In message <5A6D953473350C4B9995546AFE9939EE08FE6C73@RWC-EX1.corp.seven.com>, "George Bonser" writes:
No. But that isn't the point. The point is that v6 was a bad solution to the problem. Rather than simply address the address depletion problem, it also "solves" a lot of problems that nobody has while creating a whole bunch more that we will have. Rather than simply address the problem that was on the horizon, the group took the opportunity to complicate it with a lot of other contraptions and saw that as being a "good thing" that apparently we and the vendors are just too dumb to realize or something. And they made v4 incompatible with v6 rather really addressing the problem. They saw simply extending the header with additional address bits to be a "bad thing" for some reason when that is really all that was needed and so they went on building their mousetrap and we have the mother of all internet protocols that slices and dices and even makes Julien fries when all we needed was a bigger potato peeler. =20
I am not saying we can change it at this point but I am saying we should learn from it and never, ever, do things this way again.
And we would have still had the same problem of intercommunicating. We know how to talk from IPv6 to IPv4 and get the reply traffic back. The hard part is how to initiate connection from IPv4 to IPv6. The same problem would exist in your "just expand the address bits world". Mark -- Mark Andrews, ISC 1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742 INTERNET: marka@isc.org