nanog mailing list archives

Re: IPv6 Confusion


From: Christopher Morrow <morrowc.lists () gmail com>
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:44:09 -0500

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 5:30 PM, Tony Hain <alh-ietf () tndh net> wrote:
Daniel Senie wrote:
...
No, the decision was to not blindly import all the excess crap from
IPv4. If
anyone has a reason to have a DHCPv6 option, all they need to do is
specify
it. The fact that the *nog community stopped participating in the
IETF has
resulted in the situation where functionality is missing, because
nobody
stood up and did the work to make it happen.

Because clearly everything done in IPv4 space was crap, or should be
assumed to be crap. Therefore, everything that's been worked out and
made to function well in the last 25+ years in IPv4 space should be
tossed and re-engineered. OSI anyone?

That is not what the decision said. The point was that the DHCP WG was not
going to decide for you what was necessary or appropriate to carry forward.
Rather than add baggage that nobody actually uses, there is nothing until
someone says 'I need that'. Never mind that DHCP wasn't defined when the
IPng work started, and wasn't in widespread use yet when DHCPv6 was being
started ...


and ipv4 didnt stop evolving when ipv6 started being
designed/engineered/'architected'. If new use cases, or different
business cases were evolved in th ev4 world, it seems that those
should have also trickled back into the v6 work. That does not seem to
have been the case, multihoming is but one example of this.


The point, which seems to elude many, is that rightly or wrongly there
is an assumption that going from IPv4 to IPv6 should not involve a step
back in time, not on  security, not on central configuration
capability,
not on the ability to multihome, and so forth. The rude awakening is
that the IPv6 evangelists insisting everyone should "get with the
program" failed to understand that the community at large would expect
equivalent or better functionality.

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."

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. 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...

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?

-chris


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