On Thu, 2010-03-18 at 11:16 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
You're either going to have to sell them on future-proofing or "We're sailing off the edge of the world in two years, there be dragons there, train your folks now."
Or sell them on the point that IPv6 is where the innovation is. We have literally no idea what our children will be doing with restored end-to-end transparency and abundant addresses. That's where education has to be. It's not an educational "feature", but a very important emergent property...
Remember that there are two IPv6 transitions - introducing IPv6 and forcing some people onto it - getting rid of IPv4 after IPv6 support is universal.
And the third (well, probably the second, between those two) - learning to *really use* IPv6.
Death of NAT NAT's not going away for a long time - IPv6 doesn't need it for address space conservation, and pretends not to need it very much for renumbering IPv6 to IPv6, but it's widely used as a firewall substitute and administrative convenience.
Both oddities that I confidently predict will not survive long in the face of the enormous advantages that properly-implemented IPv6 can bring. A teensy packet filter substitutes for the "security" aspect, and PI address space deals with the second.
The first IPv6 transition will eliminate some NAT in pure-v6 environments, so there will be applications that are no longer broken and can Just Work, but it'll also introduce several different flavors of IPv4-to-IPv6 NATs/tunnels/etc.,
Sure, there will be practical reasons why people need this or that half-solution, this or that broken stopgap. But we can keep the Dark Years fewer by trying not to use them.
Any big commercial sites will stay reachable with IPv4 for a long time, certainly until IPv6 has been well established for a couple of years,
We've all been here before. The same thing will happen globally as happened in thousands of networks with IPX, Appletalk and DECNet. IPv4 remains only on sufferance. The alternative rapidly becomes vastly more attractive as the connectedness of the new protocol snowballs. Pressure builds from inside and out, and - way sooner than anyone expected - there is a sort of communal sigh of relief and the old stuff gets quietly dropped. I wonder what landmarks we should designate as "IPv4 is done" - Google dropping support for IPv4? And I wonder what the landmarks for the beginning of the end would be - Windows 15 coming out with IPv4 disabled by default? Regards, K. -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Karl Auer (kauer@biplane.com.au) +61-2-64957160 (h) http://www.biplane.com.au/~kauer/ +61-428-957160 (mob) GPG fingerprint: B386 7819 B227 2961 8301 C5A9 2EBC 754B CD97 0156 Old fingerprint: 07F3 1DF9 9D45 8BCD 7DD5 00CE 4A44 6A03 F43A 7DEF