On Oct 12, 2009, at 5:23 PM, Randy Bush wrote:
sure would be nice if there was a diagnosis before the lynching
If this happened in v4, would customers care 'why' it happened?
Obviously not.
Why should v6 be any different? It either is or is not production
ready. I'm interested in HE's view on that.
many of us are interested in diagnosis. few in your lynch rope.
I think you are stretching things to make a pithy post. More
importantly, you are missing the point.
For the v6 'Net to be used, customers - you know the people who pay
for those router things and that fiber stuff and all our salaries and
such - need to feel some comfort around it actually working. This did
not help that comfort level. And I believe it is valid to ask about it.
Diagnosis is good. Fortunately, anyone who cares knows exactly what
happened on a technical level - HE has no v6 transit and does not peer
with Telia; Telia had C&W transit, then they didn't, now they do.
Took less time to 'diagnose' than your one-liners took to write. Were
you actually interested in diagnostics, you would have spent some time
looking as opposed to trying to be pithy to 10K of your not-so-closest
buddies.
Unfortunately, and you damned well know this, we are not going to get
a /real/ diagnosis out of a busted peering relationship. Especially
when one party is an incumbent telco. HE typically - and properly -
will not discuss such relationships (modulo Mike's Cogent post, which
even he says is unusual). And Telia won't discuss squat, full stop.
So why it happened is a mystery, and will be for, well, ever.
Diagnosis ends.
However, the question still stands about the stability, and therefor,
utility of the v6 'Net. Is it still some bastard child, some beta
test, some side project? Or is it ready to have _revenue_producing_
traffic put on it? When a network as solid and customer-oriented as
HE can have a long outage to such a large network as Telia, I submit
it is not. I know, everyone is shocked. But operationally speaking,
this matters. We can either say "but it was just v6", or we can think
about how to not have this happen again. The former leads no where.
Perhaps we should choose the latter instead of making pithy posts?
If that is a "lynch rope", I will not bother arguing with you. Pigs &
mud & all that. But that doesn't make it wrong, or irrelevant.
In summary, we have the standard Chicken & Egg problem. No one cares
about v6, so no one puts anything important on v6, so no one cares
about v6. HE was trying harder to break that vicious cycle than
anyone else, yet even they do not come close to supporting v6 as much
as they support v4. Sad times for the future of the Internet if we
all need to use v6 Real Soon Now.
I asked for HE's view on that. Would you mind explaining why you
don't want to hear it?
--
TTFN,
patrick
P.S. Being a curmudgeon is useful from time to time. But only if you
are, well, being useful.
