An Internet IPv6 Transition Plan

John Curran jcurran at mail.com
Wed Jul 25 13:04:42 UTC 2007


At 1:15 PM +0100 7/25/07, Stephen Wilcox wrote:
>I'm not sure there is time for v6 to be ready before companies find different ways to manage this. There are many things that need to happen to enable v6 and I dont think any of them are happening in a big way.

Let's agree on  "18mo-4yrs of 'greyness' " (as you put it),
and that indeed different companies find different ways to
manage this... 

Some of the companies are going to select IPv6 because it's
has some level of support in existing end systems and network
gear (even considering the various implementation flaws, lack
of hardware support, etc), and because it supports a generally
hierarchical addressing/routing model which works (again,
despite recognition that the routing system has some serious
long-term scalability questions which need to be looked into). 

For their choice to work, it's necessary that your public-facing
servers accept IPv6 connections.  It's really not a hard concept,
and it's based on the simple premise stated by Jon: "In general,
an implementation should be conservative in its sending behavior,
and liberal in its receiving behavior."  You've stated a long list
of items that need to be changed, but that's if you want to serve
as an ISP using IPv6 for customers, and change your internal
infrastructure to IPv6, and that's not required.  You've already
said you are going to take another path to manage things, and
that's cool.

The question is whether you still recognize the need to deploy
IPv6 on the very edge of your network for your public services
such as web and email.  You could even have someone host
this for you, it's not that hard, and there's two to 4 years to get
it done.

If you're saying that no one at all needs to use IPv6, so you
aren't going to worry about IPv6 connectivity for your public
facing servers, then it would be best to explain how global
routing is supposed to work when ISP's aren't using
predominantly hierarchical address assignments for their
growth.

/John




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