--On Tuesday, 18 December, 2007 09:17 -0800 Dave Crocker
<dhc2(_at_)dcrocker(_dot_)net> wrote:
P.S. I don't really understand how you envision this working.
Are you thinking that people will be speaking during this
period? It's hard to imagine anything more disruptive to
having a plenary presentation or discussion than having
everyone in the room busily focused on trying to unscrew
their network.
+10.
d/
ps. For those who have watched Klensin and me beat people over
the head, by noting the import that should be imparted by his
and my agreeing on an issue, they should equally note that my
concurrence with Eric on an issue of substance is vastly more
rare.
Ok. While I had decided to just ignore most of this thread, the
presence of three-way agreement is too much of an opportunity to
pass up.
A few observations, more to reinforce and possibly put a
different stress on comments made by others than to say anything
really new:
(1) The only thing this exercise, as described, is going to
prove is that we are skilled at shooting ourselves in the foot.
We already know that, at least in the US, IPv6 is insufficiently
deployed to provide a good base for communication and smooth
interoperability fabric. We know that there are no IPv6 records
in the root servers and that many of the root servers aren't
widely connected to IPv6 networks. We know that most IPv6 use
today involves tunnels between hosts or between network islands.
Now we also know that skilled engineers and network operators
are capable of configuring their way around those problems. But
those who know how to do it know how to do it (and probably are
doing it already). Inviting the rest of the community to try to
sort things out in real-time in the plenary is silly at best.
It will make the plenary useless and deprive us of the
considerable advantages of being able to work together to
resolve issues.
If the IESG believes this sort of demonstration is important
enough, cancel the plenary program, announce an IPv6
connectivity workshop for that time slot, and _maybe_ turn down
the IPv4 network during that time. If you don't want to blow
off the plenary, then schedule an IPv6 connectivity workshop for
Sunday afternoon, maybe cancel most of the others, and announce
it now so that people have time to plan flights. Or, as Dave
suggested, wipe out the social and replace it with a workshop.
If we really want an "eat our own dogfood" process, then no more
socials, only connectivity workshops, until IPv6 is universally
(or at least seamlessly for those who want it) deployed. Such
workshops are events from which we could learn, and possibly
even demonstrate to the outside world that the perceived
problems can be overcome.
Leslie's recent note (with a changed subject line) is, I believe
the sensible one here. Let's not organize a demonstration whose
outcome we know, or some strange way to punish those who are not
already running IPv6. Let's try to figure out how we can do
something constructive for the IETF community or the Internet
and/or from which we can learn things we _don't_ know. If we
can't do something constructive, let's not waste out time.
There is one other issue that I would encourage people to think
about. Reporters come to our meetings and attend plenaries.
There are members of the reporter community, or their editors,
who like only those stories that they can sensationalize. For
them, this little "outage" results in one of two possible
headlines:
(i) Not even IETF can get IPv6 to work seamlessly.
(ii) IPv6 is so complicated that only the IETF experts,
struggling mightily, can get it to work in a drop-in
environment.
I don't know which one prefers, but neither is going to advance
the universal deployment of IPv6 or do anything else good (other
than selling a few more issues of something).
Finally, speaking from a very personal perspective, I'm a strong
supporter of IPv6. I've been giving talks in various places for
years about the economic advantages of getting on board sooner
or later and about strategies by while key organizations can
actually make money on products that support the thing (more of
them in the next 24 hours). But I'm not going to risk screwing
up my production systems in the interests of a few hours of
demo. And I'm not going to switch my production systems over to
IPv6 (or even turn on dual-stack functions) until at least one
of the ISPs I use is offering native IPv6 service with no
tunnels or other workarounds. It turns out that the meeting
sponsor, who I assume is one of those pushing this because of
their leadership in IPv6, is one of my ISPs. Every time I hear
--at an IETF meeting or elsewhere-- about their strong support
for IPv6, I go home and call up my local representative and say
"what do I do to get IPv6 turned on here". As long as the
answer is, or is the equivalent of, "how do you spell 'IPv6'?",
this sort of outage/demonstration is, for me, a joke because, if
I can't get to my systems, my laptop might as well be off
(modulo the opportunity to sit in on a bad attitude Jabber
session if I can get that working and find a Jabber server that
I can access over IPv6). And I share Ned's attitude toward
people who decide they are better qualified to tell me how to
spend my time than I am.
john
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