nanog mailing list archives

Re: DoD IP Space


From: Tom Beecher <beecher () beecher cc>
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2021 11:30:22 -0500


For most networks there is almost no pain in enabling IPv6.


A startup vendor, formed by long time industry veterans, released brand new
products inside of the last 8 years that did not yet have IPv6 support
because their software, also created by them from scratch, did not yet
support it. It does now, but one could argue that it's mind boggling this
happened in the first place.

When experienced industry individuals decide that V6 is second class enough
to chop the feature just to get the product out the door, and bolt it on to
code later (because THAT always works out well :) ), it really makes you
wonder how many more generations of engineers will be having these same
conversations.

The money always talks. As long as solutions exist to massage V4 scarcity ,
and those solutions remain cheaper, they will generally win.

On Thu, Feb 11, 2021 at 5:07 PM Mark Andrews <marka () isc org> wrote:



On 12 Feb 2021, at 08:11, Jim Shankland <nanog () shankland org> wrote:

On 2/11/21 6:29 AM, Owen DeLong wrote:

On Feb 11, 2021, at 05:55 , Izaac <izaac () setec org> wrote:

On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 04:04:43AM -0800, Owen DeLong wrote:
without creating partitioned networks.
Ridiculous.  Why would you establish such a criteria?  The defining
characteristic of rfc1918 networks is that they are partitioned.

The ability to recognize and exploit partitions within a network,
natural or otherwise, is the measure of competence in a network
engineer.

Stop making excuses.
Ridiculous… TCP/IP was designed to be a peer to peer system where each
endpoint was uniquely
addressable whether reachable by policy or not.

IPv6 restores that ability and RFC-1918 is a bandaid for an obsolete
protocol.

Stop making excuses and let’s fix the network.

Owen

TCP/IP wasn't designed; it evolved (OK, a slight exaggeration). The
ISO-OSI protocol stack was designed. Many years ago, I taught a course on
TCP/IP networking. The course was written by someone else, I was just being
paid to present/teach it. Anyway, I vividly remember a slide with bullet
points explaining why TCP/IP was a transitional technology, and would be
rapidly phased out, replaced by the "standard", intelligently designed
ISO-OSI stack. By the time I taught the course, I had to tell the class
that every single statement on that slide was incorrect. In the end,
evolution beat out intelligent design, by a country mile.

It was probably a couple of years later -- the year definitely started
with a 1 -- that I first heard that IPv4 was being phased out, to be
replaced over the next couple of years by IPv6. We've been hearing it ever
since.

That doesn't mean that we'll be living with IPv4 forever. A peer to peer
system where each endpoint is uniquely addressable is desirable. But in a
world of virtual machines, load balancers, etc., the binding of an IP
address to a particular, physical piece of hardware has long since become
tenuous. IPv4 is evolving into a 48-bit address space for endpoints (32-bit
host + 16-bit port). That development has extended IPv4's useful life by
many years.

There is pain associated with continuing to make IPv4 work. And there is
pain associated with transitioning to IPv6. IPv6 will be adopted when the
pain of the former path is much larger than the pain of the latter path.
Saying "RFC-1918 is a bandaid for an obsolete protocol" is using a
normative, rather than empirical, definition of "obsolete". In the
empirical sense, things are obsolete when people stop using them. Tine will
tell when that happens.

Jim Shankland

For most networks there is almost no pain in enabling IPv6. Its
reconfigure the routers to announce IPv6 prefixes and you are done.  We are
20+ years into IPv6 deployment.  Almost everything you buy today works with
IPv6.  Even the crappy $50 home router does IPv6.  100s of millions of
household networks have had IPv6 enabled without the owners of those
networks needing to anything other than perhaps swap out a IPv4-only router
to one that supports IPv6.  Hell lots of those home networks are behind
IPv6-only uplinks with the CPE router translating the legacy IPv4 to IPv6
for transport over the IPv6-only uplink.  The same happens with mobile
phones these days.  If you have a phone that was purchased in the last 10
years, give or take, you will most probably be talking to the world over a
IPv6-only link.  Even Telstra here in Australia is transition their network
to IPv6-only, the network in South Australia is IPv6-only with the other
states to come.  Optus here has been shipping IPv6 capable routers for the
last several years with every new install / replacement.  Optus haven’t yet
enabled IPv6 to the home but the installed base is becoming IPv6 capable.

The harder part is making sure every piece of kit works with IPv6 when you
want to turn off IPv4 internally but even then you can put that equipment
behind bi-directional NAT-64 boxes.

You have large parts of the world actively turning off as much IPv4 as
they can.  Connections to legacy IPv4-only services are being tunnelled
over IPv6 either by encapsulation or bi-directional protocol translation.
--
Mark Andrews, ISC
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742              INTERNET: marka () isc org



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