legacy /8

Sat Apr 3 06:08:57 UTC 2010

On Fri, 2 Apr 2010 22:06:24 -0700
"George Bonser" <gbonser at seven.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: George Bonser [mailto:gbonser at seven.com]
> > Sent: Friday, April 02, 2010 7:53 PM
> > To: John Palmer (NANOG Acct); nanog at nanog.org
> > Subject: RE: legacy /8
> > 
> > They hard part is getting all the end nodes to use IPIP tunneling as
> > their primary protocol by default.  It is doable but that is the hard
> > part.
> > 
> > 
> 
> Actually, both methods could exist side by side.  If a standard packet
> arrives, the destination AS is looked up using conventional routing
> information, it is encapsulated and sent to the destination AS.  In
> other words, a standard packet is assumed to be a legacy address space
> packet.  An encapsulated packet handled in the new way.  
> 
> But you know, the fact that the network techies has not exactly spent
> the past 10 years busting down the doors for v6 should tell people
> something really important.  That they are willing to wait until the
> wolf is at the door to switch means something that needs to be paid your
> attention.   v6 could well be the protocol that broke the Internet
> because it is sort of like replacing a Jeep with a bus built by Rube
> Goldberg.
> 
> That adoption is so low at this point really says that it has failed.  
> 
> 
> 

I think the Y2K incident was an example worth observing. There was a
lot of talk about it from at least 1995 onwards. In my experience
however proper efforts to address it seemed to only start early to
mid 1998, with the first half of 1999 being "crunch time" with the last
six months of 1999 left to finalise anything left over. IPv6 seems to
be following a similar time line - we're around two years away from
running out of IPv4 addresses, and there now seems to be a lot more
discussion, planning and implementation happening in recent times than
there has been in the last 5 years.

Y2K was a bit different though - there was no alternative other than
fixing it. "Carrier grade NAT" didn't exist for YY fields, so there is
no actual deadline for IPv6 like there was for Y2K. I think that is
what is leaving room for people to think they don't have to deploy it
soon, or that it has failed.

Regards,
Mark.