How to force rapid ipv6 adoption

Todd Underwood toddunder at gmail.com
Fri Oct 2 20:45:10 UTC 2015


On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 2:07 PM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
>
> None of them does what you propose — Smooth seamless communication between
> an IPv4-only host and an IPv6-only host.

i view this point/question as an assertion by owen as follows:

"it was never possible to design a smooth transition and that's why we
gave up on it."

furthermore, it's a also the following assertion:

"it was never possible to expand our address space while allowing for
an actual migration."

if you believe that, then you end up in advocacy land.  if you don't
believe that but you see lots of people who gave up on the design
process early, then you understand why we're here.

v6 was designed without a migration plan and it wasn't believed to be
important, or possibly wasn't believed to be possible.  but there was
never any pressure to use v6 because v4 worked well and we had plenty
of addresses.  we still have plenty of addresses and although they're
no longer ~free from quasi-governmental organizations they're way
cheaper than the cost to implement v6.  so we're still going to use v4
~forever.

>
> So, please, Todd, explicate exactly how you would achieve that stated
> objective… What could you do differently on the IPv6-only host side that
> would allow smooth seamless connectivity to/from the IPv4 host while still
> providing a larger address space?

it sounds like you're interested in having the engineering
conversation that should have been had ~15 years ago.  me, too  15
years ago.  sigh.

i know owen is now just trolling because he's threatened by the idea
that there might be something wrong with ipv6, but the reality is that
none of this was necessary.  ipv6 might have been done differently
with a different header format and different choices around migration.
routing could have been done differently to try to preserve end-to-end
but still splitting locators and identifiers (which i know that dave
meyer thinks might not be possible but i'm still more sanguine about).
we could have explicitly made smooth migration an engineering
requirement just as much as "more addresses" were.

we didn't.  that's fine.  so we got a disconnected network that some
things can talk to and others can't.  and we put the full burden all
the way to every edge.  and now we have conversations about how to
upgrade home cpe everywhere.  it's tedious and boring and dumb but
it's the direct result of every decision we made and how we
prioritized things.

so, for clarity, this "how do you magically enable smooth migration
now that we didn't prioritize it in the protocol design" question is a
bogus red herring.  the answer is:  "you prioritize it in the protocol
design".  i assume smart people can see that.

owen:  i understand you like v6 and that it's important to you.  that
doesn't mean it's perfect and it doesn't mean we couldn't have done
better. stop being so hostile and so threatened and try to listen a
bit.  or don't.  whatever works for you.

cheers!

t

>
> In any case I'm giving up on that conversation. And this whole one. It goes
> nowhere.
>
> And this is why v6 is where it is: true believers. Instead of a simple,
> practical matter of engineering a transition we got 15 years of advocacy.
>
> If it’s so simple, why do you continue to refuse to explain the process?
>
> Owen
>
>



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