IPv6 in Education Question

Karl Auer kauer at biplane.com.au
Thu Mar 18 22:29:12 UTC 2010


On Thu, 2010-03-18 at 11:16 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
> You're either going to have to sell them on future-proofing or
> "We're sailing off the edge of the world in two years,
> there be dragons there, train your folks now."

Or sell them on the point that IPv6 is where the innovation is. We have
literally no idea what our children will be doing with restored
end-to-end transparency and abundant addresses. That's where education
has to be. It's not an educational "feature", but a very important
emergent property...

> Remember that there are two IPv6 transitions
> - introducing IPv6 and forcing some people onto it
> - getting rid of IPv4 after IPv6 support is universal.

And the third (well, probably the second, between those two) - learning
to *really use* IPv6.
 
> > Death of NAT
> NAT's not going away for a long time - IPv6 doesn't need it for
> address space conservation, and pretends not to need it very much for
> renumbering IPv6 to IPv6, but it's widely used as a firewall
> substitute and administrative convenience.

Both oddities that I confidently predict will not survive long in the
face of the enormous advantages that properly-implemented IPv6 can
bring. A teensy packet filter substitutes for the "security" aspect, and
PI address space deals with the second. 

> The first IPv6 transition will eliminate some NAT in pure-v6 environments,
> so there will be applications that are no longer broken and can Just Work,
> but it'll also introduce several different flavors of IPv4-to-IPv6
> NATs/tunnels/etc.,

Sure, there will be practical reasons why people need this or that
half-solution, this or that broken stopgap. But we can keep the Dark
Years fewer by trying not to use them.

> Any big commercial sites will stay reachable with IPv4 for a long time,
> certainly until IPv6 has been well established for a couple of years,

We've all been here before. The same thing will happen globally as
happened in thousands of networks with IPX, Appletalk and DECNet. IPv4
remains only on sufferance. The alternative rapidly becomes vastly more
attractive as the connectedness of the new protocol snowballs. Pressure
builds from inside and out, and - way sooner than anyone expected -
there is a sort of communal sigh of relief and the old stuff gets
quietly dropped.

I wonder what landmarks we should designate as "IPv4 is done" - Google
dropping support for IPv4? And I wonder what the landmarks for the
beginning of the end would be - Windows 15 coming out with IPv4 disabled
by default?

Regards, K.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)                   +61-2-64957160 (h)
http://www.biplane.com.au/~kauer/                  +61-428-957160 (mob)

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