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Re: Variable length internet addresses in TCP/IP: history

2012-02-14 17:56:42
Martin,

On Feb 14, 2012, at 2:45 PM, Martin Rex wrote:

Brian E Carpenter wrote:

Martin,

One the one hand, the IETF was frowning upon NATs when they were
developed outside of the IETF.  But if you look at the IETFs
(lack of) migration plan, the translation that you need in order
to make old-IPv4 interoperate with new-IPv6, is actually worse than
an IPv4 NAT.

I'm sorry, but *any* coexistence between RFC791-IPv4-only hosts and
hosts that are numbered out of an address space greater than 32 bits
requires some form of address sharing, address mapping, and translation.
It doesn't matter what choice we made back in 1994. Once you get to the
point where you've run out of 32 bit addresses and not every node can
support >32 bit addresses, you have the problem.

But what is your point?

With a fully backwards compatible transparent addressing scheme,
a much larger fraction of the nodes would have switched to actively
use IPv6 many years ago.

Right, just like they could have deployed dual stack many years ago too.

The deployment problem was not due to technical issues, it was because the 
Internet changed to only deploy new technology that generated revenue in the 
short term.  After a lot of thought, I have come to the conclusion that it 
wouldn't have mattered what the IETF did, we would still be facing the same 
problems.  It wouldn't be seriously deployed until IPv4 address ran out.

These "if we had only done foo" discussions all miss the biggest deployment 
factor.

Bob



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