Re: [RRG] Moving forward... IPv4 now, IPv6 less urgent and perhaps more ambitious

[David Conrad <drc@virtualized.org>]

Robin,

On Jun 9, 2008, at 9:42 PM, Robin Whittle wrote:
> Yes, but not if the statement involves shortcuts that fence us off
> from the optimal combination of recommendations.
I view the statement proposed by Tony as merely indicating the  
priority is IPv6.  A solution that addresses both IPv6 and IPv4 would  
likely be more interesting than a solution that addresses only one of  
these.
> Despite its length, I think my text has a good signal-to-noise ratio
I do not disagree.  However, if we can't even get a rough consensus on  
28 mostly innocuous words, I'm somewhat skeptical we'd be able to  
reach rough consensus on 443 words that provide many more hooks for  
folks to get hung up on.
> Based on recent messages of support for Tony's text, I am
> surprised by how many people seem to think we don't need to solve
> the IPv4 problem.
It may be that given the limitations of IPv4, folks view its  
scalability as a self-correcting problem.  If IPv6 scalability were  
solved, the advantages of having "vast tracts of swamp" ... err...  
lots of address space would, in the end, encourage people to migrate  
away from IPv4 (since they wouldn't be able to get more IPv4 address  
space at a reasonable cost).
> I think we all went to a lot of trouble
> to develop our solutions because we believe something really is
> needed ASAP for IPv4.
An interesting question and one for which I have never gotten a  
satisfying answer.  There is pressure for a solution, but it isn't  
clear to me how time critical it is.  Clearly, there is some room to  
maneuver and, in the end, ISPs will take whatever actions they feel  
necessary to protect their own infrastructure, even if that means  
filtering out parts of the Internet.  It would be nice to have a  
solution that precludes the need for such drastic action, but I'm told  
we don't absolutely have to have it today.
> That was the impetus behind the RAWS workshop 20 months ago.
Well, no, not really.  Dave Meyers can correct me if I'm wrong, but I  
believe it was more that the brokenness in routing technology used by  
both IPv4 and IPv6 wasn't getting the attention it deserved.  To  
paraphrase Dave Clark, since (from a routing perspective) IPv6 was  
just a bigger truck driving into the same swamp, we'd be screwed if we  
didn't look at the problem more closely.
> In my view, there are no other potentially practical solutions for
> IPv4 than the map-encap systems.
Map-encap obviously isn't limited to IPv4.  In fact, if you're doing  
map-encap, the stuff that you're mapping and encapping is most likely  
an opaque bag of bits relevant only to the stuff on the outside of the  
mapper and encapper.
Regards,
-drc


--
to unsubscribe send a message to rrg-request@psg.com with the
word 'unsubscribe' in a single line as the message text body.
archive: <http://psg.com/lists/rrg/> & ftp://psg.com/pub/lists/rrg