And Now for Something Completely Different (was Re: IPv6 news)

Tony Li tony.li at tony.li
Tue Oct 18 01:32:44 UTC 2005




Fred,

> So the routing problem was looked at, and making a fundamental  
> routing change was rejected by both the operational community and  
> the routing folks.
>
> No, IPv6 doesn't fix (or even change) the routing of the system,  
> and that problem will fester until it becomes important enough to  
> change.


 From this end of the elephant, we looked at Nimrod and saw potential  
there, but did not buy off on it.  We also looked at GSE and the  
routing folks at the very least seemed bought into that, but it died,  
under what I would characterize as a purely political hailstorm.

Yes, the lack of a scalable routing architecture will continue to  
fester until it has sufficient political visibility that it exceeds  
our pain threshold and we decide to make the change.  The problem  
with this model is that the pain of change grows daily.  Each and  
every v6 system that is deployed is yet another bit of installed base  
that will need to be updated someday.

The Internet community needs the IETF leadership to understand this  
very clearly and to take action to resolve this issue sooner, not  
later.  As others have said, this is a pay now or pay later  
situation, and the pay later portion is MUCH more expensive.   
Specifically, the IAB should call for a halt to IPv6 deployment until  
consensus is reached on a scalable routing architecture.  I realize  
that this is painful, but continuing to deploy is simply creating a  
v6 mortgage that we cannot afford to pay off.

Regards,
Tony




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