>>> Each time I see one of these "days remaining before Armaggedon" >>> counters, I can't help but remember what happened on January 1, 2000: >>> nothing. >> yes, but that's because people heeded the warnings, and prepared. if >> the same thing happens wrt IPv4 exhaustion, that will be fabulous. > > No doubt - that nicely paid off our profession so we should not > complain :-) > > However, that's an intriguing discussion because I almost as often > hear quite the contrary argument: indeed, given billions of USD and > EUR spent on that issue, one could reasonably argue that the issue was > overblown and ask to which degree this statement is true and what > would have actually happened without all the pressure. > > So far, I could not find anything really useful on that (proofs?) but > keep on hearing very opposite positions, but it's maybe just me? > > Does anybody have any established and sustained opinion on that and > could provide verifiable if not objective data? How many critical bugs > were really found in typical systems? What would have been the real > impact? What could have happenned in terms of impact (meaning: it > would definitely have happened, not the what-if analysis)? Was the > cost higher than the estimated risk? Well, presumably most of that money was spent on detailed analysis rather than on bug fixes. But I haven't heard of any significant effort to collect data on how many bugs were found or what there impact would have been had they not been fixed prior to y2k. And it's not clear how much value there would be in such an effort, because we're not going to run into another y2k like situation for at least 93 more years. (Okay, maybe in 2038 when the number of seconds after the UNIX epoch rolls past a 32-bit number). It would be hard to apply any lessons learned from y2k to the exhaustion of IPv4, because they're similar only in a very superficial way. Keith p.s. also, my impression is that a lot of businesses used the y2k as an excuse to replace old, crufty software with newer software (presumably with newer cruft), which might have produced benefits other than y2k resilience. so a cost-vs-benefit analysis would need to consider this. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf