I'm certainly not opposed to making technical progress. I once arranged a
full day's workshop hosted by Steve Deering to evangelize, but I have come to
realize that it was 20+ years too early. (Amusing anecdote: it wasn't really
on Deering's radar to do these things, but he had trouble getting a hotel room
for the Munich IETF meeting in 1997, and I offered him mine. He thought that
was very generous, and gladly agreed.)
It's just practical reality, and spending more time and energy on IPv6 won't
get far up any significant chain of command. By way of example, consider the
BGP3->BGP4 and CIDR transition. I once shared the questionable honour of
announcing more unaggregatable prefixes than any other AS in the world, and
everybody everywhere knew where things were heading. Still, the project didn't
gain real momentum until all the world's AGS+ routers started keeling over due
to running out of memory, and that was with all the goodwill and cooperative
spirit inherent in an Internet where NSFNET access was the holy grail of
connectivity.
Money talks, it's that simple. Until the current state of affairs becomes less
profitable (one way or another), the current state will prevail.
I don't know why you think I'm being critical of the KAME project; I most
certainly am not, and I specifically point out that it's probably the most
widely known and used IPv6 code base. If I'm being critical, it's of the world
at large (think big and share the love :-) The world has arguably failed to
follow up on the momentum IPv6 had at the time, but things probably couldn't
have gone any other way, and there's still some way to go.
Best,
-- Per
On Monday, 25 May 2020, 17:24:43 BST, Christian <[email protected]> wrote:
Dear Per,
When is too late now? The original transition plans had to be revised at IETF
around 2008 largely because it was only "just before it's too late". So there
has been a reprieve of a hard withdrawl for an extra 12 years. But can you say
now when would you know if you left it just before too late again? Or when it
is actually too late!?
There are plenty of folk who have been engaging in IPv6 issues collectively in
Fora, TaskForces, Readiness activities. ISOC has its 360 Deploy team. All take
a strong interest in unpicking the detail and distribute clue as to the detail
of how to do things better. UKNOF has also been a pioneering place that has
always been open to engaging on IPv6.
Personally I don't think we can or should talk about The Internet going IPv6
native as if there is some kind of future NCP/TCP cut off repeat. We need to
live with and build on what we have.
best
Christian
NB Ito Jun is unable of course to defend himself and WIDE Kame now. I would
just say that he provided every opportunity for you to build on that code and
rather than sniping at it twenty five years on. It would be great to see
acknowledgement of the enormous contribution that was made openly to the
benefit of the Internet communities from that team and build from it.
On 25/05/2020 10:17, Per Bilse wrote:
When I saw this thread starting I thought to myself "No, no, no ... this
will never end well." I decided to stay out of it, but Neil raised an
important point, namely that things are more complicated than what meets the
eye. The state of IPv6 software in the field isn't good, and much of it dates
back to the early years of this century, or even late last century. There was
great enthusiasm and a flurry of activity when IPv6 first saw the light of day,
but the endurance of IPv4 combined with a steady stream of routine, everyday
issues meant that IPv6 started taking a back seat after just a few years. I
keep telling this story about a journalist asking me "When will the Internet
change to IPv6?", to which I replied "Just before it's too late"; it wasn't
what he was expecting to hear, but it was a reflection of daily reality in a
commercial environment, and that hasn't changed. IPv6 remained a draft
standard, accompanied by various additional RFCs and related documents, until
it was finally consolidated in RFC8200 a few years ago; the process took nearly
20 years, and the promotion to full standard was partly prompted by an
administrative change in the RFC process.
Being stuck in the draft standard state isn't in itself unusual, and
interoperability demands from the real world usually iron out any
implementation bumps, but in this respect IPv6 has been in a backwater.
Probably the most widely known and used IPv6 code base came out of the
WIDE/KAME project, but much of it is literally 15-20+ years old, and hasn't
been updated for over a decade. Hence, by today there are dozens, or probably
actually hundreds, of slightly diverging IPv6 implementations in various states
of disrepair. They trace their origins back to RFC2460 from 1998, but each
will have incorporated its own blend of tweaks, fixes, and updates, some from
RFCs and errata, some from I-Ds, and some from in-house developments. Few, if
any, are ready for prime time in the way IPv4 is, and while they all generally
work, IPv6 simply doesn't have the tightly knit development and
interoperability history that IPv4 has.
So ... when will the Internet go IPv6 native? Maybe never. It's a
commercial issue, and there are no overarching considerations at play: IPv4
doesn't cause global warming, and the ozone layer is safe too. Hence, nobody
is likely to spend time and energy on IPv6 until doing so becomes a source of
revenue, and that will in the first instance mean the whole world catching up
with two decades of neglect.
-- Per
