[arin-ppml] IPv6 Heretic thoughts

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> The U. S. government mandate of using
> IPv6 is very reminiscent of the great GOSIP debacle of the 
> 1990s and if something doesn't change in how we do this, I 
> frankly see IPv6 dying out and a smaller group of good 
> engineers will come up with something that works instead of a 
> protocol designed by an overly large committee that wants 
> everything but the kitchen sink.

Nothing could be further from the truth. GOSIP was an attempt
by government to design a network protocol suite and then impose
it before it had actually been developed. This spurred deployment
of IP because people wanted to get the end benefits promised
by GOSIP deployment, but GOSIP was not running code and could
not be deployed for love or money.

In addition, IPv6 has been around for 10 years or so. During that
time it has been implemented several times and deployed on thousands
of networks. Lots of bugs have been fixed, and the design has been 
adjusted several times. IPv6 is now a mature protocol. There is nothing
on the drawing boards that could conceivably be ready for full Internet
production use within the timeframe of IPv4 exhaustion. In the end,
somebody may create something better, but we will have at minimum, 
20 years of an IPv6 Internet before that is possible.

> Look at the successful conversions of the past.  The latest 
> Pentium will run MS DOS. 

And Macintosh System 7 applications, Cisco IOS images for 2600s
and even IBM System\360 OS\MVS

> I can watch HDTV on my old TV, I 
> believe it was IBM 360s which ran "an older machine"(somebody 
> here will remember) in emulation mode.

It was common for all the newer commercial IBM computers of the
50's and 60'5 to emulate the model they would replace. In the 
1970s I remember hearing of a payroll system written for the 
1401 that ran on 7090's in 1401 emulation mode, and then on the
System\360 in 7090 emulation mode.

You do have a point that the IPv6 Internet transition has
to be seamless to the user meaning that IPv4 users can 
access IPv6 sites and IPv6 users can access IPv4 sites. 
The ARIN wiki <http://www.getipv6.info> has info about some
of the technical odds and ends that Internet operators will
have to implement to make it work this way.

--Michael Dillon