On Nov 08, 2004, at 13:57, Peter Ford wrote:
In the interest of completeness I would note that at the time the size of the global Internet routing table was also a very high concern and core to at least one session at each IETF meeting at the time.
I'd like to confirm this. When I first got active in IETF in 1992, one of the first issues that was brought to my attention was the IPv4 address space exhaustion. There was an amazing (to me) presentation showing the address space exhaustion - along with a discussion of the use of NAT to mitigate that threat. The presenter went on to show that even with the use of NAT to preclude address space exhaustion, the global routing tables were growing at a phenomenal rate and stressing the routing core incredibly, thus the need for CIDR, as it would allow a reduction in the rate of growth and offered the hope of an actual decrease in the overall table size. The presentation was given, iirc, by Tony Li, then of Cisco.
FWIW, some folks thought that CIDR was not a good idea, but was "forced" on us due to short-sidedness on the part of Cisco in designing the memory capacity of their core routers. I still recall people advocating a "throw memory at it" solution.
In the subsequent 12 years, most of the predictions for address space exhaustion have failed to materialize, thanks largely to NAT.
High speed memory on core routers has increased so overall table size isn't the omnipresent threat it was then, unless you run gear from the mid 1990s.
IPv6 has failed to make any large impact on the Internet, other than providing a near-endless source of inspiration for features to "back-port" to IPv4 (like DHCP).
Where is the incentive to move to IPv6 going to come from? All of the Mac OS X and Linux machines I have at home support it. The core infrastructure of the Internet has the ability to support it. But why should we go to the trouble of enabling it? Where's the benefit?
--jon written from behind a NAT'd Cable-modem broadband connection
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