DJB was wrong... even if he was right too. [LWN.net]

DJB was wrong... even if he was right too.

Posted Jan 27, 2011 20:08 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)
In reply to: DJB was wrong... even if he was right too. by foom
Parent article: LCA: IP address exhaustion and the end of the open net

software developers are frequently willing to add features that aren't yet needed (just to get bragging, marketing rights), but only if those new features are not huge and invasive.

the 'implement a new stack, with mandatory features that are complex, and largely unknown' aspect of IPv6 made it a major project, not something that could be added in easily.

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Hardware

Posted Jan 27, 2011 21:15 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

And yet all the _software_ developers who matter did just this. I was using IPv6 _software_ ten years ago, maybe closer to fifteen now. Our biggest worry in _software_ is Microsoft Windows 95, long obsolete and unsupported, but widely used for the same reason people are still watching TVs with dial tuners (yes, really, they are even in countries with DVB - backward compatibility is a bitch)

So software is great, it's enough to have IPv6 in your house, share it with a few friends in a tiny startup's office, or even across a few hundred hosts if you can afford a beefy FreeBSD box as a router. All these things were being done last _century_ in preparation for the transition we are now undertaking.

But that only gets you so far. Eventually (today probably somewhere about gigabit speed) it is only cost effective to switch IP with custom hardware designed for that specific purpose. Eventually the cost of wider addresses doesn't vanish, but instead dominates. And there the story changes.

Hardware

Posted Jan 27, 2011 21:31 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

the latest generation of networking technology always requires custom ASICs, back in the 90s you needed ASICs for 10Mb switching.

this is part of the problem, by designing IPv6 so that everything had to change we have these problems. If this was something backwards compatible, that could run through existing devices in the middle without them having to change (think of it as being similar to tunneling, but with every ISP being a potential tunnel termination point without having to configure it explicitly) then we would not have to deal with the ISPs support or lack of it as an issue, only the question of getting enough endpoints to support it.

this wouldn't have solved the problem entirely, but it would have helped.

And if you are claiming that all developers who matter have implemented IPv6, please go back to the earlier post that pointed out that no current generation game console supports IPv6, many printers don't support IPv6, let alone other, smaller embedded systems.

Hardware

Posted Jan 28, 2011 16:13 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Again, the scenario where any ISP can offer valid tunnel endpoints and have them automatically used without explicit configuration by the user _already exists_

The ISPs don't provide such tunnels because the tunnel would _cost money_ and they don't want to spend money.