Tony, On Oct 22, 2009, at 12:41 PM, Tony Hain wrote:
The root of the argument I see in this entire thread is the assumption that 'what we have for IPv4 has *always* been there'.
Well, no. My reading is "what we have for IPv4 works, scales well, we're accustomed to it, and our provisioning systems are all built around it'.
There is lots of finger pointing at the IETF for failure to define 15 years ago, what we have evolved as the every-day assumptions about the IPv4 network of today.
Well, no. My reading is that there is finger pointing at the IETF for ignoring and/or denying what network operators are specifying.
The real issue here is that some people are so locked into one approach that they refuse to even consider that there might be an alternative way to achieve the same goal, or that the actual goal will change over time in the face of external requirements.
Actually, I think the issue is that there are folks who are running real, live businesses who don't really have the time (or interest) to experiment with alternative ways of doing things. They're getting pressure to deploy new stuff and are looking for technologies that are the quickest, easiest, requires the least retraining, retooling, redeployment, etc. They then get folks (most of which do not run real, live non-trivial networks) who say "use this new shiny toy!" and block efforts to hack the existing tools. It's that last bit that's the problem. But then again, I'm just guessing since I don't run a real, live non-trivial network... Regards, -drc