I have resisted adding anything to this debate about the IPv4 outage
because people have already stated many of the good points. I
particularly agreed with the points made that from a PR point-of-view
this was not a great idea.
Let me, though, add another perspective. What about all the
newbies? What are they going to do during this time?
At IETF 70, there was a question raised in one of the plenaries
asking "How many of you are here for the first time?" and a
significant number of hands went up. So let's look at this proposed
IPv4 outage *during the plenary* from their perspective. Now, these
newcomers may or may not have been subscribed to IETF mailing lists.
They may or may not have attended the Sunday "intro to IETF for
newcomers" session. They may or may not in fact be technical folks.
They are probably still trying to figure out how all this works and
why these people are humming, etc.
So now we go into one of the plenary sessions and it is announced
that "we will now shut down IPv4 and use only IPv6". The newcomer
notices that:
1. A good percentage of the audience now dive into their laptops and
become engrossed in diagnosing how their system works with IPv6. Side
conversations are starting everywhere and occasional shouts of "Aha!"
emerge from random groups.
2. Another percentage gets up and leaves in search of cookies.
3. Some percentage who missed reading the emails are suddenly upset
because they lost their IPv4 connectivity.
4. Some percentage pops in their EVDO/EDGE/whatever cards and
continues along as they were before doing their work and completely
ignoring the plenary speakers.
5. Some percentage never showed up at the plenary because they went
to join Richard Shockey at a local steak house.
6. Non-technical users or others who did not subscribe to IETF
mailing lists are sitting there dumbfounded with a deer-caught-in-the-
headlights look wondering what the heck is going on and if this has
anything to do with the hums.
7. NO ONE is paying attention to the speaker(s) in front of the room
during this part of the plenary.
Now maybe the newcomer is all excited about IPv6 and so plunges into
the technical troubleshooting. Maybe they go look for cookies or
steak. Maybe they sit there dumb-founded. Probably they are left
wondering what the point of this IETF "plenary" session really was.
I don't dispute that such an exercise could be an interesting
experiment in IPv6 connectivity (and one in which I would join),
although in many cases I think we can already know the outcome. I
just question the wisdom of doing it during the *plenary*. It would
seem to me to be a great exercise to do at some other point during
the week when the people who care can attend and identify issues,
work through them, etc. Or we do as Ted suggested and just run an
entire event with only IPv6 wireless. (and count how many people are
using EVDO/EDGE cards!)
It goes back to a more fundamental question - what is the purpose of
the plenary? What information do we want to get across to attendees
to the session? (And if we *do* plan an IPv4 outage, what is going
to be talked about during the time of the outage?)
My 2 cents, (now worth less than when I lived in Canada)
Dan
--
Dan York, CISSP, Director of Emerging Communication Technology
Office of the CTO Voxeo Corporation dyork(_at_)voxeo(_dot_)com
Phone: +1-407-455-5859 Skype: danyork http://www.voxeo.com
Blogs: http://blogs.voxeo.com http://www.disruptivetelephony.com
Bring your web applications to the phone.
Find out how at http://evolution.voxeo.com
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf