Small mixup...

Posted Jan 26, 2011 14:02 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
In reply to: Small mixup... by khim
Parent article: LCA: Vint Cerf on re-engineering the Internet

Actually, his idea was to extend the IPv4 to become IPv6, so that v4 is included in it. This is what happens when you run a DOS program inside any NT based Windows. You are not really running on DOS, it just looks like it to the program.

And given that all the software would have understood 16 byte addresses by now, the transition would just happen.

Practical example: my home network would have been on IPv6, although all my addreses would still be written in 4 byte form in my config files. My effort in this: zero. ISP effort in this: close to zero.

Small mixup...

Posted Jan 26, 2011 14:44 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

Practical example: my home network would have been on IPv6, although all my addreses would still be written in 4 byte form in my config files. My effort in this: zero. ISP effort in this: close to zero.

Wow, great achievement. How it'll be different from the situation today: if ISP supports either SLAAC or DHCPv6 then your home network will be on IPv6 - the only changes needed are new hardware on ISPs side? It's hard to find contemporary OS without SLAAC (and most support DHCPv6, too), you know.

The problems with IPv6 deployment are not related to problem described in DJB's article. It's simple economics. ISP economics to be exact. Other problems were fixed long ago. May be not in a way DJB likes, but they are fixed.

Small mixup...

Posted Jan 26, 2011 15:13 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (1 responses)

Aha. And they will buy my IPv6 router? Configure my AAAA records? Setup my IPv6 firewall? Reconfigure all my services? Ditto at my employer that has this multiplied by the factor of at least a 1000?

Please. This plan is an utter disaster. If it was any good, nobody would have to touch a thing.

You know, kinda like this: when I send texts from my mobile, I couldn't care less whether 3G or GSM is used. A phone I purchased almost 4 years ago could do both automagically.

Small mixup...

Posted Jan 27, 2011 12:30 UTC (Thu) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]

> when I send texts from my mobile, I couldn't care less whether 3G or GSM is used. A phone I purchased almost 4 years ago could do both automagically.

Yes, the same way you can use IPv4 on top of either wired ethernet (802.3) or wireless (802.11). A laptop purchased more than 4 years ago could do both automagically.

What we are talking about is more like changing the phone number format or the SMS packet format, not switching between technologies lower in the stack (3G/GSM and 802.3/802.11 are all link-level), so your analogy is a red herring. Changing the link (which affects only that link) is a local decision, and thus much easier than changing a higher-level protocol (which affects everyone).