Re: IPv6 woes - RFC

[Owen DeLong via NANOG <nanog () nanog org>]

> On Sep 15, 2021, at 16:20 , Michael Thomas <mike () mtcc com> wrote:
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>
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> On 9/14/21 12:44 AM, Eliot Lear wrote:
> > There were four proposals for the IPng:
> >
> > NIMROD, PIP, SIP, and TUBA
> > SIP was the one that was chosen, supported by endpoint manufacturers such as Sun and SGI, and it was the MOST 
> > compatible.  Operators and router manufacturers at the time pushed TUBA, which was considerably less compatible with 
> > the concepts used in v4 because of variable length addressing.   If we endpoints had some notion that v6 would take 
> > as long as it has to diffuse, perhaps we all might have thought differently.  I don't know.
> So I'm beginning to think that the reason ipv6 didn't take off is one simple thing: time. All of the infighting took 
> years and by then that ship had long sailed. The basic mechanisms for v6 for hosts were not complicated and all of 
> the second system syndrome fluff could be mostly be ignored or implemented when it actually made sense. If this had 
> been settled within a year instead of five, there may have been a chance especially since specialized hardware was 
> either nonexistent or just coming on the scene. I mean, Kalpana was still pretty new when a lot of this was being 
> first discussed from what I can tell. Maybe somebody else knows when hardware routing came on the scene but there was 
> still lots of software forwarding planes when I started at Cisco in 1998 just as broadband was starting to flow.
Most of it was settled fairly quickly, actually. The bigger delays were software vendors, network infrastructure 
product vendors (DSLAMs and the like), etc. who even after it was well settled simply didn’t feel a need to incorporate 
it into their products until about a year after IANA runout.
> The IETF was a victim of its own dysfunction, film at 11 and now we're having a 30 year reunion.
I’m not sure we can put all (or even most) of the blame on IETF dysfunction here. Don’t get me wrong, IMHO there’s 
plenty of IETF dysfunction and it is partially responsible. However, I suspect that if IETF had rolled out the model of 
perfection and an ideal protocol 1 month after the IPNG working group started, we’d still be pretty much where we are 
today because of the procrastination model of addressing major transitions that is baked into human nature.

Owen