legacy /8

Sun Apr 4 01:15:00 UTC 2010

On Sat, 3 Apr 2010 11:25:48 -0700
"George Bonser" <gbonser at seven.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Larry Sheldon [mailto:LarrySheldon at cox.net]
> > Sent: Saturday, April 03, 2010 10:54 AM
> > Cc: nanog at nanog.org
> > Subject: Re: legacy /8
> > 
> > 
> > That is the parachute's fault?
> > 
> > Really?
> > --
> 
> 
> 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.

Ever used IPX or Appletalk? If you haven't, then you don't know how
simple and capable networking can be. And those protocols were designed
more than 20 years ago, yet they're still more capable than IPv4.

I used to teach Novell CNE courses around the mid 90s. Of the 7
courses, one of them was a two day course on a networking protocol.
That networking protocol *wasn't* IPX - it was TCP/IP. IPX just worked,
but you had to spend two days explaining TCP/IP. Even though I'd been
using TCP/IP for a number of years before then, it still to me 5
attempts at teaching that course before I was completely happy with how
I'd explained subnets, and had that feedback from students.

I think IPv6 has not just learnt from the history of IPv4,
it has also learnt from the history of other protocols. 

>  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.  
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 