Re: legacy /8

[David Barak <thegameiam () yahoo com>]

--- On Sat, 4/3/10, Mark Smith <nanog () 85d5b20a518b8f6864949bd940457dc124746ddc nosense org> wrote:
> To: "George Bonser" <gbonser () seven com>
> > No.  But that isn't the point.  The point is
> that v6 was a bad solution
> > to the problem.  Rather than simply address the
> address depletion
> > problem, it also "solves" a lot of problems that
> nobody has while
> > creating a whole bunch more that we will have.
>
> Ever used IPX or Appletalk? If you haven't, then you don't
> know how
> simple and capable networking can be. And those protocols
> were designed
> more than 20 years ago, yet they're still more capable than
> IPv4.

Spoken like someone who has forgotten how much {fun|trouble} cable range + zones were...

IPX, AppleTalk, VINES, DECNet, SNA, and all of the other protocol suites which were kicking around in the 80s and early 
90s each had the "one thing they do really really well," but none of them were sufficiently flexible, extensible, easy, 
or cheap to capture the market.

Examples of some things which those protocols *didn't* do well include (obviously the list is different for each 
individual protocol):

* interdomain routing - most were optimized for single-administrative control networks
* multicast
* handle an encryption layer at layer 3
* cheap + easy to implement, no license required
* distributed centralized administration (i.e. DHCP servers)
* tolerate a wide variety of {link|connection} performance characteristics 

> I think IPv6 has not just learnt from the history of IPv4,
> it has also learnt from the history of other protocols. 

Sadly, though, it also picked up some of the mistaken optimizations from the other protocols.  The mess that has been 
made of RA+SLAAC+DHCPv6+DNS is something which can't be described as "elegant," and I certainly don't find it an 
improvement over IPv4 DHCP+DNS.

David Barak
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