Firewall Wizards mailing list archives
Re: IPv6
From: "Marcus J. Ranum" <mjr () ranum com>
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2011 18:31:35 -0500
Dave Piscitello wrote:
I am also not convinced that some 11th hour 59th minute "change of heart" won't occur, and someone will convince the community of an alternative course.
Back a long time ago, in the shrouded mists of yesteryear, some of us asked "why not just double the address size, left-fill with zeroes, bump the version number, and rock on?" The answer, at that time (as screeched by the standards pukes) was "that's IMPOSSIBLE!!" Impossible because backbone routers would need "gigabytes of RAM to hold routing tables!" and route lookups would be prohibitively expensive. That was back in, around, '92 or so, if I recall correctly. Nowadays it's not like "gigabytes of RAM" would be such a big deal, but spanning tree and cidr block routing actually solved that problem, anyhow. In other words, it's not "IMPOSSIBLE" at all. It's just that there is such a huge emotional and now technological and financial investment in making IPv6 work, that the powers that be are not seriously contemplating any alternatives. I used to joke (but I was serious) about how if I was a crazy multimillionaire (I'm not, BTW) I'd brand it "Mega-IP" hire a bunch of geeks to start submitting patches for it into open source projects, lobby a couple router vendors and firewall vendors to adopt it as a field-expedient Mega-quick and convenient solution, and I'm guessing IPv6 would be RIP in under a year. I'd do that because that's just the kind of mean, cynical bastard I am, some mornings - and it'd be nice to see the address space problem solved quickly, like it could have been in 1992, back when it would have taken a couple of months rather than years of bullshitting around. But if someone did that, what would the standards bodies have to do, to keep them busy? mjr. -- Marcus J. Ranum CSO, Tenable Network Security, Inc. http://www.tenable.com (This posting is not an official opinion of Tenable) _______________________________________________ firewall-wizards mailing list firewall-wizards () listserv icsalabs com https://listserv.icsalabs.com/mailman/listinfo/firewall-wizards
Current thread:
- Re: IPv6 John Kougoulos (Jan 01)
- Re: IPv6 Dave Piscitello (Jan 11)
- Re: IPv6 Kerry Milestone (Jan 11)
- Re: IPv6 Dave Brockman (Jan 12)