IPv6 Pain Experiment

Thu Oct 3 01:37:19 UTC 2019

Yes, IPv6 suffers from Second System Syndrome. No this is not news, 
neither is it malleable (no matter how much whinging about roads not 
taken occurs).

On 10/2/19 6:30 PM, George Michaelson wrote:
> A long time ago, in another country, JANET had a mail list to discuss
> email, in a world before DNS. And, when DNS emerged, JANET mail list
> made a *deliberate* decision to make the domain order of UK email
> domains the reverse of every other country worldwide. A DELIBERATE
> decision. (I was there, on this list. Others may disagree with my
> interpretation of acts done and motivations, but I want to be clear I
> didn't "hear this second hand" -I was receiving the mailflows
> discussing this in public. I am sure there are other private
> conversations I didnt see)
> 
> It wasn't a consensus decision. It wasn't an entirely rational
> decision. OTOH it was a research network, email was a research
> activity, and in some ways, it made sense to find out what happened.
> That the decision had repercussions which echoed down the years, and
> marginalized some communications Uk and internationally, is perhaps,
> the real lesson.
> 
> IPv6 had an opportunity to consider designs which were intermediate,
> (IPv4-and-a-bit) and backwards compatible. And, like JANET and domain
> order, people decided not to do it, believing it was interesting and
> research-y.
> 
> I too wish we had selected TUBA, or had thought more about interop
> with IPv4. I sometimes wish I understood why SRC was the first element
> off the wire, and not DST, Since rational ASIC/FPGA hardware can latch
> early on the SRC and begin routing faster if it appears in natural bit
> order first. Or, why we even have SRC in the header: it does not
> inform routing. These are heresies.
> 
> Counterfactuals dog Historians. Some love them, some hate them. We
> don't have time machines. This is the world we live in, we have to
> make the best of it we can. IPv6 globally is rising, IPv6 in Asia is
> rising. IPv6 in India is basically ubiquitous, IPv6 in America is
> ubiquitous. We are going to live in a mixed protocol global internet
> for the forseeable future. We can plan to extend V4, or end V4, or
> deprecate V4, or end v6, and favour CGN  but we can't end either V4 or
> V6 entirely, easily, soon.
> 
> -G
> 