Brad Knowles wrote:
At 12:14 PM +0200 2005-07-01, Andre Oppermann wrote:
Huh, Europe is moving to IPv6? I must have been asleep at all industry meeting in the past few month and years...
From what I've seen at the RIPE meetings, Europe is definitely moving towards IPv6. Maybe not as fast as some parts in Asia, but it's definitely moving that way. Moreover, it's moving towards IPv6 much faster than the US.
I don't care what you see at RIPE meetings. You have to look at how many servers/services are reachable via IPv6. Nothing else. Sure, many European ISPs have got their IPv6 prefix and some even announce it via BGP, but actually using it for anything more useful than "hey, I can ping6 you!" is far off.
All the other stuff and the different address scopes are not only impractical but confuse the average consumer and MCSE admin to no end (and those are the people that have to deal with it all the time).
IPv6 has its problems, yes. There are implementation issues that confuse programmers at Sun working on Solaris, and confuse network application programmers with a hell of a lot of experience under their belt. If you can't talk directly to Jinmei himself, you're likely to be well and truly screwed.
Ain't this *the* problem??? If not even Joe OperatingSystemEngineer can understand it, what is John Doe at home supposed to do? You know, there is one thing Steve Jobs / Apple is getting right. That is getting out of the way and make *functionality* available to the average user. And it's the *functionality* that sells these things, not the technology. Technology is only the means to get the functionality to the user. IMO this is the main thing engineers constantly fail to understand. Users don't want technology, they want easy and intuitive functionality available to them provided by whatever technology they may end up with.
But just because IPv6 has problems doesn't mean that it doesn't solve the fundamental address space problem in IPv4, and doesn't mean that it is anything less than the best available alternative.
What fundamental address space problem? I'd say we run out of AS numbers about a year before we run out of IPv4 addresses, whenever that is. -- Andre