Re: (ASCEND) IPv6 question ?

[Phillip Vandry <vandry@Mlink.NET>]

> On Fri, 28 May 1999, Phillip Vandry wrote:
> 
> :In fact, IMHO, don't count on IPv6 being in active use on the Internet
> :for a long, long time, perhaps ever.
> 
> Where do you get this info?

From my brain - that's why I wrote IMHO :-)

> What do you expect will happen instead? Proxy?

OK, this is pretty much off topic, but you asked what I thought :-)

My belief is that it's simply too costly to deploy IPv6. As the Internet
continues to become a more mission critical network for more and more
people, it becomes less and less acceptable to play with unproven things
like IPv6 on production routers. And it has to be deployed on every router
in the core before advantages can be drawn from it. As for deploying a
parallel IPv6 network, there just isn't enough demand.

Use of NAT is exploding these days, both for address conservation reasons
and for security reasons. I still think NAT is a hack (although it is a
hack that has been perfected to the point where it works very well), but
it works in production now. I expect even more increased use of NAT in
the future, together with other hacks that can help. Although I don't
see this happening widely in the next five years, the extreme would be
ISPs using NAT with customers behind them who are using NAT. (No predictions
beyond that!)

It's just a lot easier to patch the problems than to change the
architecture. Who's gonna be the ginea pig? Who's going to double their
operational expenses to deploy an IPv6 network which is just as good as
their existing IPv4 one, and not be able to do anything significant with
it until a number of others follow suit?

Once upon a time, it was reasonable to define Internet Access as having a
globally unique IP address (whether it's temporary or permanent) and a
link through which IP packets can be sent to any other node which has
Internet Access, and received from any other node which has Internet Access.

Would users accept anything less?

Already a contemporary definition of Internet Access is a little less than
that. You can't send an IP packet with a source address which is not
yours. People didn't used to filter for that, and now we do. Sometimes
you are restricted from talking to all but one machine on port 25 (spam
prevention).

Many companies offer Internet access to their employees only via a proxy
server or ALG, and they call it Internet Access. That's only good for
HTTP and FTP and a few other protocols, I can't telnet or ssh through
that! I personally find this unacceptable for that reason, but if we
were talking about NAT instead, that's actually pretty good.

I once read the following analogy: Compare the Internet with the PSTN.
Giving users direct access to IP is like giving them an SS7 connection.
Could you imagine the havok if every telephone user had access to SS7.
You might be able to do the equivalent of smurfing a phone switch or
something like that, not the mention that the amount of resources
expended would be huge!

Now I find that a extreme (I don't think we should be taking away access
to the global IP network from the end user at this time), but think
about it anyway!

-Phil
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