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Re: US DoD and IPv6

2010-10-11 11:35:56

On 10/11/2010 8:25 AM, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
Without getting into the question of whether your suggestion would have helped
anything in terms of transition and interoperability, it shares one major flaw
with the path we did adopt.

There is no incentive to spend resources to get there.

Indeed, it has been remarkable how poor the sales pitch has been to resource-poor operations that are expected to adopt this, even after all this time.

The only counter I will make -- and it is not an attempt to contradict your point -- is that the adoption barrier for the scheme I described is minuscule, when compared with the full, incompatible, dual-stack scheme that we've pursued.

Most of the software could be shared between v4 and the simplified v6 I described, and initially most of the operations procedures could be shared. And router products could have been enhanced to include the translation pretty easily.

Again, none of this contradicts the lack of an attractive value proposition for adopters. But it could have made incremental adoption much cheaper and simpler and could have started it much sooner.


As long as our path is one of minimal change, we were inherently locked in to a
behavioral set that matched Ipv4. that is what SIP proposed. That is what IPv6
gave us.

The current IPv6 is not minimal change. It is an entirely incompatible dual stack model. That really is fundamentally different from what I described, which was actually a clean upgrade to the existing system and would have remained entirely compatible with it, semantically, when initially deployed.


For any proposal to work, there has to be a benefit to folks to use it. Even
before it is ubiquitous. As far as I can tell, we ignored that question during
the 1993-1999 period when we should have been working on it.

Yup. The motivating requirement was address space, but address space is not functional enhancement, in terms of marketing to adopters. Fixing address space, for most folk, would have been an overhead expense.


We also get ourselves into a mind set of "we need an answer now. There is no
time to do technically hard work." That was a bad call. 5 extra years spend=t
serously working on what the needs were, what the deployments could be, and what
the technology could look like, might have given us a better path. (No, there is
no guarantee. We could have blown it anyway.)

Probably not. If we were going to be blown away, there turned out to be plenty of time for that to have developed.

One could argue that those likely to pursue that path of innovation were discouraged from it, but I think it more likely that the spiffy, mind-blowing enhancement is still eluding folk. So we are left with the ideal alternative of an unrealized, unspecified, superior choice, versus the concrete, flawed path we went down. The former always looks better, since it is not constrained by the real world.

FWIW, when work seriously began, in the early/mid 90s, we were already turning down legitimate requests, such as from the electricity folks (EPRI). Instead we chose to focus on global exhaustion rather than individual denial.

That was the real mistake. There really was urgency back then and we convinced ourselves there wasn't.

d/
--

  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net
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