Subject: RE: US DoD and IPv6

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2010 10:50:06 -0400 (EDT)

> From: "Michel Py" <[email-masked]>

    > you are one of the main persons behind the failure of IPv6. 

I think that's unfair. To my mind (when I sat and did a long post-mortem
after the IETF adopted IPv6 almost two decades ago, trying to understand why
I hadn't been able to convince people to do something different), in some
sense the real guilty party in the IPv6 choice is the IETF at large, the
ordinary members - for accepting what was basically 'IPv4 with a few more
bits', instead of a fundamentally revised architecture that would provided
real benefits in the form of major new capabilities (e.g. separation of
location and identity), thereby giving actual operational incentives to drive
migration.

"We have met the enemy, and he is us."

	Noel

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From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2010 10:06:42 -0400 (EDT)

> From: David Conrad <[email-masked]>

    > ISPs that have routers that are on the edge memory- or CPU-wise should
    > really consider upgrading, as there is likely to be a flood of long
    > prefix IPv4 routes as the markets take effect.

Excellent point. Happily, there are a number of things being worked on that
can help with this, if they succeed and get reasonably widely deployed.

In particular, to the extent that we can separate location and identity (and
there are a number of active schemes which do this), the fractionalization of
the identity namespace (to make maximum utilization of it, since smaller
allocations inevitably mean more efficient utilization, whereas larger one
meak more wastage) would to a certain degree cease to be an issue.

(I say "if they ... get reasonably widely deployed" because if you look at
interoperability issues with unmodified installed base, very patchy
deployment of these new things would leave us unable to really get the full
benefit, in terms of routing table diminuation, because you'd have to keep
advertizing legacy routes to allow legacy equipment to interoperate. We'll
see...)

	Noel