Re: The Department of Work and Pensions, UK has an entire /8

[Jo Rhett <jrhett () netconsonance com>]

On Sep 19, 2012, at 1:46 AM, Alex Harrowell wrote:
> To be provocative, what on earth is their excuse for not using IPv6 internally? By definition, an internal network 
> that isn't announced to the public Internet doesn't have to worry about happy eyeballs, broken carrier NAT, and the 
> like because it doesn't have to be connected to them if it doesn't want to be. A lot of the transition issues are 
> much less problematic if you're not on the public Internet.

Because next to zero of the common office equipment supports v6, or supports it well. And honestly it's a cost facter 
that nobody has any incentive to pay. Every enterprise I have spoken with has the exact same intention: IPv4 inside 
forever to avoid cost they don't need to pay. NAT to v6 externally if necessary.

Obviously when IPv6 has a larger footprint and their staff has the experience this will change, but asking the 
enterprise to pick up this ball and run with it is wasting your time.

And second, have you ever worked on a private intranet that wasn't connected to the internet through a firewall? 
Skipping oob networks for equipment management, neither have I.

> Perhaps the military have a lot of weird equipment that is IPv4 only - in fact it's a racing certainty - but DWP is a 
> gigantic enterprise data processing organisation. They also have some big Web sites, but obviously those aren't on 
> the private network. (If they had enough workstations to need the whole /8, we wouldn't need DWP as the unemployment 
> problem would have been definitively solved:-))

As a giant enterprise data processing center that works today, what possible motivation do they have for disrupting 
that?

You've got to shake this silliness out of your head. I started my career when there were dozens of networking 
protocols. The industry eventually shook out by 1992 around IPv4, however many businesses were running some of the 
obsolete, dead, unsupported protocols well up and past 2000, long long long after IPv4 had become the one true 
protocol. Even if we flip the entire Internet over to IPv6 next week, enterprises will be running IPv4 internally well 
into the 2020s. Because they have no gain in paying the cost to change, and massive risk in making the change.

Obviously some businesses will need to upgrade and will have the motivation. But don't expect people who don't need to 
upgrade, don't need to change, to undertake a massive infrastructure upgrade so that you can get more IPv4 addresses.

-- 
Jo Rhett
Net Consonance : net philanthropy to improve open source and internet projects.