legacy /8

Sat Apr 3 19:07:27 UTC 2010

On Apr 3, 2010, at 8:25 AM, George Bonser wrote:
> The point is that v6 was a bad solution to the problem.  

Well, yes, but...

> 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.  

Not really.  The only problem IPv6 really solves (that couldn't be solved in one way or another in IPv4) was the limited amount of address space.  Well, OK.  IPv6 also does stateless autoconfiguration for folks who care about that, but you can (after much battle with the IETF) mostly ignore that if you don't care.

IPv6 doesn't, unfortunately, solve the real problem which is routing system scalability, but that's a separate rant.

> And they made v4 incompatible with v6 rather really addressing the problem.  

How would you propose making going from a smaller fixed address space to a larger one backwards compatible?  How would you deal with the myriad of applications that 'know' an IP address fits into a 32 bit "int" and make use of that fact?

> 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.

Which is, I think, why some folks argue for more conservatism in address allocation policy.

Regards,
-drc