On Mar 24, 2010, at 10:14 PM, Bill Stewart wrote:
it seems to me that we'll have widespread ipv4 for +10 years at least, How many 10 year old pieces of kit do you have on your network? Ten years ago we were routing appletalk and IPX. Still doing that now?
Ten years ago I was still telling a few customers that Novell Netware had supported TCP/IP since the early 90s and it was really time to shut off IPX, and the Appletalk users were at least running over IP, not LocalTalk, so I didn't have to care much, and the Windows people were probably already arguing about Active Directory and LDAP and whether to do DNS, DLSW was Not Dead Yet, and 1/3 of my X.25 customers acknowledged that it was way obsolete and time to join the 1990s (the other two were state governments who viewed it as Somebody Else's Emulation Problem.)
The last time I was dealing with high-end Layer 1 access problems was a couple of years ago, but in addition to normal IPv4 and MPLS, I had customers running Fiber Channel and other SAN protocols on the WAN.
There'll be enough IPv4 to keep antiques dealers in business for a while yet.
As of (at least) 2002, the FBI was still using bisync for communications. If you're a data communications professional and haven't heard of bisync, that proves my point... I suspect that some members of this list weren't born by the time it was considered obsolete. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb