As a corp spokesperson type but not speaking on behalf of my employer I see the same type of risk here. We have to think very carefully before trying any form of public experiment.
The outcome 'it don't work' may be acceptable if we have a plan in place in advance to fix it. Otherwise I suspect I would not be the only person going down to the meeting with their PR flack.
There is an apps area / network area divide here. Network area seem to think that we should care about this change as users and apps area people realize that the real definition of success would be that users don't notice it. Back in the 1980s the UK moved to unleaded fuel. Lets consider the apps area approach versus the network area approach:
Network Area: Motorists will either need to buy a new car before March 1989 or modify their existing cylinder head to use unleaded gas. The changeover process is simple and can be performed in a few hours with a modestly equipped workshop as follows: First remove the old cylinder head from the engine (having first removed it from the car if necessary), take note of the settings on the sprokle chain and degauss the carburetor. Second, remove existing valves and valve seats, replacing them with hardened seats conforming to BS 6008 or better. Third skim the head, replace the sprokkle chain and crankshaft, replacing all seals and other marine mammals. Forth, replace the cylinder head and reinstall engine. Finally, retune the engine and carbs and reboot.
Apps Area: If your car was manufactured before 1982 check this list to see if it is already capable of running on unleaded fuel, if not you will either need to use an additive or have the car converted by a professional mechanic.
Telling folk that they need a mechanic might appear to be the cop out but actually the reverse is the case. Motorists of the 1920s era were entirely familiar with the way that their cars worked and expected that they would either spend a considerable amount of time working on them themselves or pay a professional chauffeur/mechanic to do so for them. By the 1940s there were still some niche manufacturers such as MG who sold a car that was designed to let you be your own mechanic but most cars were built to the assumption that there would be drivers and professional mechanics and that all maintenance operations had to fit into one bucke or the other.
As far as having presentations ruined by people debugging networks. I think we should have a series of lightning talks of 3 minutes each by anyone who thinks they have a solution to the IPv6 transition.
Yes talking to a room full of IETFers trying to debug their network connections might be a challenge but I suspect that most of us either won't bother or will direct their machines to connect through some bootleg gateway that someone lashes together to allow us to get work done with as little fuss as possible.
On 12/18/07 at 1:32 PM -0500, John C Klensin wrote:
>Reporters come to our meetings and attend plenaries.
>There are members of the reporter community, or their editors,
>who like only those stories that they can sensationalize. For
>them, this little "outage" results in one of two possible
>headlines:
>
> (i) Not even IETF can get IPv6 to work seamlessly.
> (ii) IPv6 is so complicated that only the IETF experts,
> struggling mightily, can get it to work in a drop-in
> environment.
Simply reporting on this thread would lend itself to some interesting
headlines, with minimal sensationalization:
"Proposal that the IETF use IPv6 exclusively for 60 minutes causes
widespread panic"
I really don't have a strong opinion on the proposal itself; I can
live without network connectivity for an hour (or I can cheat and use
my EVDO card for an hour :-) ). But this entire conversation has been
exceedingly informative:
a) As an Apps guy, this talk does not bode well for how seriously
IPv6 has been taken in getting basic infrastructure issues solved
such that applications can run.
b) As a user who runs my own little corner of the network, this
doesn't make me sanguine about being able to get my basic services up
and running under IPv6 anytime soon.
I'm somewhere between depressed and amused.
pr
--
Pete Resnick <http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Incorporated
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