[ppml] Summary of Trial Balloons for DealingwithIPv4AddressCountdown

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> there's nothing in 
> place to handle 
> v4-only hosts on a v6-capable network.
> 
> Eventually vendors will figure this out and provide a 
> solution, but I don't 
> have much hope that vendor enlightenment is imminent based on 
> their (lack 
> of) progress over the last decade.

Uhm, did you miss my posting with all the URLs? One was for a company
that makes an IPv6 gateway for the edge of an IPv4 network provider.
http://www.hexago.com

Given that this is where the current market is and will remain until the
large providers consider shutting down their IPv4 backbones, why should
the vendors offer a box that does the reverse? If you are building a
network in compliance with DOD or USG directives on IPv6 and want to
leverage IPv4 Internet access instead of fixed WAN links, then the
Hexago boxes do the trick. At some point these tricks may well move
inside the network provider. In fact, for providers who run an MPLS
core, the IETF has a trick called 6MPE that allows them to implement
IPv6 services by just configuring a few PE (edge) routers with pure V6.
No doubt others will implement v6 tunnels across a v4 core or v4 tunnels
across a v6 core or simply use ATM. Like the MAE-East days of the
Internet when I sent traffic across the continent in order to get across
town, the paths taken by traffic between the v4 and v6 nets will often
be strange. But it can be made to work. In fact there are so many ways
to make it work that it is a bit of a job just going through them all
and figuring out which one to use.

If you ask me, the best route is to go to MPLS, then add 6MPE and a few
Teredo servers.

> The day they turn off IPv4 isn't as interesting to me as the 
> day they turn 
> on IPv6.  I'll probably be dead before the former happens, 
> but there's a 
> fair chance the latter may occur before I retire.

IPv6 was turned on years ago. It is in an early exponential growth phase
which is why it is almost unnoticeable. But that slow exponential curve
will suddenly kick upwards when people least expect it, rather like the
IPv4 Internet back in 93, 94, 95...

-- Michael Dillon