Sounds like the same kind of mentality that lets people in LA drive cars with a 20 miles/gallon mileage. Me: You have to use cars with better mileage! Users: Again? OK - but why? And what's in it for me? Me: (explanation of air overload of pullutants deleted) Users: So you are saying that of the 200 tons (or whatever) of the total pollution in LA's air due to the usage of gas in cars, that my buying a 60 miles/gallon car saves just a few pounds? Me: Err, yes. Users: Don't ring us, we'll ring you! .... later ... Users: Uuuuhhhh, this cancer is KILLing me ... .... much later (Users: are dead by now) ... Quiz: Should Users: have saved 2 gallons/day or moved to Alaska?
Renumbering workstations in principle *is* a no-brainer. But there are always wrinkles. And if those workstations are running a particle accelerator (as when a year or so ago I coordinated some renumbering at SLAC), you better have a damn good reason for doing it. A $20M facility running 7*24 expects good reasons for you to possibly screw it up, and their operational philosophy is to assume you will.
I was able to renumber two largish groups of machines (200 or so in each), with quite a bit of coordination needed, and because of the various overlapping schedules it took a while before I could even start. Then, for each group I had to assemble numerous experts (Macs, Amigas, PCs, Next, RS/6000, Sun, Ultrix, VAX, Cisco). Luckily we had a good database of workstations so that I could tell the platform experts which machines were going to be involved. In some cases changes had to be backed out a couple of times because of something the platform experts forgot (or didn't know about).
Now, can you imagine the conversation I might have had if still working there and SLAC agrees to exchange its class B (with about 1k out of 64k addresses assigned) for some number of class C:
Me: SLAC has to renumber! Users: Again? OK Tim - but why? And what's in it for us? Me: (explanation of routing overload deleted) Users: So you are saying that of the 20k or so addresses in routers, SLAC renumbering saves just one entry? Me: Err, yes. Users: Don't ring us, we'll ring you!
As Marty says, there is (unfortunately) no carrot - and users resent the stick. You apply the stick too often and you are out the door, either as an external provider or internal expert. Users barely (in some instances) know what an IP address is. They expect the network to be like the phone or power outlets; you just plug in where you happen to be. If we expect renumbering and provider-based addressing to be feasible, it seems to me that w/s vendors need to provide powerful tools to enable *transparent* *on-the-fly* renumbering - else it won't happen. And even if they do (and where's the carrot for *them*?), it will be quite a while before such tools are ubiquitous enough to make the process always easy. Should we be working with vendors in this area?
Now will you all *go* *home* - it's the weekend, damnit!
Tim Streater, DANTE. t.c.streater@dante.org.uk +44 223 302992