--On Friday, October 08, 2010 09:47 -0400 Steve Crocker
<steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Let me say this more strongly. These two defects, "it wasn't
> economically feasible ... and it didn't offer any
> interesting/desirable new capabilities" were mild compared to
> an even bigger defect: There simply wasn't a technically
> feasible plan on the table for co-existence and
> intercommunication of IPv4 and IPv6 networks.
>
> In addition to working our way through the IPv6 adoption and
> co-existence process, I think it would be useful to do a
> little soul-searching and ask ourselves if we're so smart, how
> come we couldn't design a next generation IP protocol and work
> out a technically viable adoption and co-existence strategy.
> The "dual stack" approach implicitly assumed everyone would
> have both an IPv6 and an IPv4 address. If everyone has both
> kinds of addresses, that implicitly asserts there's no visible
> shortage of IPv4 addresses, which is contrary to fundamental
> reason IPv6 is needed. Further, although some scenarios
> suggest IPv4 usage will start to decline steeply once IPv6
> transport, products and services are widely available, the
> safer bet is that IPv4 networks will persist for a fairly long
> time, say 20 to 50 years.
Steve,
While I agree with what you say (and most of what Noel says),
hindsight is pretty easy. I even agree with your 20 to 50 year
estimate although an optimist might draw some comfort from how
quickly CLNP and CONP, TP0 and TP4 (and the rest of the OSI
machinery), Vines and Netware, etc., disappeared once the
network effects set in and the writing appeared on the wall.
However, certainly Noel's position was part of the discussion
15-odd years ago. Certainly the positions that IPng must
either be strictly forward compatible or that it should
introduce enough new and valuable functionality to make people
want to incur the pain were part of the discussion.
Nonetheless, the IETF community selected what is now IPv6. What
does this say about the IETF and how we make decisions? Does
that need adjusting?
Finally, and perhaps more important right now, while it is easy
to observe that the 1995 (or 2000) predictions for IPv6
deployment rates have not come close to being satisfied and
recriminations based on hindsight may be satisfying in some
ways, the question is what to do going forward. There are
communities out there who believe that we have managed to
"prove" that datagram networks, with packet-level routing, are a
failure at scale and that we should be going back to an
essentially connection-oriented design at the network level.
If they were to be right, then it may be that we are having
entirely the wrong discussion and maybe that we are on the wrong
road (sic) entirely. If not, then there are other focused
discussions that would be helpful. The latter discussions that
have almost started in this and related threads, but have (I
believe) gotten drowned out by the noise, personal accusations
about fault, and general finger-pointing.
How would you propose moving forward?
john
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf@xxxxxxxx
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf