I-D Action:draft-azinger-scalable-addressing-00.txt

[Mark Smith]

On Sat, 25 Sep 2010 22:27:55 -0700
Fred Baker <fred at cisco.com> wrote:

> 
> On Sep 25, 2010, at 8:31 PM, David Conrad wrote:
> 
> > On Sep 25, 2010, at 8:15 PM, Mark Smith wrote:
> >>> I may be a bit of a curmudgeon here, but I think one sentiment you might 
> >>> hear from the operations community is: "No thank-you.  The IETF has 
> >>> already done more than enough to place obstacles in front of IPv6 
> >>> adoption, particularly by 'end sites'.  We don't need to add to that."
> >> I'm curious as to what specifically these obstacles are or have been? 
> > 
> > http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5887
> 
> OK, so it sounds like Michaels comment was that the IETF has actively make it hard to deploy IPv6. The response is "Renumbering still needs work", and the upshot of the discussion in RFC 4192 ("renumbering a network without a flag day") is that the things that make renumbering hard are the places where people take shortcuts with things magically knowing addresses instead of using names, or put addresses into configuration files.
>    
>     interface foo
>        ipv6 address 2001:0db8::1/32
> 
> So the complaint is that the IETF has not found a cure for human stupidity/laziness or for the need to configure routers? Or is there another complaint?
> 
> I'm serious. If the IETF has actively gotten in the way, there's something we need to fix. If it's something that neither the operators nor the IETF can solve, that's an unfair response.

I agree, which is why I asked the question. I think the IETF has done
most of what it does - provide protocol specifications that can be
implemented. A lot of vendors have implemented them, and they've been
mostly subversively deployed because IPv6 has been shipped in products
by default in a lot of cases.

My opinion is that the lack of IPv6 deployment by operators is
primarily apathy - the problem has been a long way off for a long time,
so there has been quite a lot of "talk about it" in the operator
community, but not all that much action. Then, two or so years
(i.e. in the last six months) before there is a real impact that is
within short term planning time frames for organisations, there is now
a flurry of action. Sounds exactly like the timeline of what happened
with Y2K. The unfortunate thing about this time frame is that the
opportunity for a smooth migration away from IPv4 has disappeared, so
now we're going to have to put up with IPv4 getting even worse as we
try to stretch the life of it's address space even further via large
scale NAT etc.

Regards,
Mark.