On Sat, 2 Sep 2000, Roeland M.J. Meyer wrote:

3) Conservatively, every recent linux node has IPv6 kernel support and every Windoze box can do IPv6 (not to mention what we have just heard from the BSD camp <g>). This is over 50% of the leaves out there (conservatively). At what point is there sufficient market penetration of the technology to consider rolling IPv4/IPv6 interoperability/capability on the core routers and switches (something short of 100%, I would hope)?

4) Is it maybe that Sun, HP, Intel, Cisco, IBM, and the telco's, aren't all quite ready yet?

There are two key problems which are preventing the widespread use of IPv6, IP Allocation, and network vendor support. Support for all hosts is actually one of the least of the problems. Think of it this way, major networks want to deploy IPv6... How do they do it? They certainly can't do it on their primary backbone links and routers, the support from vendors is simply not there. Even if there was working code, they wouldn't dare deploy it on their production network, the code is too unstable (especially IPv6 routing protocols), and they risk looking unreliable in comparison to those who don't even make the attempt to support IPv6. So what do they do? Without the network there is not the demand for high traffic IPv6, and without the demand there is little desire to build the network. Should they buy seperate routers, try desperately to make IPv6 work well on a spare 7200, and hope not to get a black eye from customers who expect the same level of routine-ness we are experienced with in IPv4? Should they provision more circuits because of this? Build a parallel network supporting IPv6, without a current customer demand? Or do they say, "we'll wait until the vendors get it right"? Even if you get past all that, there is still the very obvious fact that for certain vendors, the levels of performance we expect today are because of extensive tuning for IPv4 speed, and we know we won't be seeing this level of performance right off the bat from IPv6. And while they wait, there is no usable IPv6 infastructure, less interest and development from vendors who don't really see a "need", and less demand from users who know there is no point when they can't find a network infastructure to support them. The other problem is IP allocation. ARIN and others are used to their comfortable role as IP Nazi ("No IP for you, come back, one year!"), they have happy extortion-scheme pricing on it, and they're not about to give it up voluntarily any more then NetSol would have without being forced... If you doubt this, go look at the current policies for obtaining IPv6 space. -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/humble PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177 (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)