Only 5x IPv4 ... WRONG! :)

Wed Oct 20 06:37:50 UTC 2010

> -----Original Message-----
> 
> 	IPv6 - while it has just over a decade of work, still has a long
> way
> 	to go to fulfill its promise. For the oldtimers, remember that
it
> took
> 	IP a couple of decades to "gel" at version 4.  Sure, we can (and
> in
> 	some cases - MUST) cram the "Internet" model on IPv6, but that
is
> a
> 	genuine waste of opportunity.
> 
> 
> 	So ... can we let an IPv6-based "polyphonic-net" embrace, and
> subsume
> 	the old, last century Internet?  Or is that asking too much of
> the
> 	sales/marketing droids?

Most of the problems I have seen with v6 really aren't v6 problems.
Programs and their various libraries, for example, that parse an address
with a colon as a hostname is one example.  Now I could even work around
that by populating the local default dns domain with records that
resolve to AAAA records ... if I could put a colon in a hostname (e.g.
someone enters fe80::1e:dead:beef:cafe, the program looks up
fe80::1e:dead:beef:cafe.my.local-domain rather than trying to connect to
fe80:1e:dead:beef:cafe and dns returns with the AAAA record, that
problem fixed, but I can't, so it isn't.) And even that would only work
for a few commonly accessed hosts.

Programs that rely on multicast will be a little different but that can
be handled in dual-stack, at least in the local internal net.

Now the problems with things like load balancing is real.  Our vendor
supports front end v6 VIPs balanced to backend v4 servers, but it
requires a code update that must be tested before deployment and an
outage scheduled once it has been tested.  It isn't something that can
just be thrown out there on a whim.

The biggest cultural change is coming out of RFC1918 dungeons into the
light of internet routable space and how people deal with that.  It will
be a very interesting time for networks, their vendors, and the
engineers/techs/administrators. 