Geoff on IPv4 Exhaustion

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

On 11/20/2011 11:22 PM, Doug Barton wrote:
> On 11/20/2011 23:13, Matija Grabnar wrote:
>> Well "the users don't want end-to-end" is an appeal to authority,
>> too.
>
> Sure, you can look at it that way if you want to. My actual intention is
> to get the IPv6 kool-aid drinkers to look at what people have been

IPv6 isn't kool-aid.  That IPv4 has run out is a fact.  That IPv6 has
been designed to replace it is also a fact.  Saying that you are just
destroying your credibility.

>
> No, it isn't. And this is a key point. The question is, what solutions
> will corporate IT administrators accept, and why?
>

Most corporate IT administrators are reactive and not pro-active.  Back
in the 90's just about all of them thought that Netware and IPX would
rule forever.  I talked to plenty of them in the 90's who didn't even
know what TCP/IP was.

In fact, funny little story - in 1994 the company I was working for,
Central Point Software, was purchased by Symantec.  I was the low man
on the totem pole in that IT dept. and was the only one not laid off.
About 3 months into it I was interviewed by one of the executive VP's
at Symantec.  His first question to me was what should they do about
TCP/IP, they had a req. on the table from their internal product 
developers (the ones they inherited from CPS) to buy a bunch of Trumpet 
Winsock licenses for use and only one person in their own IT group had
any opinions on it, and his opinion was to not do it and wait for Win95.
I only heard about that -after- I told the VP to not buy that and to
plan on using the Microsoft-supplied IP stack.  None of the other IT
people in their group knew anything about TCP/IP.  Of course, that
changed a few years later.  But my experience since is that IT depts. in
corporations are often some of the slowest to embrace new technologies
because they spend all their time reacting to user requests.

I guarantee you that very few corporate IT administrators will actively
pursue getting their orgs up and running with IPv6.  Most will do
everything they can to avoid it until the day that one of their users
who has some pull demands it.  And the user who I think is most likely
to demand it and get it is going to be the marketing or sales VP who 
needs to sell into a foreign country where there are customers on IPv6 
that are not reachable from his organization.

IPv6 is going to come into most orgs from the outside and because of
that the corporate admins who deploy it are going to not know much
about it and few will take the time to learn anything about it.  So
you are going to see quite a lot of admins just do whatever the vendors
tell them to do because they don't know any better.  They will accept
whatever the pretty salesgirl tells them to accept, and she will just
tell them whatever her engineers tell her.

Ted