-----Original Message----- From: Mark Smith [mailto:nanog@85d5b20a518b8f6864949bd940457dc124746ddc.nosense.org] Sent: Friday, April 02, 2010 11:09 PM To: George Bonser Cc: John Palmer (NANOG Acct); nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: legacy /8
Y2K was a bit different though - there was no alternative other than fixing it. "Carrier grade NAT" didn't exist for YY fields, so there is no actual deadline for IPv6 like there was for Y2K. I think that is what is leaving room for people to think they don't have to deploy it soon, or that it has failed.
Regards, Mark.
I think part of the problem with v6 is that it is still sort of a moving target. There seem to be a lot of ways of doing this or that and it seems new ones come out a couple of times a year that are incompatible with other ways of doing things. Things such as automatic address assignment and communicating with v4 from v6 are just a pain in the hips at the moment, there is not ironclad, cast in stone, "this is how it is done, period". But if you look at other technologies, it was the network operators that dragged them into play through necessity. Nobody had to tell anyone that they must put MPLS into their network or VRFs or BGP or whatever. The operators dragged those technologies in because they needed them. For the vast majority of operators, the only problem v6 is going to solve (admittedly a huge problem) is address depletion and a lot of the other "features" are going to go unused by most people but have to be dealt with (turned off with a big hammer in many cases). We have 128 bits of addressing, you would have thought someone might have decided early on to come up with something simple like ... the first 32 bits are your ASN and that is your "net block". Have another facility that is not connected to the first? Get another ASN. But this is all water long under the bridge. At the moment we are stuck with what we have. We really don't have the choice at this point but to hold our noses and use v6 and that is going to cause a lot of problems in a lot of places with a lot of vendors. Actually, to many operators a depletion of v4 addresses is a good thing because it serves as a barrier of entry to competition. I would guess that people who have more than enough v4 space currently are glad to see it hard to obtain and also glad to see nobody moving to v6. It just means more pie for them.