quietly....

Wed Feb 2 21:58:05 UTC 2011

> It's a bit of a shame that people who've gotten into networking in the
> last 10 to 15 years haven't studied or worked with anything more than
> IPv4. They've missed out on seeing a variety of different ways to solve
> the same types of problems and therefore been exposed to the various
> benefits and trade-offs of the different methods. With that sort of
> exposure, people may find out that there are other better ways to
> solve problems, but IPv4's limitations and constraints prevented them
> being possible.

Then there are some of us who *have* worked with other networking
technologies (e.g. DECnet, XNS, Appletalk, X.25, etc) and *still*
think that IPv6 is in many ways a horrible mess.

IPv6 is at the same time both too much and not enough. It is "too
much" because it is too different from IPv4, significantly slowing
deployment and learning time. It is "not enough" because it really
only solves one problem, namely address exhaustion - and not, for
instance, the routing table explosion problem.

(And don't get me started on the *claimed* advantages of IPv6, like
"mandatory IPsec", "more efficient header processing" etc.)

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug at nethelp.no