Re: Dual stack IPv6 for IPv4 depletion

[Joe Maimon <jmaimon () ttec com>]

Doug Barton wrote:

> Joe,
>
> In this post, and in your many other posts today, you seem to be
> asserting that this would work if "$THEY" would just get out of the way,
> and let it work. You've also said explicitly that you believe that this
> is an example of top-down dictates. I know you may find this hard to
> believe, but neither of these ideas turn out to be accurate. A little
> history ...
>
> In 2004 I was the manager of the IANA. Tony Hain came to me and said
> that he'd been crunching some numbers and his preliminary research
> indicated that the burn rate on IPv4 was increasing fairly dramatically,
> and that runout was likely to happen a lot sooner than folks expected it
> would. Various people started doing their own research along similar
> lines and confirmed Tony's findings.
>
> So amongst many others, I started taking various steps to "get ready"
> for IPv4 runout. One of those steps was to talk to folks about the
> feasibility of utilizing Class E space. Now keep in mind that I have no
> dog in this hunt. I've never been part of an RIR, I've never worked for
> a network gear company, I'm a DNS guy. To me, bits are bits.
>
> I was told, universally, that there was no way to make Class E space
> work, in the public Internet or private networks (because the latter was
> being considered as an expansion of 1918). There are just too many
> barriers, not the least of which is the overwhelming number of
> person-years it would take to rewrite all the software that has
> assumptions about Class E space hard coded.
>
> Further, the vendors we spoke to said that they had no intention of
> putting one minute's worth of work into that project, because the ROI
> was basically zero. In order for address space to "work" the standard is
> universal acceptance ... and that was simply never going to happen.
> There are literally hundreds of millions of devices in active use right
> now that would never work with Class E space because they cannot be
> updated.
>
> Of course it's also true that various folks, particularly the IETF
> leadership, were/are very gung ho that IPv6 is the right answer, so any
> effort put into making Class E space work is wasted effort; which should
> be spent on deploying IPv6. On a *personal* level I agree with that
> sentiment, but (to the extent I'm capable of being objective) I didn't
> let that feeling color my effort to get an honest answer from the many
> folks I talked to about this.
>
> But all that said, nothing is stopping YOU from working on it. :)  The
> IETF can't stop you, the vendors can't stop you, no one can stop you ...
> if you think you can make it work, by all means, prove us all wrong. :)
>   Find some others that agree with you, work on the code, do the
> interoperability tests, and present your work. You never know what might
> happen.
>
> In the meantime, please stop saying that not using this space was
> dictated from the top down, or that any one party/cabal/etc. is holding
> you back, because neither of those are accurate.
>
> Good luck,
>
> Doug


Thanks for the this.

To clarify, my criticism of top down is specifically in response to the 
rationale presented that it is a valid objective to prevent, hinder and 
refuse to enable efforts that "compete" with ipv6 world-takeover resources.

I have no intention of using Class E. I have no intention of developing 
code that uses Classe E. I will note that the code involved that is 
publicly searchable appears to be simple and small, the task that is 
large is adoption spread.

But perhaps we can all agree that standards should be accurate and 
should not be used to advance uninvolved agenda. And class E 
experimental status is inaccurate. And keeping that status serves 
nobody, except those who believe it helps marshal efforts away from 
IPv4. And that is top down.

Burn rate is specious. Applying liberally constrained green-field 
burn-rate as a projection of ROI on brownfield space likely to be 
heavily constrained by market force if nothing else is wholly 
inapplicable and inaccurate.

Joe