RE: IPv6 Confusion

["Tony Hain" <alh-ietf () tndh net>]

christopher.morrow () gmail com wrote:
> > ...
> > Yes people expect 1:1 functionality, but how many of them are
> stepping up to
>
> how many vendors are implementing willy-nilly v4 feature requests for
> their enterprise/isp customers? does it not seem reasonable to look at
> each one and say: "Gosh, if you want a TE knob for v4,surely you'll
> want that in v6 'soon' yes?" (replace TE knob with ... us about every
> other knob requested actually). The arguement that 'You have to ask
> for v6 knobs the exist in v4 else they won't happen' flies in the face
> of the arguement that: "People don't want v4 or v6, they just want IP
> connectivity."

The reality is that people are telling the vendor 'I need X NOW, don't
bother with slowing down to make IPv6 work while you are at it'. Since the
list of X is never ending, nobody ever gets time to go back and add IPv6. If
you expect IPv6 in your products, you have to put money on the table.
Expecting that a vendor will do something that you are telling them not to
by your procurement habits, is really silly. 

> This doesn't exactly follow for the IETF process, though it really
> ought to for a goodly number of things. If you are using something in
> v4, and it got added via the consensus process in the IETF, it's very
> likely that you will need like functionality in v6. 

No, the ops community does not use everything that the IETF turns out. How
many people still use SLIP, RIP, EGP, SMTP over X.25, IP over ARCNET,
FDDI-mib, ...??? The IETF needs operational input about what is really
useful, and that has to come from people that are running networks. 

> DHCP and
> Multihoming are just 2 simple examples of this. I still can't see how:
> "but v6 has autoconf so you don't need dhcp!" is even attempted as an
> argument after 1996. Surely vendors of networking gear and consumer
> OS's realized before 1996 that things other than 'address and default
> route' are important to end stations?? I know these entities use other
> features in their enterprise networks...

There are vast differences in how enterprise networks are run today than
they were 10 years ago, and in both cases they are different than how
consumer networks are run. Again, this group is composed of professional
network managers, and they want explicit knobs to manage things. Other
environments don't care about those knobs and shouldn't be required to
understand and tweak them. Both are valid and need to operate independently
of the other. 

> > the table with $$$ to make that happen... In the US, it is only the
> DoD. In
> > the ISP space, most of it comes from Japan. If you are not finding
> what you
>
> I thougth EU also was spending on v6?

The EU talks a lot, but outside of the 6net/6diss projects has not really
put much money behind it, that I am aware of. Even those efforts were more
about documenting what was operationally possible at the time than they were
about defining requirements. 

Tony