On 6 mrt 2008, at 15:03, William Herrin 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.
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.
You are mixing two questions: the availability and use of code. IPv6 has been available in Windows XP, Mac OS X 10.2 and other OSes for more than half a decade now. (Granted, those initial implementations in those two OSes weren't ready for prime time, but still.) However, just having code in hosts doesn't mean the protocol gets executed. Many organizations are reluctant to deploy new "stuff" without a very good reason to do so: if it doesn't buy them anything, why risk problems? And that's for simple stuff such as ECN, when actual work is involved, such as with IPv6, this gets orders of magnitude harder.
A counter argument against the OS update argument: yes, the main OSes are often upgraded. But these days, very many devices speak IP and not all of them are often updated or even realistically updatable. Reflashing a five year old base station or modem, even if the software is available, isn't likely to happen in most consumer networks.
But I do agree that it wouldn't take 15 years, especially if there is a modicum of backward compatibility. Even if my print server or 3 year old cell phone can't do the new cool stuff, if my brand new wifi iPod and my regular computers can and the old stuff can still do what it did before, I'm happy. And that iPod and the computers can be updated quite easily within a few weeks. (I'll run updates unless I'm traveling or I'm close to a deadline.) For enterprise installations this will be longer but even they will adopt new software after a year or two for 98% of their stuff.
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