IPv6 *is* like AMD

Posted Jan 29, 2011 16:14 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

All I keep saying is that mistakes were made. Even the best of the best do that from time to time.

Unfortunatelly you keep saying something totally different: The answer to a very simple and common question is still the main problem with IPv6: Why does everyone already connected to the net have to reconfigure and essentially run two setups? - when in fact it's minor issue not worth talking about. This is "question A", BTW. The main issue is totally different: how can we provide IPv6 connectively to the new nodes who don't have IPv4 address (they are behind NAT or in some non-IPv4 based networks)? This is "question X".

Why the "question A" is unimportant and "question X" is the biggest problem there is?

Question A: it only helps few people who are getting "white" IPv4 addresses. Today it's about 25% of the users in the 10 years time, it'll be about 0.5% of users.

Question X: Internet is still grows about 50% per year (if it stops growing then the whole IPv6 transition will not be needed). This means if you can attach new nodes to the Internet with IPv6 connectivity then in 10 years time about 98% of users (well, devices, not persons: people will have multiple connections by then - some IPv4 only, some IPv4/IPv6 and some IPv6-only; we only care about last two) will be connected to the IPv6. At that point IPv6-only connectivity is almost as good as IPv4 connectivity and we can talk about "IPv6-only ISP providers".

Now, please explain again why do you think DJB plan which solves 0.5% of problem is more important than other plans which may solve 98% of problem?

Your claim boils down to this: it was not possible to design IPv6 as an upgrade to IPv4.

No. My clain is different: it is possible to design IPv6 as an upgrade to IPv4 (see TP/IX, for example), but DJB's idea is not a way to do it: it solves about 0.5% of problem and leaves the other 99.5% unsolved.

I know that any plan which makes sure new users get IPv6 by default will succeed. In the next few years new users will come from LTE - so this is where battle should be concentrated today. Disruptive technologies never win by frontal assault - they need some new place to grow and thrive. Then eventually they make old technologies irrelevant.

DJBs plan is wrong because it tries to help frontal assault - and frontal assault is doomed no matter what, so why spend so much time thinking about it?

I'm sure you read what DJB wrote and the main idea is that things should be easily interoperable and compatible as much as possible.

Sorry, but this is just a preamble to the DJB's article. The gist of the article is "how to make sure nodes which have white IPv4 addresses and DNS records may easily participate in the IPv6 Internet". And this is total red herring: these nodes were rare even when DJB wrote his article and today they are exception, not the rule. It does not really matter what happens to these nodes. It's important to give IPv6 connectivity to the new nodes - and DJB's idea does not help there at all.

But I know one thing: my ping6 still doesn't work and it should.

And I know another thing: what happens with a few lucky persons who have "white" IPv4 address is irrelevant. They are minority, they already have end-to-end connectivity so they are the last persons interested in migration to the IPv6. If ping6 will work for all LTE users then it'll be enough to drop IPv4 altogether. Today about half of Internet access is from mobile phones. In 10 years time it'll be 90% (if you include LTE-enabled laptops and pads) and it'll be not important for the web sites if they are accesible to IPv4 users or not. At this point users of the old IPv4 internet will find some kind of solution.

So, even if DJB and myself are utter nutters (which is a distinct possibility) your grand technical solution still isn't working.

It's not my "grand technical solution". I don't know a good solution to the dilemma. But I know that DJB's idea is wrong because it solves 0.5% of the whole problem at best - and it solves precisely the wrong part of problem.

Your Problem X, as you call it, is what people should have been working on in the interim. But, they couldn't work on it, because the main idea did not have interoperability and compatibility in mind, so they could not plan on how to achieve this very simple goal.

Interoparability and compatibility are not relevant. We either have the problem of IP address exhaustion from explosive growth of the Internet or not. If we do have such problem then what happens with "old" nodes is unimportant: they will be quickly outnumbered by "new" nodes, if we don't have such a growth then IPv6 transition is not needed at all. In both cases DJB's plan is useless.