IPv6 woes - RFC

Wed Sep 15 04:21:19 UTC 2021

> On Sep 14, 2021, at 14:20 , Michael Thomas <mike at mtcc.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On 9/14/21 2:07 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:
>> You’d be surprised… Vendors often get well down a path before exposing enough information to the community to get the negative feedback their solution so richly deserves. At that point, they have rather strong incentives to push for the IETF adopting their solution over customer objections because of entrenched code-base and a desire not to go back and explain to management that the idea they’ve been working on for the last 6 months is stillborn.
>>>> 
>>> But we're talking almost 30 years ago when the internet was tiny. And it's not like operators were some fount of experience and wisdom back then: everybody was making it up along the way including operators which barely even existed back then. I mean, we're talking about the netcom days here. That's why this stinks of revisionist history to me.
>>> 
>> 
>> I was there for parts of it. Even then, the vendors were entrenched in their views and dominated many of the conversations.
>> 
> Vendors have to be able to implement things so of course there is going to be push back when it's not technically feasible or far more expensive. Nobody expects customers putting out the actual $$$ to be up to speed on the intricacies of TCAM's and other such considerations so there is always going to be back and forth.

Back and forth is one thing, but the reality is that they put a lot of development effort into things in a vacuum and then expected us to take what they built and standardize it. They often seemed utterly surprised when the practical realities of deploying it in an operational network didn’t agree with their idea of an “elegant” solution.

> And none of this alters that nobody has given a scenario where their $SOLUTION would have fared any better than ipv6.

That’s probably fair criticism to some extent.

Owen