On Apr 7, 2012, at 8:35 PM, Christian Huitema wrote:
Unlike some others, I'm still not convinced that there is anything
fundamentally wrong with the IPv6 design
although I believe that we could have made it either easier to deploy or
that we could have offered more incentives for deployment.
IPv6 is, fundamentally, IPv4 with bigger addresses.
Not quite. IPv6 has multiple prefixes, link-local addresses, neighbor
discovery. See section 3 of RFC 5739 for a discussion of how things break when
you treat IPv6 as a drop-in replacement.
I am hearing two kinds of critics. On one hand, some regret the lost
opportunity to break from the IPv4 design and do something more radical, e.g.
ID/locator separation. On the other hand there are those who wish that IPv6
was even more like IPv4, including the use of NAT and other such practices,
so network administrators could keep a familiar setting.
Changing the message from "you don't need NAT anywhere" to "sure, you can use
RFC 4193 ULAs, just don't let us see them on the Internet" would be a big help.
Small businesses would have one or two networks, so nothing bad happens even if
the router chooses the 40 random bits in a not-so-random fashion. Bigger
businesses with multiple subnets in each site and VPNs between the sites would
need to be more careful, but should have the appropriately-skilled operators.
Just like they do now.
Yoav