[BBLISA] anybody doing IPv6 for real operations?/possible presentation topic

[Dean Anderson]

On Fri, 12 Mar 2010, Tom Limoncelli wrote:

> > Except that there is no killer IPV6 app or service.  There is no one
> > thing that anyone "just has to do". After 15 years of pie in sky,
> > IPV6
> 
> Oh please, can't we all just get along?
> 
> Slow down, cowboy.  I didn't say IPv6 was good or bad.  Did I?

No...

> The question was "how to deploy it" and I gave 2 constructive
> suggestions.

And I'm not saying your suggestions are bad---Just that they won't work.  
For all your good intentions, there is no killer app that will be better
on IPV6 than on IPV4.  More precisely: There can be no such app.  All
the bells and whistles of IPV6 have been cut out.  Really all you have
left is wider addresses and a slew of brokenness to use it.  And IPV6
will be slower and go less places.

> Discussions of beauty and truth weren't requested.

No, but discussion of practicality is.  IPV6 isn't practical, CLNS
actually is.

> You called IPv6 a failure.  Technically, we won't know if it is a
> failure until we run out of IPv4 addresses.  I never thought it would
> actually be deployed until the last minute.  Did anyone fix Y2K issues
> in the 1980s?

Failure and futile efforts at deployment are different.  Before you get
root to 20,000 routers, you need to have a plan, not just a wonderful
vision of utopia after the revolution.

> True, there are no killer apps today. Except the 2 that I mentioned.
> The other killer app is "any ISP that has a business plan that depends
> on growth past 2012". That's a very meaningful and real business case
> for ISPs, hosting companies, and large web-based businesses.  Sadly
> there aren't more than handful of those in the world.  Plus, that's an
> indirect benefit.  People don't buy a car, they buy a way to get from
> point A to point B.

ISPs will continue to grow after 2012 on IPV4.  End users get more NATs.  
E.g Comcast needs very few public IP addresses. Comcast doesn't need a
nationwide-unique RFC1918 address space either (they complained that
they have more than 24 million devices)  Most of the billions of IPV4
users are residential clients of a few million servers. Only servers
need public IP addresses. There really aren't that many servers,
especially when you consider that a load balancer only needs one IP to
front many servers.

After that, IP addresses are used for infrastructure. CLNS can be used
instead, again without router upgrades.  There's no need for routers to
have IPV4 addresses; they just have to be able to route CLNS packets
that connect users to servers. Think MPLS on the global network.

> Will there be an app that directly draws people to IPv6?  No.  It is a
> chicken and egg problem.  However, AFTER ipv6 is widely deployed I
> predict killer apps will arise.

After I win the lottery, I predict BBLISA will have free beer and
massages at every meeting.  Don't hold your breath, I don't play the
lottery.

> I don't know what they are but they will be in the category of "things
> you can do in a world without NAT", or one might simplify that to
> just: "The benefit of IPv6 is that everyone can be their own server".  
> P2P will go from being a fringe/rare thing, to a common way of doing
> things.  Not for file sharing, but for everything: IM, phone calls,
> and hopefully apps that we can't imagine today.

This was one of the pie in the sky promises. While there is address
space, your residential ISP won't let you be your own server. You'll
still be behind a NAT to IPV4 servers, or a NAT to IPV6 servers. The NAT
is to ensure you aren't running a server at home.

> "The benefit of IPv6 is that you can be the server (again.. like in
> the 1990s before NAT)"

This just isn't true. There isn't space in the routing table for
everyone to have their own block like in the early 1990s.  Cisco talks
about a new router that can handle 2 million routes. Well, that still
doesn't give end users their own address block.  It was never size of
the address space that ARIN/IANA was managing, it was size of the
routing table.

	--Dean

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