[ppml] "Who's afraid of IPv4 address depletion? Apparently no one."

[John Curran]

At 8:39 AM -0500 2/9/08, Leo Bicknell wrote:
>IPv6 is not a flag day; there is a dual stack transition period and
>ALG's can easily bridge the two.  There are more than a few enterprise
>networks designed with RFC1918 space internally and a small DMZ
>network with dual homed mail servers, VPN servers, web proxy servers,
>and the like.  At least in the short term these enterprises will
>be well served by getting a /48 from their upstream, putting IPv6
>on the outside interfaces of the 10 or so boxes in the DMZ, and
>leaving the rest of their 10,000 internal systems alone on IPv4
>RFC1918 space.
>
>They will be able to send e-mail and browse web sites on IPv6 only
>boxes just fine.  The VPN servers will allow someone with IPv6 only
>at home to create an IPv4 tunnel back to the internal corporate
>network.

Complete agreement.   In fact, there's an I-D out there
</draft-jcurran-v6transitionplan-02.txt> where I outline
this sort of overall Internet transition.

>I think we need to be careful with our message.  IPv6 is a "right
>now" problem for ISP's and for major content providers.  However
>IPv6 may also be a "in another couple of years" problem for an
>Enterprise in the situation I describe above.  We need to focus our
>efforts where they will do the most good.

Alas, "being careful" with the message doesn't actually sell
newpapers or generate webclicks...  (which is what we see
from the referenced article).  The loss of availability of large
contiguous address blocks from the free pool is most
certainly not an issue for the enterprise network manager,
it's an issue the ISP community.   The catch is that unless
the ISP starts advocacy of IPv6 enablement of their existing
customers edge servers (web, mail), then they won't have
the ability to use to use IPv6 to connect new clients when
they need to...

/John