Re: Confirmation to advance: draft-ietf-6man-ipv6only-flag-05

[Bob Hinden <[e-mail]>]

Raymond,

> On May 27, 2019, at 9:07 PM, Raymond Burkholder <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On 2019-05-27 5:54 p.m., Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>> Then stop telling people to filter Ethertype 0x0800 because you can't use RFC2563 in the presence of such filters.
>>> Those are different options, depending on your situation.
>> Well, yes. But if an operator chooses to filter 0x0800 and wishes to actively
>> inform hosts that IPv4 is unavailable, only an IPv6 mechanism can do so.
>> So here we are.
> 'only an IPv6 mechanism can do so'  -- is that necessarily true?
> 
> This time I did read through https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-6man-ipv6only-flag-05.  I see there is an inclusion of the IPv4 Sunset draft for turning off ipv4 (and someone else did point out that the Sunset WG has been itself 'sunsetted' I believe).
> 
> I also took a look at table called 'EtherType values for some notable protocols' at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EtherType
> 
> A network link may have many other protocols other than ipv4 or ipv6: PTP, MacSec, LLDP, PBB, CFM, RoCE, ATAoE, MPLS, PPPoE, .... not to mention STP and the like which is very noisy.  I didn't see a summary in the document of how that might be handled.
> 
> So I guess this is IPv6-only in the sense of IPv6 with no IPv4.

Yes, it says that in Section 4. "IPv6-Only Definition”.  Reading the actual document is helpful in these discussions, not just the email thread :-)

Bob


> 
> I can't remember if there was mention of IPv4 only hosts knowing how to evaluate an IPv6 flag in an IPv6 protocol, or how vendors would/could/want to implement such a thing.
> 
> Maybe rather than saying IPv6 only, maybe create another EtherType which network stacks would know how to interpret, and it could be used to turn off other protocols.  Maybe some networks might want to run IPv4 and turn off IPv6 (saying half jokingly).
> 
> This independent protocol could be used to turn off other protocols that the network stack might see as well.  The flags then become universally applicable to any stack that has been designed to interpret xxx-only flags.  It would then have long lasting applicability, as protocols come and go.
> 
> Raymond.
> 
> 
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