[LINK] www.ipv6.org.au/summit/

[Karl Auer]

On Fri, 2008-08-29 at 19:47 +0000, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote: 
> Yes, Geoff says "Theres no IPv6 out there in production land and no IPv4 
> addresses left. Failure, Huston said, is an option with IPv6. Rather than 
> continue to look at IPv6, he encouraged the industry to persist with IPv4 
> with intensive use of carrier-grade NATs."

"Encouraged"? Hardly! Here's the presentation; well worth a look:

   http://cidr-report.org/presentations/2008-08-21-ipv6-failure.pdf

Geoff presented several possible and plausible futures, one of which was
"carrier grade NAT". But he emphasised the downsides of those
possibilities too, concluding (albeit couched in weasel words :-) that
"IPv6 still represents the lowest risk option of all the potential
futures". 

> So, IPv6? well http://www.sixxs.net/misc/coolstuff/ seems ok, but
> limited 

Well - yeah! Chickens and eggs.

The point is that the storm clouds have well and truly gathered, thunder
is rolling in the hills, great big rain drops are splotting into the
dust all around us, and what are we doing? Wandering around the outside
of the Ark tut-tutting about the quality of the woodwork and loudly
suggesting the construction of various sorts of rowboats.

> we propose to extend the IPv4 address space by assigning to each
> customer a single IPv4 address which is extended by bits from the
> port number in the TCP/UDP header, leaving the applications a 
> reduced fixed range of ports.

... thus leaving the DNS no defence (other than 100% adoption of DNSSEC)
against the Kaminsky exploit. But regardless of that, are you really
suggesting we should start work NOW on another ten-year design and
implementation effort? IPv6 is here, now, and it works. Not only that,
it works *well*. It has some issues (mostly outside the protocol, i.e.
policy and implementation), but by and large it's a fully functional
solution.

> [...] broadband consumers are not anticipated to deploy a massive
> number of applications over IPv4.

Well, no - because they won't be able to. Not with IPv4 as it is now and
not with this deckchairs-on-the-Titanic idea either. What a total
failure of imagination and vision. For a technologically savvy society,
we are amazingly blind to technological history.

"I think there is a world market for about five computers."
   - Thomas Watson, IBM, 1943 

"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their
home."
   - Ken Olsen, DEC, 1977

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
   - Bill Gates, Microsoft, 1981

If you hamstring "consumers" with paltry expectations, you'll be
building on a self-fulfilling prophecy. Let's not do that...

Regards, K.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)                   +61-2-64957160 (h)
http://www.biplane.com.au/~kauer/                  +61-428-957160 (mob)

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