Ed,
On May 29, 2007, at 12:11 PM, Edward Lewis wrote:
If you want to read Dilbert on-line and I tell you that it is
available at a certain URL, would you rather I give you "http://
www.dilbert.com" or that I send you "if you use IPv4 then http://
www.dilbert.com" else if you use IPv6 then http://www6.dilbert.com
else buy a newspaper"?
I would prefer you to give me a mechanism by which I can reach the URL.
We have tried to overlay the same transport and presentation layer
onto a new network layer, but have not engineered the new network
layer to facilitate this. We have new APIs and new naming
attributes, requiring applications to do the heavy lifting while at
the same time, not providing any reasonable mechanism to relay
information back to the applications when it turns out that heavy
lifting is in vain.
I would agree that in the ideal world, an end user should be able to
point their browser to a given URL and get back the same content
irrespective of the underlying network layer protocol being used.
However, in the world I live in, it doesn't work like this. Of
course you can argue that the only way we'll be able to get to the
ideal world is by forcing people to deal with the breakage so that
it'll be fixed, but I'd point to Vijay's presentations. The problem
is, if you're a large scale ISP, how many calls to your help desk
will it take until your helpdesk staff says "turn off IPv6"?
Rgds,
-drc
