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Re: A modest proposal for Harald

2004-11-06 16:28:54
On Sat, 06 Nov 2004 09:53:00 +0100, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
 So the death of IPv4 isn't going to happen with a bang. More like
 a protracted series of whimpers

One of the great dangers of having a history of success is the way it
blinds us to new ways to fail.

In the case of IP addressing evolution, the blindness is that our 
community presumes that transition to IPv6 is inevitable.  Hence, we 
have done a very poor job of providing compelling benefits for users 
and admins.  We have a grand promise -- and frankly it often sounds a
lot more like religious fervor -- about eventual benefits, but no 
claim of immediate benefit that grabs operations folks by their gut, 
driving them to adopt this change.

By way of noting one possible scanario that builds on today's reality
and leads down a path that never adopts IPv6, I'll ask:  

        What if users turned all leaf networks into private address space, so 
that public IPv4 numbers were needed only at the level of roughly 1 
per public interface?

This is, of course, the ultimate breakage of the end-to-end addressing 
model, but we tend to forget that the model is something rather 
esoteric to non-protocol geeks.  

We already must modify the architecture to deal with a much richer 
range of border policies than just differential routing.  Having it 
include partitioned address space is a pretty obvious step, given how
often we already are faced with that reality.

At the least, it means we had better have an end-to-end reference 
(identification) construct that is a) separate from IP Address, and b) 
works fine over IPv4.  To this end, work like Opes and the 
architectural aspects of multi6 might be rather more strategic than we 
have been acknowledging.

The problem is that we failed to evolve IP in a timely manner and in a 
way that was really convenient for real administrators.  Instead we 
took the approach that this needed to be done as a major system shift
and that "we would only get one shot at this change", so we also 
loaded quite a bit of baggage into the package.  And now we try to 
characterize the minimal deployment of IPv6 as if it represented 
success.  

Or perhaps the real problem was that what has been happening with 
NATs, et al, is fine but we that have preferred to tout our idealized
solution and ignored market pragmatics.

Please forgive me for noting that this kind of error is classic among
organizations that have had major successes and, therefore, believe 
that their internal intelligence is greater than that of the markets.  
A small variation on this error is when it is from the aggregation of 
successful companies.  The obvious example is OSI.


d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
+1.408.246.8253
dcrocker  a t ...
www.brandenburg.com




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