moving to IPv6

Sun Nov 2 17:59:17 UTC 1997

Alex Bligh writes...

> possible. Running a provider-side proxy you could
> theoretically have 1 IP address per farm. An
> application layer solution is thus also doable.

But you still need to find an excuse to waste 8000 more addresses so
you can appear to justify getting a /19 address space to get around
route filters so your multi-homing gives a return on investment.

> In a world where the internet industry is becoming
> more and more like the telecoms industry, the
> necessity of users to have protocol level access
> to the network is diminishing, and the dangers
> of doing so are becoming greater. Which telcos
> will blithely hand out SS7 interconnects to
> users? Without (routable) IP access, there
> would be no SYN floods of distant networks, no
> source spoofing, less hacking, easier traceability,
> and the BGP table need only be OTO 1 entry per
> non-leaf node on a provider interconnection
> graph.

That's why everyone is abandoning traditionals ISPs and going with proxy
providers like AOL.

I'm not sure if you are limiting this suggestion to just dialup accounts,
or widening it to include dedicated accounts.  The justfications and impact
vary depending on the type of account.

> Of course there would be applications that would
> suffer. No telnet for instance, except through a telnet
> gateway at each end (and, urm, that's probably
> not a bad thing). Risk of snooping by ISPs
> on private data (well they can do that anyway,
> and if you really care, send it encrypted).
> No IPv4 intranet applications between customers
> of different providers (hang on, didn't IPv6
> require tunnels anyway?). No broken protocols
> which encapsulate network addresses within
> the payload (oh well - rewrite the protocols).

How will you be sure that every provider has a telnet gateway?  I suspect
that many will just leave it out.  And they will leave out many other
protocols/applications, as well.

IPv4 can be translated to IPv6s4 (my term for IPv6 in an address space that
corresponds to IPv4 addresses).  Of course if we do this it means we have to
be able to continue to route all this address space even after IPv6 is fully
deployed (I'd not want to by then).

> Sean seems to predicts death of end to end
> network layer addressing. How about the
> death of end to end internet? Instead
> run with a core of IPv4 numbered routers
> and application layer gateways. Run everything
> else in private address space. 10.0.0.0/8
> has pleny of room.

You've just written a new application based on UDP.  How will it get
through these application layer gateways?  Will you have to write the
gateway module, too, for every one of many dozens of gateway platforms?

The end-to-end notion is what makes the network so powerful.  Without
that you end up being limited to those few applications that someone
decided there is a business justification for in the gateways.

Before the Internet got started in the research and academic world,
there simply would never have been a business case to build it, based
on the way business does its analysis.  Yet, we know what the end
result turned out to be.

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