Dave Crocker <dhc2(_at_)dcrocker(_dot_)net> writes:
The phrase "damning with faint praise" comes to mind. Given how long
IPv6 has been in the pipeline, the fact that it is available at an
essentially production level in a minuscule level, so far, says that
we are looking at a 10-20 year adoption cycle.
I'm really not sure that this is very bad at all seeing it from the
"inside". Two years ago there was nary an OS that came with v6. Now I
think the only significant one that is missing v6 support is MacOS X,
and that's only because they haven't figured out the right ways to
wrap the calls for the application layer (the kernel bits are
easy). Without any OS support, how could anyone run it, even people
who wanted to? The fact that we've moved so fast from a standing start
is pretty impressive. Consider how slowly IPv4 grew by comparison.
I think realistically speaking, mid 2000 was the beginning of
deployment in any real sense at all, and in terms of desktop OSes used
by the bulk of consumers, we've only had availability in a stock
OS for a few weeks now.
My opinion is that ten years is on the high side. Unlike v4
deployment, it is much easier to deploy v6 in a v4 world than it was
to deploy v4 with no internet around. However, anyone who thought this
could be done in less than years was not thinking clearly about the
problem.
IPv6 seeks to change an existing infrastructure. That means that its
adoption is vastly slower than an end-point change, such as adoption
of MIME. And it took MIME 5 years to become seriously available, and
at least 8 years before it was reliably available.
I disagree -- it is mostly an endpoint change, and the endpoints are
the hard part. The extant v6 network functions fine over tunnels on
most of its connections. Some of the biggest uses of v6 I see in the
short run are in overlay networks to get around v4 NAT hells for
network management.
The other thing to keep in mind is that it is perfectly useful to run
v6 machines in a v4 world -- it isn't like you won't be able to look
at cnn.com until cnn.com runs v6. The v4 universe forces me to use
translator boxes anyway, so there is no giant reason to use NAT boxes
instead of v4<->v6 gateways, but one has the advantage that one gets
real address space and can actually get at the individual machines
over v6, which is very hard to do in nested NAT world.
--
Perry E. Metzger perry(_at_)wasabisystems(_dot_)com
--
NetBSD Development, Support & CDs. http://www.wasabisystems.com/