I still like Milo's comment in the IETF: "IPV6 is like a nuclear weapon, you hope you will never have to use it, but it's nice to know it's there just in case" I have been watching this space for a LONG time, seven years odd, and spoken to numerous people about it. It seems to me we will see a significant partitioned v6 world first, gateways to the IPv4 will connect the historical to the new. I have seen strong suggestions from the mobile space where G3 phones will be generally VoIPv6, but significant amounts of mobile telephony will not directly connect to the big-I, and conversion gateways, GPRS gateway's etc, will hide the huge IPv6 partitions. Still some countries, obviously China, Japan, etc, see it as essential to their growth, so I suppose it will grow out of those new worlds, where the trasition from IPv4 will not be so great. The actual amount of address space available in v4 is largely irrelevant, with much of the allocated space running at <3% utilised, with no legal or realistic way of recovering the space, we can assume it will never get to the high levels of utilisation desired. Fortunately, the utilisation rules are getting tighter, and at the cost of increased prefixes in the global tables, we have seen significantly more rational address allocation. Just because there is enough address space in v4 for quite some time, a significant change in the types of devices and market could damage that overnight. Just an opinion, Arron Scott Cisco NZ -----Original Message----- From: owner-nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz [mailto:owner-nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz]On Behalf Of Chris Wedgwood Sent: Tuesday, 17 July 2001 12:58 AM To: Craig Whitmore Cc: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: Re: IPv6...Fact or Fiction? On Mon, Jul 16, 2001 at 11:47:19PM +1200, Craig Whitmore wrote: When do people think we (the Internet) will run out of IPv4 addresses and people will be forced to move over and use IPv6? Or will people use the IPv4 addresses in a much more conservative way? They might run out... but that doesn't mean IPv6 will take over :) Do you think it will really take off in the near future? Its gaining momentum every day. I first connected to the 6bone in '96, there were about 30 or 40 sites then, now there are hundreds with probably thousands of hosts down-stream. Has there really been a standardized IPV6 Format yet? You mean like EUI64? By format what do you mean? Has anyone actually used it in a production enviornment? There are people selling IPv6 connectivity in .au somewhere I think, so I guess this counts. Should I "Apply" for some IPv6 addreeses now or will there be plenty of time to implement it? Right now, only 15% or so of the theoretical space has been mapped out, and the way it is allocated is fairly conservative. I wouldn't rush out just yet, unless you really need it. See rfc2928 (I think) for more details on this. IPv6 doesn't really solve many problems for most people yet, so its deplyment is rather limited. Microsoft are now on-board and that could help enourmously (upgrading bits in the middle is often easier than at the edge). Solaris, Linux and *BSD all have pretty reasonable IPv6 support. Patches exists for practically every other OS that counts. --cw --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

Chris Wedgwood wrote:

Its gaining momentum every day. I first connected to the 6bone in '96, there were about 30 or 40 sites then, now there are hundreds with probably thousands of hosts down-stream.

Questions: Where do I buy an IPv6 connection? Where do I get IPv6 address space from? 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. Frankly, the IPv6 situation fills me with a sense of deja vu. It feels a lot like the deployment of OSI in the early 90s, with lots of things on the critical path being re-invented unnecessarily. (I don't think OSI ever managed to get its bloated Virtual Terminal spec out the door before the momentum for OSI/GOSIP fell away, back when the Internet community had just stopped worrying about it and and made terminal emulation Somebody Else's Problem in Telnet.) To me, IPv6 has failed to be widely deployed for two reasons. One of them is sheer bloody-minded arrogance on the part of the IETF protocol gods -- a quite sensible proposal, TUBA, was put forward as one of the four IPng proposals, which involved basically leaving TCP and UDP alone, and running them over OSI CLNP packets. If pursued, we wouldn't be having this discussion -- we'd be running all our current services over TUBA packets instead of IP. The real beauty of TUBA was that at the time there had been enough push for OSI from the government community that most infrastructure actually supported it (or at least could turn it on). If they'd released TUBA as the replacement for IP back in 1995-96, we'd have just turned it on, dealt with the issues and (mostly) turned IPv4 off about 1998. The scale of the migration problem in that timeframe was a very tiny fraction of what it is now. But TUBA was based on OSI, and OSI was The Enemy. I watched people like Tony Li (cisco) banging their heads on people who'd never had anything to do with packet switching who would say, "but OSI is slow", and Tony would say "we can switch it as fast as IP", "but only under special circumstances", "all circumstances", "can't possibly", "we can switch it *as* *fast*", "can not" ad nauseum. Some of these people had no idea about protocol switching hardware and software; as far as I could make out, many who voted for what became IPv6 had simply assumed that OSI's variable length addresses were slower than fixed length addresses, without even bothering to ask the people who made routers for a living if this was genuinely a problem. (Techy aside: variable lengths aren't a problem. OSI addresses have address families, so you can assume particular rules for particular address families -- the addresses are no more "variable length" than CIDR prefixes, or for that matter, classful IP addressing.) 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. 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. So I'm not optimistic about IPv6. I think an opportunity to make an incremental but rapid change to solve the immediate problems was squandered by bad cases of Not Invented Here syndrome and second-system effect. 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. -- don --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog

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