On Monday, May 26, 2003, at 17:31 Canada/Eastern, Arron Scott wrote:
Someone in the IETF once made the statement that "IPv6 was somehwat like a Nuclear Weapon, hope we never have to use it, but nice to know it's there just in case".
Although obviously it is important the operations groups get to grips with v6 (and it's MANY implications), I still wonder what the business drivers will be for people to use IPv6 extensively in NZ. Until a critical mass is reached it will be up to those who build IPv6 clouds to provide the v6-v4 gateways, and I still see the real work going on in China, and the mobile provider networks.
Are you seeing a real world move in America/Canada yet Joe ?
There are large operators running native v6 networks in Europe and the US, and more in east Asia. We are deploying (and have deployed) v6 infrastructure at ISC. You can decide whether we are "real world" or not :-) One interesting aspect which seems to rarely get a mention is that most operating systems used by people today support v6, either out-of-the-box or with minor tweaking. When I arrived at the IETF meeting in San Francisco earlier this year and the DHCP servers were down, I didn't actually notice; my powerbook (with attendant fruity consumer-grade operating system) autoconfigured itself with a v6 address, it turned out that everything I wanted to do was possible without v4 transport, and without any 6-to-4 gateways (IMAP, SMTP, ssh). So maybe the wait for v6 is not about waiting for a demand from users, since when it's available users will start using it without even realising; maybe it's because the problems that v6 was designed to solve are not particularly pressing right now. Or alternatively, maybe v6 still has the aura of "future, experimental, maybe one day, complicated, scary" about it, and people don't realise that the infrastructure is really already in place, to a large extent, and all they have to do is turn it on. I remember jumping through hoops, gathering documentation for historical allocations out of 203.97.0.0/17. I also remember the annoyance of address assignment, ad-hoc classless in-addr.arpa delegation, shouting at sales people for promising "5 class Cs" with their 64k office internet connections, and being shouted at by sales people for holding up deals because appropriate pedantic address utilisation forms had not been filled in correctly. It would certainly have been nice to be able to sidestep all that and say "yes, here is your /48, please move along now". Joe