt this change. By way of noting one possible scanario that builds on today's reality and leads down a path that never adopts IPv6, I'll ask: What if users turned all leaf networks into private address space, so that public IPv4 numbers were needed only at the level of roughly 1 per public interface? This is, of course, the ultimate breakage of the end-to-end addressing model, but we tend to forget that the model is something rather esoteric to non-protocol geeks. We already must modify the architecture to deal with a much richer range of border policies than just differential routing. Having it include partitioned address space is a pretty obvious step, given how often we already are faced with that reality. At the least, it means we had better have an end-to-end reference (identification) construct that is a) separate from IP Address, and b) works fine over IPv4. To this end, work like Opes and the architectural aspects of multi6 might be rather more strategic than we have been acknowledging. The problem is that we failed to evolve IP in a timely manner and in a way that was really convenient for real administrators. Instead we took the approach that this needed to be done as a major system shift and that "we would only get one shot at this change", so we also loaded quite a bit of baggage into the package. And now we try to characterize the minimal deployment of IPv6 as if it represented success. Or perhaps the real problem was that what has been happening with NATs, et al, is fine but we that have preferred to tout our idealized solution and ignored market pragmatics. Please forgive me for noting that this kind of error is classic among organizations that have had major successes and, therefore, believe that their internal intelligence is greater than that of the markets. A small variation on this error is when it is from the aggregation of successful companies. The obvious example is OSI. d/ -- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking +1.408.246.8253 dcrocker a t ... www.brandenburg.com _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf