Noel Chiappa wrote: > > From: Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxx> > > >> Wouldn't it make more sense to put the effort into morphing v6 into > >> something that *IS* attractive? > > > there's precious little time left to do that > > Umm, Keith, we're *already* 'out' (in some sense) of IPv4 space, and have > been for a decade or more. > Given that addresses are still available for the time being, I'm not sure what sense you mean there. (of course, without NAT we would have reached this point years ago.) > Why do you think there are all those blasted NAT boxes out there? > Different reasons. A big one is because the commodity IPv4 connection is a /32, and it turns out that lots of customers have reason to hook up more than one host. Another one is that pretty much everyone uses Windows, which has a long history of (deliberately introduced) insecurity, and people have been duped into thinking that private networks and NATs offer substantial protection. Groupthink is also a big factor, I suspect. People bought NATs because their friends did. Also, NATs spread at a time when most widely-used Internet apps were client-server. > So the future just holds a *different* kind of 'running out of IPv4'addresses, which, when it happens, the world will deal with in what seems at the time to be the most cost-effective way of dealing with the problem, even if it's ugly (q.v. NAT) > Why do you believe that the world chooses the most cost-effective solution? As far as I can tell the market mostly engages in hill-climbing, which rarely produces an optimal result. Now if instead you had said people would do whatever seemed to be easiest, without much regard to the long-term cost, I'd probably agree with you. Maybe I should buy stock in application hosting firms that "own" substantial chunks of IPv4 space. Keith _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf