On Feb 28, 2011 8:45 AM, "Owen DeLong" <owen@delong.com> wrote:
On Feb 28, 2011, at 7:34 AM, Joe Abley wrote:
On 2011-02-28, at 10:27, Nick Hilliard wrote:
On 28/02/2011 14:59, Joe Abley wrote:
I'm not sure why people keep fixating on that as an end goal. The future we ought to be working towards is a consistent, reliable, dual-stack environment. There's no point worrying about v6-only operations if we can't get dual-stack working reliably.
That's "dual-stack" as in
You're describing where we are. I'm talking about where I think we
should be planning to arrive.
Your description sounds more like where we should be making a plane change. The eventual destination is IPv6-only. Dual-stack is a temporary stopover along the way. However, you are partially right in that we should be focusing on arriving at the first stop-over until we arrive there. Then we can start navigating from there to the final destination.
Look, my original point is that RA is a brilliant solution for a
"dual-stack-except-one-of-the-stacks-really-doesn't-work-properly-so-we'll-fudge-around-it"? :-) problem which never really existed. Now, can we all just ignore RA and work towards DHCPv6 because that's what's actually needed in the real world?
RA and DHCPv6 work together. It's different from DHCP in IPv4. Run with
it. Sending people back to the drawing board at this late stage in the game (a) isn't going to happen and (b) isn't going to help anybody.
And the model breaks badly at layers 8-10 in most enterprises and many other organizations.
We haven't got there because I can't plug in my laptop into any arbitrary ipv6-only network and expect to be able to load up ipv6.google.com .
Is that too high a standard to work towards? :-)
As I thought I mentioned, yes. Forget v6-only right now. Dual-stack is an operationally-harder problem, and it's a necessary prerequisite.
For some situations at this point, that may not actually be true. It will be soon enough that it won't even be possible.
Owen is right. Ipv6-only is a very near term reality for networks with very fast growing edges like mobile phones and wireless machine to machine communications. It is not prudent to install an electricity meter today with a 30 year expected life span ... and include ipv4. These systems are being deployed today as ipv6 only, not in the future. Also, you can expect many types of mobile phones to be ipv6-only soon. Ipv4 is not going away, dual stack fell short of being the universal transition mechanism but is still useful in many palaces -especially content hosts, and ipv6-only will pop up soon in as many places as it possibly makes sense. Remember, from a network planner / designer / architect perspective, ipv4 is not a resource for future network growth.
Owen