Remember "Internet-In-A-Box"?

Wed Jul 15 01:19:34 UTC 2015

On 7/14/2015 8:02 PM, Mike wrote:
> The flame wars and vitrol and rhetoric is too much noise for me to 
> derive anything useful from. Someone needs to stand up and lead. I 
> will happily follow.

"Too much noise" has been v6's problem from the start.  Every time I've 
looked at v6 for use in the enterprise or even at home over the last ~15 
years, the answer is always "wait -- v6 isn't standardized yet", 
"implement now -- v6 is ready for production", "wait -- v6 is missing 
critical features", "implement now -- v6 is easier than v4" and "wait -- 
v6 is too complex, and we don't have the best practices figured out yet" 
-- all simultaneously, depending on who you ask, the phase of the moon, 
local weather patterns, etc.    And, to a significant degree, that's 
still happening today.

That's exarcerbated by the long development cycle, multiple conflicting 
revisions/implementations over the years, and a severe case of feature 
creep.  Most people started to tune out around the third time we heard 
"it's really here, for real this time!", and were completely 
underwhelmed (or overwhelmed, as the case may be) when the "really here 
for real" version arrived after a long hype cycle.

So basically.... IPv6 is the Duke Nukem Forever of the networking 
world.  Took forever to get here, was completely underwhelming when it 
did, and wasn't compelling enough for people to pony up money for other 
than as a curiosity.  Unfortunately v6 is an essential part of making 
the Internet continue to work, because in any other scenario it would 
have been abandoned as vaporware 10-15 years ago.  If a product is in 
development for 20 years, the expectation is that it's perfect out of 
the box, reduced to the simplest possible implementation, and easily 
understood -- and that's not what we have.

- Pete