[156580] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: The Department of Work and Pensions, UK has an entire /8
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (George Herbert)
Thu Sep 20 04:19:08 2012
In-Reply-To: <505AC3F8.9060905@bogus.com>
From: George Herbert <george.herbert@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2012 01:18:18 -0700
To: joel jaeggli <joelja@bogus.com>, George Herbert <george.herbert@gmail.com>
Cc: "nanog@nanog.org" <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Sep 20, 2012, at 12:21 AM, joel jaeggli <joelja@bogus.com> wrote:
> On 9/20/12 12:09 AM, George Herbert wrote:
>>=20
>> On Sep 19, 2012, at 9:58 PM, Jimmy Hess <mysidia@gmail.com> wrote:
>>=20
>>> There is still no technical reason that 240/4 cannot be
>>> rehabilitated, other than continued immaterial objections to doing
>>> anything at all with 240/4, and given the rate of IPv6 adoption thus
>>> far, if not for those, it could possibly be reopened as unicast IPv4,
>>> and be well-supported by new equipment, before the percentage of
>>> IPv6-enabled network activity reaches a double digit percentage...
>>=20
>> Excellent idea. Now build a time machine, go back to 2005, and start wor=
k.
>=20
> Sorry it was a bad idea then, it's still a bad idea.
Bad Idea or not, stopgap or not, it was and remains technically, programmati=
cally, and politically feasible.
The critical failure is that starting RIGHT NOW would deliver five years-ish=
too late, which renders it a moot point. In two or three years we may well=
regret not having done it in 2005; in seven years we will have had to have s=
olved and deployed IPv6 successfully anyways.
We could have started it at a more opportune time in the past. We could als=
o have done other things like a straight IPv4-48 or IPv4-64, without the oth=
er protocol suite foo that's delayed IPv6 rollout. Operators could have eit=
her used larger baseball bats or more participating numbers to make some IPv=
6 protocol design go the other way. IETF could have realized they were in E=
pic Fail by Too Clever territory.
All of these things are water under the bridge now. We have what we have. I=
t being amusing to grouse about mistakes of the past does not magically chan=
ge the present. We have rapidly vanishing IPv4 and no 240/4, IPv6, and no t=
ime. That is reality.
Pining for 240/4 fjords is not a time machine to change the past.
George William Herbert
Sent from my iPhone=
