[137709] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: IPv6 mistakes, was: Re: Looking for an IPv6 naysayer...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Owen DeLong)
Fri Feb 18 09:49:13 2011
From: Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com>
In-Reply-To: <F2423D30-E871-4434-824B-590AEBD64A7E@muada.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2011 06:48:12 -0800
To: Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com>
Cc: NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Feb 18, 2011, at 2:50 AM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> On 17 feb 2011, at 17:35, George Bonser wrote:
>=20
>> Considering v4 is likely to be around for another decade or two, =
getting
>> Class E into general use seems easy enough to do.
>=20
> You really think people will be communicating over the public internet =
using IPv4 in 2031?
>=20
For some minimal definition of two endpoints both of which are IPv4, =
sure.
It'll be across 4in6 tunnels or something like that, but, I'm sure there =
will still be die-hard
legacy systems doing that in 2031.
As to whether IPv4 will still be generally routed on the internet? I =
actually suspect that
will end before 2021 and might start winding down as early as 2014. Many =
people
think that is overly optimistic, but, I look at the scaling problems =
IPv4 routing will face
in a post depletion world and I suspect the motivations to deprecate =
IPv4 will come on
strong and fast as a result.
Before you ask, no, I'm not going to promise to eat my column. (Hi Bob!)
> It will take a long time before the first people are going to turn off =
IPv4, but once that starts there will be no stopping it and IPv4 will be =
gone very, very quickly.
>=20
Define long time. I'm thinking 3 to 5 years, maybe.
> (Of course there will be legacy stuff, just like some people are still =
running IPX or AppleTalk today. I'm talking about the public internet =
here.)
>=20
> Today people are complaining how annoying it is to have to learn new =
things to be able to run IPv6, but that doesn't compare to how annoying =
it is to have to learn OLD things to keep running a protocol that is way =
past its sell by date. I still need to teach class A/B/C despite the =
fact that CIDR is old enough to drink in most countries because without =
knowing that you can't configure a Cisco router. That's annoying now. =
Think about how insane that will be in the 2020s when the notion of =
requesting IPv4 addresses from an RIR is ancient history and young =
people don't know any better than having a /64 on every LAN that is big =
enough to connect all ethernet NICs ever made.
>=20
I am not convinced you can't configure a cisco router without knowing =
about classful addressing. True, you
will have to understand classful routing for the way Cisco displays =
routes to make sense to you, but, if you don't,
all that happens is you wonder why they display things so strangely, =
grouping these octet-bounded collections of
routes.
Owen
