Re: IPv6

["Marcus J. Ranum" <mjr () ranum com>]

Dave Piscitello wrote:
> I am also not convinced that some 11th hour 59th minute "change of
> heart" won't occur, and someone will convince the community of an
> alternative course.

Back a long time ago, in the shrouded mists of yesteryear,
some of us asked "why not just double the address size, left-fill
with zeroes, bump the version number, and rock on?"

The answer, at that time (as screeched by the standards
pukes) was "that's IMPOSSIBLE!!" Impossible because backbone
routers would need "gigabytes of RAM to hold routing tables!"
and route lookups would be prohibitively expensive. That was
back in, around, '92 or so, if I recall correctly. Nowadays
it's not like "gigabytes of RAM" would be such a big deal,
but spanning tree and cidr block routing actually solved that
problem, anyhow. In other words, it's not "IMPOSSIBLE" at
all. It's just that there is such a huge emotional and now
technological and financial investment in making IPv6 work,
that the powers that be are not seriously contemplating any
alternatives.

I used to joke (but I was serious) about how if I was a
crazy multimillionaire (I'm not, BTW) I'd brand it
"Mega-IP" hire a bunch of geeks to start submitting
patches for it into open source projects, lobby a couple
router vendors and firewall vendors to adopt it as a
field-expedient Mega-quick and convenient solution, and
I'm guessing IPv6 would be RIP in under a year. I'd do
that because that's just the kind of mean, cynical
bastard I am, some mornings - and it'd be nice to see
the address space problem solved quickly, like it could
have been in 1992, back when it would have taken a couple
of months rather than years of bullshitting around. But
if someone did that, what would the standards bodies have
to do, to keep them busy?

mjr.
--
Marcus J. Ranum         CSO, Tenable Network Security, Inc.
                        http://www.tenable.com
(This posting is not an official opinion of Tenable)
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