Date: Sat, 27 Feb 2010 12:04:12 +0800 From: Phil Regnauld <regnauld@nsrc.org>
Nick Hilliard (nick) writes:
And the politicians. Yes, they will erupt in hitherto unseen outbursts of self-righteous indignation at the stupid internet engineers who let this problem happen in the first place and who made no provision whatsoever for viable alternatives,
Um, not to be the party pooper of your fire-and-brimstone scenario, but IPv6 deployment has taken quite a bit longer than expected.
I'm not saying that political incentives (carrot & stick) or government regulations in the line of "implement IPv6 before X/Y or else..." have had any effect, except maybe in Japan: look how long it took for the EU commission to jump on the bandwagon, for instance (or for that matter, how long it took any government to take IP seriously).
But if was asked why IPv6 hasn't been deployed earlier, I'd be hard pressed to come up with a simple answer. "It wasn't ready" is probably not considered good enough for an elected official.
<rant> I'm sorry, but some people are spending too much time denying history. IPv6 has been largely ready for YEARS. Less than five years ago a lot of engineers were declaring IPv6 dead and telling people that double and triple NAT was the way of the future. It's only been over the past two years that a clear majority of the networks seemed to agree that IPv6 was the way out of the mess. (I know some are still in denial.) Among the mistakes made was the abandonment of NAT-PT as a transition mechanism. The BEHAVE working group has resurrected it and I still have hope of a decent system, but it has not happened as of today and we need it yesterday. Because so many network engineers or their managers decided that IPv6 was either not going to happen or was too far down the line to worry about, vendors got a clear message that there was no need to spend development money adding IPv6 support to products or implement it for their services. I won't go into the mistakes made by the IETF because they were doing something very un-IETF under tremendous time pressure. The standards were developed on paper with almost no working code. This was because the IETF assumed that we would run out of IPv4 long ago since the basics of IPv6 pre-date CIDR. They pre-date NAT. Yes, IPv6 has been around THAT long. At leat one network was running IPv6 on its network, available to users for testing for over 15 years ago. It's been a production service for years. Let's face reality. We have met the enemy and he is us. (Apologies to Walt Kelly.) We, the network engineers simply kept ignoring IPv6 for years after it was available. Almost all operating systems have been IPv6 capable for at least five years and most much longer. Most routers have been IPv6 ready for even longer. But we didn't move IPv6 into services nor offer it to customers. As a result, it just sat there. Code was not exercised and bugs were not found. Reasonable transition mechanisms are nowhere to be seen, and the cost of fixing this (or working around it) has grown to frightening proportions. </rant> There is a lot of blame we can spread around, but take moment and look in a mirror while you parcel it out. I think we are more responsible for the situation than anyone else. -- R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) E-mail: oberman@es.net Phone: +1 510 486-8634 Key fingerprint:059B 2DDF 031C 9BA3 14A4 EADA 927D EBB3 987B 3751