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RE: Let's look at it from an IETF oldie's perspective... Re:IPv4Outage Planned for IETF 71 Plenary

2007-12-20 07:41:43

However, I would gently suggest that if people want IPv6 to 
be successful, we need to start using it, and we need to 
start creating the engineering solutions that allow IPv6 to 
be useful in the real-world.

Yes. And that includes figuring out what is needed to make an
IETF meeting function with only IPv6 transit connections to
the outside world including full support for IPv4 users at 
the meeting. "Full Support" in this context means making it
possible for IPv4 users to seemlessly access IPv6-only services.
If there is to be any kind of "IPv4 outage", it should be on
some of the IETF servers that currently function on both IPv4
and IPv6 to prove that it is possible to make a transition
to IPv6 that is relatively seamless to the end users of the
Internet.

The 
question is what other real-world deployment problems are 
hiding that haven't been addressed yet.

A mandate to make an IETF meeting function as described above
would be a good way to get people to work on figuring out
these problems.

      There are some who seem to be arguing that the IETF is 
not the place to work out these problems.  Well, last I 
checked, the word
*ENGINEERING* is in the name of our organization. 

I think there is a multileveled understanding of what engineering
means that has led to some of the outraged comments. By some
standards, many of the IETF participants, especially old-timers,
are FORMER engineers because they don't get their hands dirty 
any more. By other standards they are EXPERIENCED engineers who
don't need to get their hands dirty and can spend all their time
planning, designing and vetting other people's work.

The EXPERIENCED engineers are right that technology experiments
which amount to a service outage should not be dumped on an IETF
meeting. But the hands-on folks are also right that the IETF has
an important role to play as the IP4 exhaustion crisis ramps up. 
It is because the pool of experienced engineers is avaliable as
a resource, that it makes sense for a working group to plan,
implement, TEST, and deploy whatever is needed to make it possible
for an ENTIRE IETF meeting to function with no IPv4 Internet 
connectivity other than via automatic tunnels, proxies, and NATs.
The IPv4 packet transport may be turned off at the lower layer
but that doesn't mean that IPv4 users would get no service or even
degraded service.

Of course, such a demonstration could be done without involving the
IETF at all, but then it loses a lot of the PR impact. For instance
if the IETF meeting needs AAAA records in the root to avoid deploying
root hijacking, then ICANN will act. If the IETF requests major
service providers to participate in such a demonstration by turning
on some type of IPv6 services in trial mode, then I suspect we will
see Google and Microsoft and CNN and Verizon all join in the effort.

      Let me give a challenge.  It's been nine years.  In the 
next year, let's try to do whatever ENGINEERING work is 
necessary so that the IETF conference network can offer 
IPv6-only services to all of its laptop clients, and that 
this be sufficient for people to get real work done.  

This means that it has to include transition technologies
so that a pure IPv6 users can still get to all the IPv4 services
that they need, and so that an IPv4 user can do the same.
If you push this one step further and show that an IPv4 user
on the IETF network can make use of IPv6-only services, then
you will really make a splash in showing that IPv6 is ready
for primetime.

--Michael Dillon

And once this has been proved at an IETF meeting, the next step
is to do it at an event like Davos. 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Economic_Forum>


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