On Nov 18, 2021, at 12:54 , John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com> wrote:
Steven Bakker <steven.bakker@ams-ix.net> wrote:
The ask is to update every ip stack in the world (including validation, equipment retirement, reconfiguration, etc)...
This raises a great question.
Is it even *doable*? What's the *risk*? What will it *cost* to upgrade every node on the Internet? And *how long* might it take?
We succeeded in upgrading every end-node and every router in the Internet in the late '90s and early 2000's, when we deployed CIDR. It was doable. We know that because we did it! (And if we hadn't done it, the Internet would not have scaled to world scale.)
Actually, CIDR didn’t require upgrading every end-node, just some of them. That’s what made it doable… Updating only routers, not end-nodes. Another thing that made it doable is that there were a LOT fewer end-nodes and a much smaller vendor space when it came to the source of routers that needed to be updated. Further, in the CIDR deployment days, routers were almost entirely still CPU-switched rather than ASIC or even line-card switched. Heck, the workhorse backbone router that stimulated the development of CIDR was built on an open-standard Mutlibus backplane with a MIPS CPU IIRC. That also made widespread software updates a much simpler proposition. Hardly anyone had a backbone router that was older than an AGS (in fact, even the AGS was relatively rare in favor of the AGS+). I’d venture to guess that something north of 90% of BGP-speaking routers were running IOS of the day (version 8.something, if memory serves). Juniper didn’t exist yet. Arista didn’t exist yet. Foundry? Nope. etc. Proteon was mostly out of business and didn’t really make anything in that class. Wellfleet did, but they had a very small market share. The lift is a lot harder today and the potential benefits continue to shrink.
That may not be worth it to you. Or to your friends. But it would be useful to a lot of people -- hundreds of millions of people who you may never know. People who didn't get IP addresses when they were free, people outside the US and Europe, who will be able to buy and use them in 5 or 10 years, rather than leaving them unused and rotting on the vine.
I question this assertion. I might buy tens of thousands of people, but I find it pretty hard to give credibility to the idea that this would make a significant difference to hundreds of millions of people. It’s not going to reduce NAT or CGN deployment significantly. It’s not going to speed up IPv6 deployment in any meaningful way. You’re going to have to make a much stronger case for the benefit here being significant if you want that argument to be taken seriously. Owen