On Wednesday, Feb 12, 2003, at 21:26 Canada/Eastern, Ewen McNeill wrote:
and that the real pressing issue is how you make the routing system scale (an issue which IPv6 does not attempt to address).
This is the flip side to the "one address, or maybe a few more if you beg lots". You end up lots of very long prefixes. To be sure many of those couldn't care less about routing, and CIDR works well for them.
The length of the prefixes isn't really the issue; it's the amount of state that is required to be present in the global routing system in order to represent route policy.
I'd be happy to see IPv6 deployed to get rid of some of the worst excesses of NAT I see (particularly the "traffic in to one IP address splits off to N internal servers in difficult to keep track of fashions") but other than that I don't think it's going to solve all that much by itself.
There are certainly some things that IPv6 does well, and making NATs unnecessary is one of them. There is also little doubt that IPv6 deployment will continue, and probably accelerate, despite the facts that the prime motivator for change no longer exists and the new prime motivator for change is not addressed. As someone I worked with once said, sufficient wings have been strapped to the pig that it *will* fly. Joe