Dave Crocker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > The phrase "damning with faint praise" comes to mind. Given how long > IPv6 has been in the pipeline, the fact that it is available at an > essentially production level in a minuscule level, so far, says that > we are looking at a 10-20 year adoption cycle.
I'm really not sure that this is very bad at all seeing it from the "inside". Two years ago there was nary an OS that came with v6. Now I think the only significant one that is missing v6 support is MacOS X, and that's only because they haven't figured out the right ways to wrap the calls for the application layer (the kernel bits are easy). Without any OS support, how could anyone run it, even people who wanted to? The fact that we've moved so fast from a standing start is pretty impressive. Consider how slowly IPv4 grew by comparison. I think realistically speaking, mid 2000 was the beginning of deployment in any real sense at all, and in terms of desktop OSes used by the bulk of consumers, we've only had availability in a stock OS for a few weeks now. My opinion is that ten years is on the high side. Unlike v4 deployment, it is much easier to deploy v6 in a v4 world than it was to deploy v4 with no internet around. However, anyone who thought this could be done in less than years was not thinking clearly about the problem. > IPv6 seeks to change an existing infrastructure. That means that its > adoption is vastly slower than an end-point change, such as adoption > of MIME. And it took MIME 5 years to become seriously available, and > at least 8 years before it was reliably available. I disagree -- it is mostly an endpoint change, and the endpoints are the hard part. The extant v6 network functions fine over tunnels on most of its connections. Some of the biggest uses of v6 I see in the short run are in overlay networks to get around v4 NAT hells for network management. The other thing to keep in mind is that it is perfectly useful to run v6 machines in a v4 world -- it isn't like you won't be able to look at cnn.com until cnn.com runs v6. The v4 universe forces me to use translator boxes anyway, so there is no giant reason to use NAT boxes instead of v4<->v6 gateways, but one has the advantage that one gets real address space and can actually get at the individual machines over v6, which is very hard to do in nested NAT world. -- Perry E. Metzger [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- NetBSD Development, Support & CDs. http://www.wasabisystems.com/
