The use of RIPng

[Alexander Clouter]

Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm at ipinc.net> wrote:
>
> Any vendor making and selling gear operates under a product
> feature principle.
> 
> This is that all features can be sorted by the number
> of customers who -require- them.  On top of the list are the
> features considered most critical to the most number of
> people, on the bottom the least critical.  There is a price tag
> associated with each feature.
> 
> The lower down the list you go, the chance a feature will be
> implemented is inversely proportional to it's price.
> 
> Right now IPv6 is lower down on that feature list.  The vendors
> know that as time passes it will become more important and
> so there is some weight to the idea of deploying IPv6 early,
> but what this means economically is your able to defer some of
> the cost of the IPv6 features into the future.
>
I would normally agree here if it was not that the feature was a L3 
'thing' which is meant to be transparent to the layers above it.

For example, I want a SIP based handset.  There should be no reason that 
when SIP is implemented in the device by the vendor that it does not 
care about whether it is operating over IPv4 and IPv6.  SSH and SNMP can 
also be considered similarly.

I will agree things get a bit hazy when we are talking about devices 
that operate at or between L2 and L3, but for 'features' that live at L4 
or above...I cannot understand why a vendor is not providing feature 
parity.

There is a cost to *migrate* an existing codebase that is IPv4 only to 
dualstack, however for new devices/features, there is no excuse.

Just my thoughts.

Cheers

-- 
Alexander Clouter
.sigmonster says: Restaurant package, not for resale.