On Wed, Jul 18, 2001 at 12:22:45PM +1200, Don Stokes wrote: Where do I buy an IPv6 connection? In NZ, you probably can't (well, not if you want support). Where do I get IPv6 address space from? APNIC/ARIN/RIPE Oh, and I don't want to talk IPv4 to anyone, just IPv6, but I'd better be able to talk to the whole Internet. Are you smoking crack again? Arguably, there is not such this ad ipv6 only, IPv6 is a more-or-less a superset of IPv4, all IPv4 address map into Ipv6 address (but obviously not the other way around). The other reason for IPv6's failure was that the IPv6 folks insisted that authentication, encryption, address assignment and other stuff had to be done in the base protocol -- and deployment couldn't start until these had been done. But, more or less, they are done. If we don't need IPv6 now, and its only an experimental thing, then why not try to make it as good as possible before its widely deplpyed when improvements will be much harder to support. In IPv4 land, we do all of these things now in higher level protocols (although some of them aren't done well, mainly due to IETF myopia -- as far as I can make out, there are a bunch of IETFers who don't believe that NAT could ever possibly work and therefore doesn't need to be considered <sigh>, IPSEC being a case in point), such as IPSEC, SSL, DHCP and friends. NAT is a broken idea, as are firewalls. Just because it works, doesn't change this. NAT (and more generally, anything that messes with the end-to-end connectivity of things by meddling in the middle) all have pitfalls which were outside the design of IP and particular TCP. I mean, I can run DECnet by tunnelling it through IP, but I don't think I want to. (And once apon a time, some of the world's biggest data networks ran DECnet, although 16 bits of address space divided into 1024 nodes in 63 areas was a tad limiting -- DEC's own Easynet had "hidden areas" that looked suspiciously like the use of private IP address space, mumbleteen years ago.) And I don't think I want to run IPv6 right now either. Appletalk :) --cw --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog