On 6/7/10 12:49 PM, John C Klensin wrote:
My belief is that we have a serious IPv6 marketing and
transition problem until and unless we can get a level of
functionality for IPv6 (and, really, for IPv4/IPv6 mixtures of
the sorts that Ned's notes imply) at a level of investment
roughly equivalent to the costs we are now paying for IPv4
alone. I want to stress that "level of investment" and terms
like "expensive" are measured in requirements for knowledge,
maintenance, configuration fussing, etc., not just hardware.
They also include some important issues about support costs on
the vendor/ISP side: if an ISP sells a "business IPv6 service"
with certain properties and customers get into trouble, that ISP
is itself in trouble if the support requests require third-level
or engineering/design staff involvement to understand or
resolve. When the hardware costs we are talking about are in
the same range as one month's connectivity bills (and all the
numbers you and Ned mentioned are, at least for me), they just
wash out and disappear compared to aggravation, fussing, and
other sysadmin costs.
IMHO, it would be a mistake to expect low end routers targeting home and
small office environments to eventually include features for handling
multiple IPv4 addresses in conjunction with an IPv4 to IPv6 transition
strategy, largely for the reasons you give. When multiple providers
are involved, some choices are available for multiple IPv4 addresses
where devices terminating a provider's network are connected through a
vlan switch with trunking. Or terminated with a selection of mid-range
routers ~$400/$50 new/used price range, such as cisco 871 or 2600.
Instead of expecting a company's support to deal with with involved
configurations, solutions are increasingly met by co-location services,
or VPS where the providers offer network/power redundancy, dual stack
rout-ability, and support expertise.
An automatic 6to4 tunnel for an isolated IPv6 network, routes on a
per-packet basis to a border router in another IPv6 network over IPv4
infrastructure. Tunnel destinations are determined by the IPv4 address
of the border router extracted from the IPv6 address starting with the
prefix 2002::/16 having the format
2002:/border-router-IPv4-address/::/48, which likely makes this a
function of the ISP. When IPv6 is available, each device becomes
accessible with unique IP addresses. A conservative approach for scarce
IPv4 addresses is to associate dedicated servers/services with specific
ports of a single global address, a feature supported by nearly all
commodity routers. Whenever accessing IPv6 networks over the Internet
becomes imperative, ISPs will suggest boilerplate solutions. However,
it seems unlikely these will include anachronistic use of IPv4 addresses.
-Doug
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