Jari,
On Sep 13, 2007, at 1:05 PM, Jari Arkko wrote:
We had an opportunity to fix that, but we blew it.
I think everyone agrees that having that flexibility
(ease of renumbering, no routing explosion in the
core etc) would be good.
So would world peace, motherhood, and apple pie. What are you
willing to give up for it?
But I would suggest that instead of playing the
"what if" or "I told you so" games, we collectively
focus on solving the problem.
And I would suggest by ignoring history we are doomed to repeat it.
I am not engaging in "I told you so" because I didn't -- you'll note
I used "we". I am merely pointing out that we're either at or very
quickly approaching a crossroads and the choices we have are
constrained by the reality of the Internet today and past decisions
we, the IETF, have made.
IPv6 _is_ IPv4 with more bits and it is being deployed that way. One
can argue that it shouldn't be that way and that there should be a
paradigm shift in the enterprises, ISPs, and grandmothers of the
world, but commercial reality makes such a shift very, very hard.
And getting it solved
means having a solution that actually works, has all
the little details (like what the security is etc) worked
out, fits with the incentives that the various players
have, and so on.
Do you believe IPv4 (or ANY other successful large scale technology),
when it was designed, had all the little details worked out?
As I have said elsewhere, I've come to believe that one of the
fundamental failures of the IETF is that it permits or even
encourages protocol design to be directed by corner cases. In this
particular case, it isn't even clear to me there is agreement on what
the problem we're trying to solve actually is.
And we have a place for that work to happen in the IRTF.
Actually, I suspect if the work were to happen in the IRTF, it would
be doomed. The IRTF is, after all, focused on research. I can
imagine the people in the IRTF contributing towards a solution but
that isn't where a solution will come from. Given real world
constraints, a solution will come from engineers (protocol, network,
hardware, and/or software), singly or working together, coming up
with an approach that meets real world requirements (not what
researchers believe are real world requirements). It almost
certainly won't be architecturally pure and it probably won't be
pretty, but it will probably meet commercial and operational needs.
Regards,
-drc
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