On 4/2/2010 17:22, Randy Bush wrote:
ipv4 spae is not 'running out.' the rirs are running out of a free resource which they then rent to us. breaks my little black heart.
even if, and that's an if, ipv6 takes off, ipv4 is gonna be around for a loooong while. when 95% of the world has end-to-end ipv6, do you think amazon et alia are gonna blow 5% of their market by decomissioning ipv4?
we are gonna learn how to distribute and use ipv4 more efficiently. it's not that hard, we know how to do it. internet engineers have worked through and around a lot of problems, it's our job. making connectivity continue work for folk who, for whatever reason, delay migration from ipv4 is just part of our job. not to panic.
the hard part is figuring out how the rirs make money off ipv4 holders redistributing it among themselves. if that becomes a non-goal, things get a lot simpler.
So, jump through hoops to kludge up IPv4 so it continues to provide address space for new allocations through multiple levels of NAT (or whatever), and buy a bit more time, or jump through the hoops required to deploy IPv6 and eliminate the exhaustion problem? And also, if the IPv4 space is horse-traded among RIRs and customers as you allude to above, IPv6 will look even more attactive as the price and preciousness of IPv4 addresses increases. The idea isn't for IPv4 to be replaced (decommissioned). The idea is for IPv6 to be added, then things will slowly transition. IPv4 will be around for a long time indeed, but increasingly, new sites/services, and old sites/services will be adding IPv6 as a way to connect to them. Then at some point, IPv6 will become the "normal" way to connect, and IPv4 will be a the "legacy" way, with fewer and fewer using it. Also, reading your other post, if you don't understand the difference between 2^32 and 2^128, please start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth Anyway, I see it as pretty much moot, since many major players (Comcast, Google, etc) are in the midst of major IPv6 deployments as we speak. Eventually you will have to jump on the bandwagon too. :-) - Jim