On Thu, 27 Sep 2007 13:59:53 -1000 Randy Bush <randy@psg.com> wrote:
The REAL problems are not going anywhere for a long time, if ever.
indeed, many will be with us for a long time. but there are a bunch we could knock off in a few years o dual stack backbones (and it's as much the vendors as the isps here) o dual stack consumer cpe o routers that hold 2m routes *with churn* from enterprise to backbone o test equipment to differentiate vendor hot air from actual performance o nat-pt with standardized algs for at least dns, smtp, http, sip, and rtp
I once complained to Bjarne Stroustrup about some aspect of C++. He replied that it was not the best possible language, but rather the best language possible. He was dealing with programmers who were recent converts to C; indeed, many of them had only recently been weaned from lower-level assembler languages. (Doug McIlroy once told me that C was the best assembler language he'd ever used. I agree with him.) I feel much the same about IPv6. IPv6 isn't what I wanted it to be. During the IPng directorate, several of us (including me and at least one of the chairs) pushed very hard for id/locator split. We lost. That was 1994; it's over and done with. But it took 13 years from then to a (mostly) complete set of specs and universal implementation, at least in all systems shipping today. Even if there was universal agreement that the design was wrong and that we should start over, I can't see it taking less than 10 years to get back to the current level of maturity. We don't have that long. We don't even have any guarantees that we'd get everything right if we tried again; while we could avoid today's known pitfalls, I'm sure there are \aleph_0 more waiting for us. To me, then, the question is "now what?" We have to get off of v4. We're dying the death of a thousand NATs. What we have to do is push the responsible parties -- CPE vendors, ISPs, router vendors, and yes, the IETF -- to fill in the holes. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb