On 3 jan 2008, at 17:30, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
Yes, as you point out the generic answer to the problem is NAT-PT
which was recently squashed after a cabal got together.
I think the second v6ops meeting in Vancouver showed a decent amount
of interest in resurrecting it again. (This is becoming a bit of a
third rate zombie movie, though.)
Pretty much everyone seems to now accept that we are going to run
out of IPv4 addresses before IPv6 deployment is complete and that
some form of address sharing is therefore inevitable.
Hold on, you're going a bit too fast there.
The most basic transition strategy would be a flag day. For obvious
reasons, this doesn't work.
The second most basic transition strategy would be to add IPv6 until
everyone is dual stack, and then start removing IPv4. This doesn't
work either, because nobody has an incentive to add IPv6 until they
can remove IPv4 and nobody can remove IPv4 until everyone is dual stack.
This means that the real transition MUST be such that there is a time
during which there are both IPv4-only and IPv6-only hosts. With
improved NAT-PT this won't be any worse than IPv4+NAT and even without
any form of NAT-PT it's still possible to get a lot done with proxies,
so this isn't necessarily a problem.
The interesting thing is that running out of IPv4 addresses in and of
itself doesn't make IPv6 more attractive, even though NOT running out
of IPv4 addresses definitely makes IPv6 NOT attractive to most people.
Even with IPv4 addresses all used up, you can still only talk to 0.1%
of the internet over IPv6. With an IPv4 address that is shared through
NAT you can probably reach 50% of the internet (everyone except others
behind NAT who don't have any incoming ports mapped). However, the
first value is only going to go up, while the second is only going to
go down. So at some point, it starts making sense to do IPv6 or
IPv6+IPv4NAT.
So it looks like much more NAT is actually a necessary intermediate
step to get IPv6 deployed. We here at the IETF, the group of self-
appointed people that should know better, should make sure that we
don't get unduly stuck in that intermediate phase. That's why I am
very much interested in bringing back NAT-PT: it gives people IPv6
with their NAT so the usefulness of IPv6 is enhanced as that of IPv4
deteriorates so it addresses both the temporary situation and the
eventual goal of full IPv6 deployment.
Then take a look at what those companies are doing about it.
Polaroid has already gone bankrupt
How is proactively going bankrupt useful? (-:
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