At 1:15 PM +0100 7/25/07, Stephen Wilcox wrote:
I'm not sure there is time for v6 to be ready before companies find different ways to manage this. There are many things that need to happen to enable v6 and I dont think any of them are happening in a big way.
Let's agree on "18mo-4yrs of 'greyness' " (as you put it), and that indeed different companies find different ways to manage this... Some of the companies are going to select IPv6 because it's has some level of support in existing end systems and network gear (even considering the various implementation flaws, lack of hardware support, etc), and because it supports a generally hierarchical addressing/routing model which works (again, despite recognition that the routing system has some serious long-term scalability questions which need to be looked into). For their choice to work, it's necessary that your public-facing servers accept IPv6 connections. It's really not a hard concept, and it's based on the simple premise stated by Jon: "In general, an implementation should be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior." You've stated a long list of items that need to be changed, but that's if you want to serve as an ISP using IPv6 for customers, and change your internal infrastructure to IPv6, and that's not required. You've already said you are going to take another path to manage things, and that's cool. The question is whether you still recognize the need to deploy IPv6 on the very edge of your network for your public services such as web and email. You could even have someone host this for you, it's not that hard, and there's two to 4 years to get it done. If you're saying that no one at all needs to use IPv6, so you aren't going to worry about IPv6 connectivity for your public facing servers, then it would be best to explain how global routing is supposed to work when ISP's aren't using predominantly hierarchical address assignments for their growth. /John