On Nov 08, 2004, at 13:57, Peter Ford wrote:
In the interest of completeness I would note that at the time the size
of the global Internet routing table was also a very high concern and
core to at least one session at each IETF meeting at the time.
I'd like to confirm this. When I first got active in IETF in 1992,
one of the first issues that was brought to my attention was the IPv4
address space exhaustion. There was an amazing (to me) presentation
showing the address space exhaustion - along with a discussion of the
use of NAT to mitigate that threat. The presenter went on to show that
even with the use of NAT to preclude address space exhaustion, the
global routing tables were growing at a phenomenal rate and stressing
the routing core incredibly, thus the need for CIDR, as it would allow
a reduction in the rate of growth and offered the hope of an actual
decrease in the overall table size. The presentation was given, iirc,
by Tony Li, then of Cisco.
FWIW, some folks thought that CIDR was not a good idea, but was
"forced" on us due to short-sidedness on the part of Cisco in designing
the memory capacity of their core routers. I still recall people
advocating a "throw memory at it" solution.
In the subsequent 12 years, most of the predictions for address space
exhaustion have failed to materialize, thanks largely to NAT.
High speed memory on core routers has increased so overall table size
isn't the omnipresent threat it was then, unless you run gear from the
mid 1990s.
IPv6 has failed to make any large impact on the Internet, other than
providing a near-endless source of inspiration for features to
"back-port" to IPv4 (like DHCP).
Where is the incentive to move to IPv6 going to come from? All of
the Mac OS X and Linux machines I have at home support it. The core
infrastructure of the Internet has the ability to support it. But why
should we go to the trouble of enabling it? Where's the benefit?
--jon
written from behind a NAT'd Cable-modem broadband connection
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