Big Temporary Networks

Thu Sep 20 18:38:52 UTC 2012

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Masataka Ohta [mailto:mohta at necom830.hpcl.titech.ac.jp]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2012 11:21 PM
> To: David Miller
> Cc: nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: Re: Big Temporary Networks
> 
> David Miller wrote:
> 
> > So, a single example of IPv4 behaving in a suboptimal manner would be
> > enough to declare IPv4 not operational?
> 
> For example?

Your own example ---

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Masataka Ohta [mailto:mohta at necom830.hpcl.titech.ac.jp]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2012 1:26 AM
> To: nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: Re: Big Temporary Networks
>
> ...  that a very crowded train arrives at a station and all the smart
phones of passengers try to connect to APs ...

IPv4 has a train load of devices unicasting and retransmitting all the
dropped packets, where an IPv6 multicast RA allows all the devices to
configure based on reception of a single packet. Therefore IPv4 is
"suboptimal" in its abuse of the air link which could have been used for
real application traffic instead of being wasted on device configuration.
Thus by extension using your logic it is not operational. 

Just because you personally want IPv6 to be nothing more than IPv4 in every
aspect is no reason to troll the nanog list and create confusion that causes
others to delay their IPv6 deployment. Your complaints about IPv6 behavior
on wifi ignore the point that IPv6 ND behavior was defined before or in
parallel as wifi was defined by a different committee. There will always be
newer L2 technologies that arrive after an L3 protocol is defined, and the
behavior of the L3 will be 'suboptimal' for the new L2. When the issue is
serious enough to warrant documentation, addendum documents are issued. When
it is simply a matter of personal preference, it is hard to get enough
support to get those documents published. 

Tony