Thus spake "Keith Moore" <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu>
At the same time, IETF needs to understand that optimizing for
deployability first and scalability second often succeeds whereas
the reverse often fails. We need to understand how to design
protocols that can be deployed quickly and yet be upgraded
gracefully as the real requirements for long-term widespread use
of the protocols become apparent.
This is the true failing of the IPng effort: all the attention was focused
on the end result, with virtually no effort towards a viable transition
model. A contributing factor was that the IETF designed IPng in a vacuum
and tossed it over the wall to operators, and completely ignored (and is
still ignoring) feedback on why people aren't deploying it.
A large part of this hubris comes from the success of IPv4 itself. There
were dozens of different L3 protocols in use in the 80s and early 90s, so
operators had little problem adding yet another one to their networks -- and
IPv4 was so much better than the others that the remainder faded away rather
quickly in the mid 90s. It seems to have been assumed that operators would
have no problem going back to the dual-stack model to get IPv6 and would
drop IPv4 relatively quickly. However, since v6 isn't much better than v4
(arguably worse, if one considers the number of hosts reachable, equipment
replacement, staff retraining, etc.), it just hasn't happened. Add to that
a transition model that _requires_ that every host be dual-stacked before
the first v6-only node appears and you've got a horrible chicken-and-egg
problem where nobody has any incentive to create a critical mass of
dual-stacked hosts. Also add in how long it took MS to ship an OS with v6
on by default; that should have happened by 1998 or 2000 -- not 2007.
NAT-PT was a reasonable solution to this (with a few tweaks), since it could
make hosts _appear_ to be dual-stacked with little effort, but it offended
the purists and was killed despite there being nothing to replace it.
S
Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking
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