[arin-ppml] fair warning: less than 1000 days lefttoIPv4 exhaustion

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> Turning on v6 on a bunch of routers is fairly trivial. (You 
> do need routers that can forward v6 at full speed, though.) 
> Turning on v6 on a simple server is slightly harder.

I'm not sure where you work, but in a typical ISP it is a lot
harder to turn on (or off) anything on a router unless it is
fixing some kind of urgent problem. Otherwise it has to be tested
for months, fully documented, built into monitoring/management
systems, and then only done during certain specific quiet hours.
Turning on IPv6 on a single server is trivial and probably doesn't
even require testing if it is a new server.

> Doing 
> the same for a massively load balanced / distributed service 
> is somewhat of a challenge.

Still easier than turning on IPv6 in a router. You would only do
this for new infrastructure since it is intended to handle new
traffic.

> But the real issues are all these 
> little management scripts all over the place that keep 
> businesses running,

Yes. Some OSS software suppliers are starting to address this issue
since these little management scripts also exist inside commercial
software packages. The IP address management systems seem to be 
leading the pack. Stuff like Men and Mice for instance.

> and the fact that we still don't have any 
> idea how we're going to deploy IPv6 over broadband. I'm 
> really concerned about that part, so far nobody seems 
> interested in solving that issue.

I don't know what you mean here. DOCSIS 3 already has support
for v6 on cable modems, and for DSL we already know that this is
a trivial software upgrade for many devices. And forcing consumers to
buy a new DSL device is not necessarily a bad thing considering the
enhanced features available in wifi, routers, multiport switches, etc.
Many ISPs are now beginning to sell enhanced services that come with
a DSL device, i.e. TV over Internet or backup services, etc. This is
the stuff that product managers are real good at getting done when it
needs to get done.

--Michael Dillon