I still think that we should pursue making the design work and not adopt cruft as standards (ULA).
ULAs aren't cruft. They serve a purpose. If you don't need them, don't use them and they won't get in your way.
ULAs aren't cruft so long as providers do not start exchanging ULA routes in the general routing table. When economics start forcing this issue, then ULAs become a crufty form of PI space. Since I believe the economics will force this issue sooner rather than later, I regard ULAs as cruft whether you agree or not.
The actual distribution of new IP addresses to boxes is fairly trivial in IPv6. DNS is somewhat problematic but nothing a good search and replace can't handle. The real issues are IP address based access restrictions and problems with ingress filtering when addresses from two ISPs are in use at the same time.
Agreed. That is why I would like to see access restrictions move to something more meaningful than the IP address. Of course, doing so, requires some easy form of strong host authentication, such as AH on all packets that must traverse access restrictions. Ingress filtering shouldn't be that hard, since at least on a theoretical level you shouldn't, in those cases, be leaking provider A's addresses to provider B's network and certainly, answers are unlikely to come back from the other provider.
- Until very recently DNS software did not support A6 records at all, and "chain" support for A6 records still seems to be a work in progress.
This is getting resolved and I suspect will be long since functional by the time v6 comes to widespread deployment consideration.
Quite the opposite. There was A6 support in BIND AFAIK, but it's removed as it's unworkable. Learn to love AAAA.
That's most unfortunate. A6 had much more promise than AAAA for a variety of applications. Oh well.
If your organization is large enough to involve reconfiguring a significant number of routers, it is unlikely to be small enough to have to use PA space instead of getting PI space in the v6 world.
There is currently no PI in IPv6 unless you're an internet exchange or a root server. Whether there will be is anyone's guess, but it's not currently in the pipeline.
If we allow ULA, there definitely will be. If we don't, then, it will be interesting to see how many ISPs spring up with a single customer (themselves).
I still think NAT is evil cruft that had a purpose in the V4 world, but, is highly undesirable in the v6 world.
Regardless of the merit of NAT, there is little merit in IPv6+NAT as it has all the downsides of both. If you can live with NAT, stay in IPv4 and talk to the IPv6 world over IPv4<->IPv6 NAT.
Agreed. Owen