Todd Underwood was a little late

Michael Dillon wavetossed at googlemail.com
Mon Jun 21 19:12:07 UTC 2010


>>> P.S. At this point, the IPv6 transition has failed, unlike the Y2K
>>> transition, and
>>
>> For certain values of "fail."  The odds of a dual-stack transition as
>> initially
>> envisioned by the IETF are vanishingly small, but IPv6 will be a significant
>> part of the coping strategies once RIRs allocate their last blocks of IPv4.
>
> it'd be interesting to hear michael's reasoning behind 'transition has
> failed' (to me at least). I agree it doesn't seem like it's moved
> along as anyone would (aside from Todd) have hoped, but it is moving
> along.

In January 2000, there was no IT crisis as the result of Y2K rollover.
A few companies had a few problems that were mostly sorted out within
days. With IPv6, I believe that after IPv4 exhaustion we will have an
unavoidable period of chaos that will affect a large number of ISPs of
all sizes. The window of opportunity for being well-prepared has been
missed. In fact, some of the fallout from this will impact ISPs who
have done a lot of preparation, for instance vendors who haven't
implemented IPv6 support because so few customers were asking for it.

>Currently the only real alternative to ipv6 at the end-user (in
> ~2yrs) will be giant-CGN-NAT-things or ... that's about it :(

Middleboxes mean increased instability, higher support costs, and
wierd problems where customers can't reach a site even though the
middlebox is handling traffic correctly, because too many users are
sharing the same IP address and it is triggering some kind of traffic
shaping at the other end. Middleboxes are a symptom of failure since
they force operators to pay for the middleboxes, for training staff on
how to operate and scale them, for customer support, and still pay for
the normal native IPv6 transition. It will hurt the longer term
balance sheet for anyone who is forced down that road, when compared
to their competitors who don't have to implement as many or as complex
middleboxes.

> I don't think we'll have (nor would we have in 2005 even) gotten an
> ipv7/8/9/10 up and spec'd/coded/wrung-out before ~2 yrs from now
> either. So, given the cards we have, ipv6 isn't all bad.

On this we agree.
The problem is not IPv6, it is the failure to deploy IPv6 soon enough.
Not enough trained people, not enough testing, not enough bugs shaken
out.

--Michael Dillon




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