Noel and Tony,
thanks for offering such wonderful foils for a technical discussion!
I'm going to do my best to rile the feathers of both of you, by appearing
to take a strong stand, but actually remaining solidly perched on the fence
between your positions, and manage to rile some so-far unruffled feathers
in the mix.
How's that for stimulating interesting discussion??????
One of the slides I use regularly says about what the IETF does:
- Maintain the IPv4 Internet
- Enable the IPv6 Internet
- Create the mobile Internet
Frankly, folks, IPv4 is what IBM used to call "functionally stabilized".
And it's got NATs in it. NATs stink. But (sorry, Brian) - IMHO, they are
going to stay in the IPv4 Internet forever. So a major part of
"maintenance" is learning to live with the little monsters.
News for you, Tony - 52 months is more than 4 years, which is bigger than
the effective lifetime of Gopher. Still plenty of time for another dot-com
boom'n'bust cycle.... and as I see it, we're never going to run out; the
market will just raise the price of IPv4 addresses until the market balks.
Just like crude oil, but quite a few years sooner. Luckily, unlike oil,
alternates exist!
So the death of IPv4 isn't going to happen with a bang. More like a
protracted series of whimpers - from the accountants paying for those pesky
numbers.
In IPv6, I see our job as standardizers to make sure the thing we have
defined is well-defined enough to let it work, and then get the hell out of
the way.
At this time, it's the users and the network builders who will decide
whether we've succeeded or failed. Not us standardizers.
We can do minor maintenance and "hey, we didn't mean it that way", but the
best we can do for IPv6 is to point out all the stuff that is done, stable,
and is NOT going to change any time soon.
And despite the best efforts of the people overselling benefits of IPv6
that actually aren't v6-specific, and the people clamoring for "just
another fundamental tweak to the architecture", I think this is succeeding.
But on mobility, I think we blew it.
Our first attempt - Mobile IPv4 (or Tethered IPv4 as I called it after I
understood what a Home Agent really is) is a failure, in no small part
because its design ignored firewalls and NATs (the nasty little buggers).
So app-level switched to the "mobility by DHCP" instead - get a new IP
address and let the applications do the reconnect dance, each according to
its own nature. Baroque enough to make grown GSM engineers weep.....
It's possible we're going far enough back on a reset that Mobile IPv6
(which I do NOT understand) does better, and that the "mobile networks"
thing is finally understanding the reality that a device is no longer a
single thing - clusters of them move together.
But we've still got lots of fun and games here for years to come.
Food enough for thought?
Harald
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