Re: Dual stack IPv6 for IPv4 depletion

[Doug Barton <dougb () dougbarton us>]

On 7/15/15 4:45 PM, Joe Maimon wrote:
> Doug Barton wrote:
> > On 7/15/15 10:24 AM, Joe Maimon wrote:
> > > I suspect a 16 /8 right about now would be very welcome for everybody
> > > other then the ipv6 adherents.
> >
> > Globally we were burning through about a /8 every month or two in "the
> > good old days." So in the best case scenario we'd get 32 more months of
> > easy to get IPv4, but at an overwhelming cost to re-implement every
> > network stack.
> >
> > This option was considered back in the early 2000's when I was still
> > involved in the discussion, and rejected as impractical.
>
>
> Removing experimental status does not equate with the burden of making
> it equivalent use to the rest of the address space.
>
> How about the ARIN burn rate post IANA runout? How long does 16 /8 last
> then?
>
> What would be wrong with removing experimental status and allowing one
> of the /8 to be used for low barrier to /16 assignment to any party
> demonstrating a willingness to coax usability of the space?
>
> Yes, any such effort has to run the gauntlet of IETF/IANA/RIR policy.
>
> CGN /10 managed. This could too, if all the naysayers would just step
> out of the way.

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


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