Perry,
> Jon Crowcroft <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > >>Having said that, I ask you: What do you foresee as a realistic IPv6
> > >>transition plan? Dual stacks? I don't see it happening, to tell you
> > >>the truth. (Maybe this 6-in-4 stuff will actually help here.)
> >
> > well, how about we just start to turn it on in some routers? - it works
> > in most host OSs now, dual stack, just fine.
> >
> > the value of the net is the square of the number of people connected -
> > NAT is a square root function.
>
> NAT has actually created a simple transition plan for us.
>
> I'd say at this point that 95% of the corporate networks in the
> U.S. use private addressing and a NAT or proxy box at the
> border. Switching from this to using v6 internally with a v6 to v4
> NAT/proxy at the border for communicating with v4 is trivial -- since
> they don't have globally routable addresses now, they won't be hurt by
> the switch.
>
> As more and more people switch to this configuration, they'll start
> finding themselves talking to more and more things over the net
> natively, and fewer and fewer through the translator. Suddenly,
> they'll discover they *do* have globally routable addresses again,
> just like we did in the old days before net 10 was turned into the
> universal addressing ghetto.
This could go as you described *until* these folks would start to move
from one provider to another, and therefore will be faced with the need
to renumber. At that point NAT could become quite an attractive
alternative from cost/benefit point of view again. And now these folks
will be back to where they've been with IPv4, but but with the extra
cost of IPv4 to IPv6 transition.
Yakov.
P.S. While one could argue that renumbering with IPv6 could be made
simpler than with IPv4, what one really needs to compare is renumbering
with IPv6 vs renumbering with NAT.
