If there is a means for all hosts to have addresses that are reachable from
all other hosts (barring that a security policy is in place), will companies
renumber their internal networks to coincide with this addressing scheme?
given that they could easily derive IPv6 addresses from the current IPv4
numbers in use, I don't see why not.
even in IPv4, renumbering is only difficult because we haven't really
tried to develop good tools for doing it.
If we (the Internet community) used private addresses and NAT for all hosts
that do not want/need/require access from the Internet, would the addressing
problem be as much of a problem as it appears to be?
there's a dubious assumption that any significant group of hosts does not
want/need/require access from the Internet - and especially that you can
separate the hosts that do need such access from ones that don't.
If we are as generous with the IPv6 addresses, how soon before we have
the same address problem?
so long that by the time it happened, we wouldn't be using any of the
same platforms, applications, or protocols.
to the extent that the danger of IPv6 address exhaustion exists, it
isn't from using them like we do IPv4 addresses. it requires doing
things like assigning a separate IPv6 address to every process created,
or every smart pill that someone swallows (daily) to diagnose potential
medical problems, or every network-capable toy that gets included as a
prize in a cereal box, AND using lots of delegation layers in routing.
Keith