interop show network (was: legacy /8)

Wed Apr 7 14:34:43 UTC 2010

On Wed, 7 Apr 2010, Eliot Lear wrote:

> I remember the days of Ron Natalie running around with a cherry picker in San 
> Jose, and the whole point of the network being to test interoperability, so 
> that things would and did break (and then we fixed them).  If v6 is even 
> close to ready, wouldn't it be sad that this sort of testing isn't done at 
> interop?  Or is it just sad that v6 isn't so close to being ready?  Or is it 
> both?

The lack of v6 readiness for a long time (and to some extent today) seems 
to have been locked in a vicious circle.

Many users haven't been pushing vendors for v6 capabilities in their 
products (software and hardware) because they either didn't know about it, 
and/or didn't perceive it as important.  OS developers seemed to be the 
most ahead of the curve on this, with usable v6 stacks available for most 
modern OSen for several years, and close to a decade in some cases.

Many providers for a long time weren't implementing v6 because, while many 
knew it needed to happen, customers weren't pushing for it, and many 
network equipment vendors didn't have solid v6 implementations.  Content 
providers would also fall into this bucket.

Many vendors for a long time weren't making v6 development and support a 
priority because customers weren't pushing for it, so they didn't see a 
financial reason to do so.

jms