Remember "Internet-In-A-Box"?

Mark Andrews marka at isc.org
Wed Jul 15 06:22:33 UTC 2015


In message <55A5B526.8030804 at alter3d.ca>, Peter Kristolaitis writes:
> 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.

Yet I can take a Windows XP box.  Tell it to enable IPv6 and it
just works.  Everything that a node needed existed when Windows XP
was released.  The last 15 years has been waiting for ISP's and CPE
vendors to deliver IPv6 as a product.  This is not to say that every
vendor deployed all the parts of the protocol properly but they
existed.

Most of the noise was people saying "We don't need IPv6" and second
guessing the design decisions because they still had IPv4 think.
If you look at the protocol it basically hasn't changed in the last
15 years. There has been minor tweak but what was there was complete
enough to deploy.

> - Pete
-- 
Mark Andrews, ISC
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: marka at isc.org



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