nanog mailing list archives

Re: quietly....


From: sthaug () nethelp no
Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2011 22:58:05 +0100 (CET)

It's a bit of a shame that people who've gotten into networking in the
last 10 to 15 years haven't studied or worked with anything more than
IPv4. They've missed out on seeing a variety of different ways to solve
the same types of problems and therefore been exposed to the various
benefits and trade-offs of the different methods. With that sort of
exposure, people may find out that there are other better ways to
solve problems, but IPv4's limitations and constraints prevented them
being possible.

Then there are some of us who *have* worked with other networking
technologies (e.g. DECnet, XNS, Appletalk, X.25, etc) and *still*
think that IPv6 is in many ways a horrible mess.

IPv6 is at the same time both too much and not enough. It is "too
much" because it is too different from IPv4, significantly slowing
deployment and learning time. It is "not enough" because it really
only solves one problem, namely address exhaustion - and not, for
instance, the routing table explosion problem.

(And don't get me started on the *claimed* advantages of IPv6, like
"mandatory IPsec", "more efficient header processing" etc.)

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug () nethelp no


Current thread: