legacy /8

Zaid Ali zaid at zaidali.com
Sun Apr 4 08:43:49 UTC 2010


This sounds like

Step 1: I have a wisdom tooth, it hurts on my right jaw and so I will chew
from my left.

Step 2: Take some pain killers.

Step 3: Damn it hurts I will ignore it and it will eventually heal.

Step 4: Continue to take pain killers and perhaps if I sleep more it will
grow in the right direction and everything will be fine.

Step 5: Wake up everything is fine.

You will actually wake up without a toothache and things will seem fine
except you now have teeth you don't actually need because they will cause
blockage, hard to brush, floss constraints, many future dental trips etc.
Your ancestors needed wisdom teeth in the stone age because they bit off
more than they could chew, food was rough and coarse and teeth fell out
easily. Through evolution diet changed and jaws eventually became smaller
and humans chewed differently so you don't need the protection of wisdom
teeth. Given that understanding you can avoid 5 painful steps and go to a
doctor to have it pulled out, slight extra pain in doing so but you gain
healthier teeth. 

Leaving dentistry and coming back to IP, we have to think of what we want
the future IP address model to be and how does it affects the future of the
Internet model. A lot of smart people have come together to bring the IPv6
solution, it works (not without flaws but neither did IPv4 in the early
days) so lets work together in figuring out implementation and adoption.
There is nothing stopping anyone from writing an RFC on IP option for low
order bits+NAT et al and to that I wish anyone well. Just make sure one
addresses scaling/backward compatibility because it will be like not being
able to predict what kind of food will get stuck around your oddly grown
wisdom tooth that caused a hole and now need a filling.

Implementing IPv4 patches/NAT etc will not harm or break the Internet model
but the question is do we want this or do we want to implement IPv6 that may
be have a bit of pain now but the right thing for the future. Lets go where
we want and have a healthy Internet, adopt IPv6 and phase out IPv4.


Zaid

P.s. Disclaimer: I have always been a network operator and never a dentist.
I did build networks for a medical university many moons ago and often got
into interesting discussions about medicine.
 


On 4/3/10 11:11 PM, "Vadim Antonov" <avg at kotovnik.com> wrote:

> 
> With all that bitching about IPv6 how come nobody wrote an RFC for a very
> simple solution to the IPv4 address exhaustion problem:
> 
> Step 1: specify an IP option for extra "low order" bits of source &
> destination address.  Add handling of these to the popular OSes.
> 
> Step 2: make NATs which directly connect extended addresses but also NAT
> them to non-extended external IPs.
> 
> Step 3: leave backones unchanged.  Gradually reduce size of allocated
> blocks forcing people to NAT as above.
> 
> Step 4: watch people migrating their apps to extended addresses to avoid
> dealing with NAT bogosity and resulting tech support calls & costs.
> 
> Step 5: remove NATs.
> 
> --vadim
> 
> 






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