Re: [BEHAVE] draft-hamarsheh-behave-biav2-03 VS draft-ietf-behave-v4v6-bih

["Goossens, Marnix" <[e-mail]>]

Hello Teemu



>Since those early versions of BIAbis the draft's purpose been narrowed down to cover only the use case behave WG is chartered to work on. Hence your generic draft has too wide scope when considering the goals >of behave wg (IETF does *not* want generic host based protocol translation tool for IPv6 transition).



I am sending you below part of the motivation in the draft why we propose a generic tool, and why we think wide-spread deployment of IPv6, especially in residential context, is bound to fail if not something drastic is done about allowing IPv4-only applications to communicate transparantly over IPv6. I have been fighting for years (mainly in Europe) the blindness of IETF towards PRAGMATIC issues, the IETF  sometimes taking a rather "idealistic" (but naive) technical-only stance towards issues such as multicast and now IPv6, and the focus of IETF on network operations mostly ignoring in the process the end-user's viewpoint.

If you care to read the motivation, you will find that it is not at all about technical problems, but human and commercial issues...



It may be that we have send the draft in error to the behave group, if that WG is too narrow in scope, but we probably had little choice...



Kind regards,



Marnix Goossens



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It is probably important to give a brief analysis first of one of the
blocking factors withholding the wide-spread introduction of IPv6 in
order to fully understand why the here proposed BIA is considered an
essential component in the unlocking of IPv6.
At the inception of IPv6 it was - probably rather naively - presumed that all
parties involved with the Internet would be eager to make the
changeover and that the transition would happen spontaneously.
It is now quite generally acknowledged that some human and commercial
factors preventing a spontaneous transition have been largely
underestimated. In the transition to IPv6 there are essentially
two parties involved: network providers and end-users.
The benefits of using IPv6 are almost entirely for the network
providers, while the end-users have only potentially indirect
benefits from better network operation. No drive to make the
changeover should be expected from the majority of end-users

(which includes application developers, that are working for these end-users),
as they have probably little to gain. The network providers can expect
benefits, but they are obviously dependent on the willingness of their
end-users to make any changeover. The result is some kind of
deadlock: no (commercial) network provider is going to force the
customers to make the changeover against their will. So making the
transition transparent to the end-user is the key in any transition
to IPv6. The average end-users are not really aware about what goes on
in the network layer, and even if they do, they usually could not care
less. It does not matter much to them if their applications are
communicating using IPv4 or IPv6. But, while there is no drive to be
expected from the end-users for any transition to IPv6, the vast
majority would not object to the transition on condition they can go
on using their applications as before.
While the first impression is that applications are not affected
by the changeover on the IP layer from IPv4 to IPv6, this is
unfortunately not true. The applications are using IP addresses,
and hence should be capable of dealing with the longer IPv6 addresses
when having to communicate over IPv6.
Expecting all applications to be modified to be capable of dealing
with the longer IPv6 addresses is rather naive. Apart from the
"standard" Internet applications with rather good support such as
web browsers, email programs, etc. that can be expected to be IPv6
enabled, there are thousands of other applications, some of them are
written by small companies (of which some may be out of business)
and others are even "home-made". For some applications, Internet
communication is only a side-issue, for example for registering
and/or checking for updates, and upgrading to become IPv6 compatible
is probably not a high priority. It is to be expected that a large
proportion of applications will only be modified to be IPv6
compatible when IPv6 usage gets into full swing. And even if the
IPv6 capable new versions of application software are made available,
it is again rather naive to expect all end-users to do the required
updating of all the software on their system.
The end-users MAY be willing to accept a changeover to IPv6, but will
NOT accept that some of their applications will no longer work as
before. From this observation it becomes obvious that it is
absolutely essential that provisions are standard installed and
enabled on any general purpose machine (the vast majority of systems
connected to the Internet) that is provided for IPv6 communication
and potentially has to run IPv4-only applications to continue
communicating as before when communicating using IPv6. While the
demand for mandatory provisions on every general purpose machine
capable of communicating using IPv6 may seem a tall order,
it should be realized that this approach is much more realistic
then expecting ALL applications to be made IPv6 compatible:
compared to thousands of applications that would need conversion
requiring all application developers to follow suit, the number of
communication stack implementations on general purpose machines is
very small and is made by only a handful of developers.