At 7:53 -0600 3/11/05, JORDI PALET MARTINEZ wrote:
IPv6 is an innovation opportunity, and makes life more simple to everyone, and consequently can generate more business.
I mean this as a reality check, not an argument.
"makes life more simple to everyone" is a subjective statement. There are some people that get comfortable with a way of doing business or solving a problem. These people are generally not engineers, and are more likely to be in operations. I am not saying the operators are anti-innovation, but if your job is operations, a stable environment is a good environment. "The devil you know is better than the devil (or angel) you don't."
The ISPs need to look IPv6 as a way to aggregate services and applications and get a couple of extra euros for every service, every month, form every customer. This can make a huge difference, specially when the revenues for the access price are going down and down (and the bandwidth high and high), and consequently they will not even able to cover the access cost with that fees.
My comment is not directed at the revenue end of the "business" but at the staffing end of the business. The pool of unemployed operators-to-be (generalizing) is more aware of how to manage NAT'd networks than the pool of those knowing new (pick'em) technology. I.e., operations managers can and should deal with innovation, rank-and-file workers aren't employed to change the world.
What we can do about that ?
Get operators involved. Not just ISPs but enterprises - medium to power users. You're not going to get the small and personal users, they don't have time for the IETF.
Getting operators involved does not mean reading internet drafts. It means engaging them in dialog, deriving operational requirements from them. It means inviting and baiting them into workshops. (They won't show just because you email them, you have to get them to show.)
I am saying this from the experience of DNSSEC, that long-lived project to extend DNS. In retrospect, one reason it has taken so long is that initially it was defined by security experts without the input of operators. Operators have come into the fold and now there is an operations-friendly proposal. But operators don't come as one unified bloc, new operators come to the table all the time with more input. This is why there are still discussions over details in the protocol.
I realize that NAT breaks the theoretical idea of the network layer being end-to-end and I realize the consequences. All protocols would be simpler if universal addressing was a reality, as the textbooks say it should be. If life were like the textbooks, extending features would be fun and easy, a thousand flows would bloom.
But reality isn't according to theory. The Internet with NAT, "split-brain" DNS, firewalls, etc., and a client-server mentality is proving useful to many folks today. As engineers we have to deal with that, not ignore it, as we try to innovate further.
To make this clear - I am not saying I want to protect NAT, etc. I think it is foolish to engineer as if it was a nuisance.
-- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Edward Lewis +1-571-434-5468 NeuStar
Achieving total enlightenment has taught me that ignorance is bliss.
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