I think it's a case of the notion of connectivity being changed faster than
many other things. How connectivity is achieved is ultimately not important to
most people, and which addressing scheme is used is a detail hardly anybody
even knows about.
When I first got involved, I didn't have IP connectivity at all; I had UUCP
email and news ("We used to !, but now we @"). Then I got FTP via email, a new
world. Then I got IP, globally routed IP, on my pizza box (later to be a shoe
box), yet another new world; you could use 'talk' (a command line,
curses-windowed chat) across the Internet if you knew the other guy's IP
address, how cool is that? Then I got WWW/HTTP (and DNS), yet again a new
world. Each world introduced a new addressing scheme, another way to specify
where you want to go. (There was also a parallel universe where things were
called X.something, but nobody went there.)
Then I got NAT'ed IP; not a new world, but a big change in connectivity
semantics, yet with little change in usefulness. Now ... well, how many
regular punters know what they've got?
If you look at how connectivity is shaped in people's daily lives, most of them
don't know they have an IP address. Most don't even use a general purpose web
browser (with DNS), they use an "app", whose means of connecting to a fixed
server is entirely hidden. It probably uses DNS, which resolves to IP, which
maps to MAC, which maybe rides on whatever PPP or ATM or something else uses,
but none of that is important. No personal connectivity device needs an
'ifconfig' icon in order to work, and IPv4 vs IPv6 isn't important either; it
isn't the addressing scheme people buy into, and that goes for the UKNOF
audience too. When did anybody last care about MAC addresses? What if the
ubiquitous 48bit MAC was replaced by something completely different? As long
as IPvN packets can be forwarded, it doesn't matter to anybody here.
So, assuming the role of party pooper, I think there's a good case for IPv4
being here forever. Whether connectivity is provided via IPv4 or IPv6 or
something else is a detail, and I don't think you can compare to Y2K or 2038;
both of those come with a degree of certainty that a policy decision will never
have. I fully understand the frustration expressed by many people, but I think
it's something that just comes with the job.
Best,
-- Per
On Tuesday, 26 May 2020, 01:11:25 BST, Paul Mansfield
<[email protected]> wrote:
So is it actually feasible to announce *any* date when IPv6 will be
the only connectivity offered to the end user? The thing is that
without target dates and deadlines, things will drag on indefinitely.
I'll admit I wanted to deliberately put up a challenging statement,
but not to troll, really. I genuinely want an answer to "is there a
possible date?".
Looking back at Y2K, would all that effort have been put in to kill
off old services and tidy up all the cr*p if there hadn't been a fixed
deadline? As to the Jan 19 2038 problem, how many of us hope to be
retired by then, or will we be dragged out of retirement?!
Ok, yes, there's a hell of a lot of legacy equipment in place which
could still be there in five years, so perhaps five years isn't near
enough for ipv4 use to have fallen into almost disuse. Do "we" still
want to be fighting with dual-stack networks, CGNAT, scrabbling to buy
ever more expensive IPv4 addresses etc indefinitely? Will 2038 also
mark a point where legacy systems have to be retired because of their
use of 32 bit math for dates and thus also retire non-ipv6 compliant
systems? Eighteen years seems a long way away?
