[arin-ppml] IPv6 in the Economist

[Dean Anderson]

On Fri, 6 Jun 2008, Owen DeLong wrote:

> Except you can't do name resolution if you turn off IPv4.
> 
> I would say that's not full IPv6 support.
> 
> I'd say that's minimal sort-of support at best.

DNS is very severely broken in IPv6. This non-technical reason is that
certain root operators want to keep their monopolies on anycast sales,
and so (for technically inexplicable reasons), they have advocated
mixing IPv6 and IPv4, and silenced dissent in apparent violations of
anti-trust law.  So, there are no IPv6 root nameservers. Instead, one
mixes IPv6 DNS records with IPv4 DNS records on the same nameserver.
This totally unnecessary mixing creates stability problems for both IPv4
and IPv6.  One has to remove IPv4 NS records to make room for IPv6
records, so any effort to deploy IPv6 comes at the expense of IPv4
stability. While bad enough, that isn't the worst part.

What's worse is that the DNS resolver implementations are broken as
well. One can't just create IPv6 root nameservers because the resolvers
don't do the right thing--there is no IPv6-specific resolver which could
use different root nameservers for IPv6. IPv4 and IPv6 have to be mixed
at the roots on down.  Until this is fixed, IPv6 won't really be very
useful or else both won't be stable.  Altering and updating resolvers on
every computer is a very time-consuming job to say the least. So, I
think IPv6 won't be taking over in 3 years, and IPv4 won't be going away
in 3 years.

Its probably 10+ years to fix the resolver problem, and so a long time
before IPv6 could be ready for stable deployment outside a lab.  In that
time, I'd say we could go to OSI CLNS instead, and have much less risk.  
The good news is that one can work on both IPv6 and CLNS simultaneously
as completely separate stacks.  Keeping CLNS separate from IPv4 this
time will improve the process of development, and improve deployment
stability later.

		--Dean



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