Each time I see one of these "days remaining before Armaggedon"
counters, I can't help but remember what happened on January 1, 2000:
nothing.
yes, but that's because people heeded the warnings, and prepared. if
the same thing happens wrt IPv4 exhaustion, that will be fabulous.
No doubt - that nicely paid off our profession so we should not
complain :-)
However, that's an intriguing discussion because I almost as often
hear quite the contrary argument: indeed, given billions of USD and
EUR spent on that issue, one could reasonably argue that the issue was
overblown and ask to which degree this statement is true and what
would have actually happened without all the pressure.
So far, I could not find anything really useful on that (proofs?) but
keep on hearing very opposite positions, but it's maybe just me?
Does anybody have any established and sustained opinion on that and
could provide verifiable if not objective data? How many critical bugs
were really found in typical systems? What would have been the real
impact? What could have happenned in terms of impact (meaning: it
would definitely have happened, not the what-if analysis)? Was the
cost higher than the estimated risk?
Well, presumably most of that money was spent on detailed analysis
rather than on bug fixes. But I haven't heard of any significant
effort to collect data on how many bugs were found or what there impact
would have been had they not been fixed prior to y2k. And it's not
clear how much value there would be in such an effort, because we're not
going to run into another y2k like situation for at least 93 more
years. (Okay, maybe in 2038 when the number of seconds after the UNIX
epoch rolls past a 32-bit number). It would be hard to apply any
lessons learned from y2k to the exhaustion of IPv4, because they're
similar only in a very superficial way.
Keith
p.s. also, my impression is that a lot of businesses used the y2k as an
excuse to replace old, crufty software with newer software (presumably
with newer cruft), which might have produced benefits other than y2k
resilience. so a cost-vs-benefit analysis would need to consider this.
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