Re: [RRG] Are we solving the wrong problem?

["William Herrin" <bill@herrin.us>]

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 3:46 AM, Tony Li <tony.li@tony.li> wrote:
>  |I think so, in the end of the day.  It makes re-numbering a non-
>  |issue, as even active connections will trivially survive.  But the
>  |transition will be long..... (15 years?)
>
>  As always with host changes, I'm not convinced that it takes 15 years to
>  make significant forward progress.  The (in)security of the net has done us
>  a favor in that we can now update a significant portion of the hosts within
>  one month of having a patch, and certainly with a new OS every 3-5 years.
>
>  All it takes to make rapid forward progress is concerted effort, and all
>  that takes is rough consensus...


Hi Tony,

It depends on the character of the change. It didn't take 15 years for
TCP window scaling to be deployed; it was out there in only a couple
years. On the other hand, I'd be surprised if IPv6 was deployed to a
usefully ubiquitous level even 20 years after we started.

The former was small, strictly backwards compatible and required no
configuration changes. So it got picked up in the tech refresh cycle
and made it out quickly.

The latter failed to meet those any of those three criteria and is
still struggling for it.

It's not a question of consensus or effort. It's a question of hassle
factor. The higher the hassle factor, the slower it gets deployed.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


-- 
William D. Herrin                  herrin@dirtside.com  bill@herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr.                        Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004

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