On 9/13/21 11:22 AM, Randy Bush wrote:
< rant >
ipv6 was designed at a time where the internet futurists/idealists had
disdain for operators and vendors, and thought we were evil money
grabbers who had to be brought under control.
the specs as originally RFCed by the ietf is very telling. for your
amusement, take a look at rfc 2450. it took five years of war to get
rid of the tla/sla crap. and look at the /64 religion today[0].
real compatibility with ipv4 was disdained. the transition plan was
dual stack and v4 would go away in a handful of years. the 93
transition mechanisms were desperate add-ons when v4 did not go away.
and dual stack does not scale, as it requires v4 space proportional to
deployed v6 space.
we are left to make the mess work for the users, while being excoriated
for not doing it quickly or well enough, and for trying to make ends
meet financially.
This is really easy to say in hindsight. 30 years ago it wasn't even
vaguely a given that the Internet would even win and the size of the IP
universe was still tiny. The main problem is that the internet was a
classic success disaster where you're going as fast as possible and
falling farther and farther behind. All of the gripes about particulars
strike me as utterly irrelevant in the global scheme of things. As I
mentioned, if they did nothing more than bolted on two more address
bytes it still would have been just as impossible to get vendors and
providers to care because everybody was heads down trying to deal with
the success disaster. It's really easy to say that ipv6 suffers from
second system syndrome -- which it does -- but that doesn't provide any
concrete strategy for what would have been "better" in both getting
vendors and providers to care. None of them wanted to do anything other
than crank out kit that could be sold in the here and now that providers
were willing to buy. That was certainly my experience at Cisco. As I
said, the exec I talked to didn't actually want to do anything at all
but was willing to let a couple of engineers navel gaze if it gave him
something to talk about were the subject to actually come up with
customers and a bludgeon against 3COM (iirc) at the time.
None of this is technical. It was which short term hack is going to keep
the gravy train flowing? I was a developer at the time keeping an eye on
the drafts as they were coming out. They didn't strike me was overly
difficult to implement nor did they strike me as particularly
overwrought. From a host standpoint, i didn't think it would take too
much effort to get something up and running but I waited until somebody
started asking for it. That never came. Nothing ever came. Then NAT's
came and kicked the can down the roads some more. Now we have mega-yacht
NAT's to kick it down the road even farther. Tell us what else would
have prevented that?
Mike
