Michel Py wrote:
Each time I see one of these "days remaining before
Armageddon" counters, I can't help but remember what
happened on January 1, 2000: nothing.
Keith Moore wrote:
yes, but that's because people heeded the warnings, and prepared. if
the same thing happens wrt IPv4 exhaustion, that will be fabulous.
FUD. Nothing is going to happen the day the last v4 block is allocated.
Nothing is going to happen for days. Nothing is going to happen for
weeks. Nothing is going to happen for months.
Contrary to Y2K, when it was conceivable (and did happen, at a very
small scale) that something would crash because a counter rolled to "00"
because the software written 20 years before did not plan for it, what
will happen the day IPv4 is exhausted is zip, nada, nothing. Some
obscure player will not get addresses, the business will go instead to
an established player who has feasted on IPv4 for years and has built
both fat and a respectable stockpile in their cellar, and the world will
continue to spin.
Artur Hecker wrote:
No doubt - that nicely paid off our profession so
we should not > complain :-)
:-D
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.
Indeed. I mostly agree with the Phillip Hallam-Baker's post later on.
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?
We will never know that. There were scores of people who billed tons of
money to take care of it; you don't expect that they will admit to
spending all this time finding nothing, would you? But on the other end,
most of the Y2K audit teams were internal so they kept their dirty
laundry in the family.
In the end, it does not matter. Y2K was about compliance, and compliance
is about making sure it fits the requirements checklist, which means
it's defendable in court, and does not mean it actually works.
What would have been the real impact? What could have
happened in terms of impact (meaning: it would definitely
have happened, not the what-if analysis)?
Nobody will ever know that either. What could have happened if the
dinosaurs were not extinct? What could have happened if we did not drop
a nuke on Japan to end the war? What could have happened if the Germans
got a nuke before we did? What could have happened if the soviets beat
us to the moon? What could have happened if John Kennedy was not
assassinated? What could have happened if the telephone was not
invented?
Was the cost higher than the estimated risk?
Nobody will ever know that either, but one thing is sure: it would have
been a lot cheaper without the legal liability buffalo dung that was
associated with it.
Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
The first was the Y2K vampire who consultant-like turned every victim
into a new source of infection. The first thing a Y2K vampire would do
on claiming a new victim was to send out letters to every supplier
demanding to know if their systems have passed a Y2K audit. Thus the
poison spread at exponential speed.
This is no different than a pyramid scheme or a virus: the only way out
is full speed ahead and hope that you will not be part of the
casualties.
We have to think like marketting people.
Phillip, although I agree with the rest of your post, I am not sure
about this part. One of the IPv6 problems is that it was sold by
marketing before engineers could actually make it work. Remember all
these miraculous features: small DFZ, easy renumbering, etc? Tell me
where these features are today besides the imagination of
marketing-minded people who sold them before making sure that they could
actually be delivered.
Two things happened along the road: First, as you have explained, people
realized that the Y2K FUD was overblown and are not willing to spend the
same money on IPv6. Second, the dot-com bubble burst, and the IPv6
forklift upgrade that could have been financed by all this capital money
pouring from the sky did not take off.
IPv6: sold by marketing before the concept was even proven. Designed by
protocol purity zealots who can't make it cheap enough to be
economically deployable. It reminds me of the Concorde supersonic
aircraft: it could have been a success if the supersonic boom could be
suppressed and if the price of oil did not skyrocket. A few were built
and were operated with much hype on a confidential scale for many years.
Where can you see one today? In a museum.
Michel.
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