Subject: Will IPv4 be formally deprecated when IPv6 is good enough ? Date: Tue, Oct 
14, 2003 at 11:43:36PM +0930 Quoting Mark Smith ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):
> That brings to my mind two questions
> 
> a) Is IPv4 going to be formally deprecated when IPv6 is good enough? If so, are the 
> related IPv4 NAT RFCs also going to be deprecated at that time ?

Do not think so. Maybe it is my limited mind, but I find it hard not to keep 
v4 on some boxes. 
 
> b) Is IPv6 good enough yet ?

I think so. There are valid concerns on two things; multihoming and
address allocation procedures. There seems to be strong forces among the 
researchers and vendors advocting that we halt and wait for the
Grail of multihoming while we at the same time work very hard in preventing 
people from getting allocations, to preserve address space and keep
the routing table size down.

I think the address allocation problem is based on v4 habits. v6
is abundant. We need it to be available. Nothing will happen until
people can get real allocations with relative ease, not so easy
that nuisance allocations will occur, but almost. Give every AS
number holder a /32 or something, and watch deployment speed up.

With multihoming, strongly related to above, I suggest people cease
waiting for the Grail and instead adopt the v4 model, aided by the 
limited growth we'd see if people did not have to patch their nets
together using disjunct prefixes.  I believe routing table growth
would be much slower, and there are suggestions I find supportive
of this in some analyses of routing table characteristics, for
example in <http://www.caida.org/outreach/papers/2002/EGR/>:

        "Small ASes (those who originate only a few prefixes into
        the global routing system) do not contribute more than their
        fair share of either route entries or churn to the global
        routing system." 

Thus, if most ASen were able to contain all their hosts within one
single /32 per AS, we would see limited routing table growth for
some years, during which there would be time to develop more
sophisticated routing paradigms, if operational experience dictated
such a need was indeed present.

The key words here are "operational experience". We need to get people 
start using v6 for everyday things. 

-- 
M�ns Nilsson         Systems Specialist
+46 70 681 7204         KTHNOC
                        MN1334-RIPE

This TOPS OFF my partygoing experience!  Someone I DON'T LIKE is
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