Re: [v6ops] Incremental Deployment of IPv6-only Wi-Fi for IETF Meetings

[Simon Hobson <[e-mail]>]

Philip Homburg <[e-mail]> wrote:

> I find it fascinating that IPv6 is bad at competing with IPv4 even now
> that IPv4 addresses have run out for a while, that you advocate actively
> breaking IPv4.

That's not how I read it.
As I read it, "most" modern software(& systems/configs) will work with IPv4 or IPv6 - and for such software there is no problem as IPv4 gets turned off.
Also, as I read it from various comments, for those that don't, many are due to config issues (such as referencing an IPv4 address in OpenVPN config). It would be useful to identify such issues so that they can be corrected by educating those responsible.
And for those few bits of software where it's the software itself, then making the problem known would allow the developer to fix it "at some point" as they release new versions.

Fixing such problems leads to a situation where IPv6 only will actually work. The alternative that some seem to be advocating is to "do nothing" which means that such problems never get fixed, so IPv4 support stays as a requirement "forever", and progress doesn't happen.

My take on the proposal is that with an IETF shindig you have a self selected group of people with above average technical/networking knowledge - and a common interest in progress. As such it's a perfect group (ie people that won't just whine that "the internet's broken" with no useful information added) to try an experiment with and see whether it is practical to run such a network.



Ca By <[e-mail]> wrote:

>   ipv4 has been broken for 10 years now with the mass deployment of NAT. 

Indeed, there seems to be a lot of argument about how to keep it working transparently when for the vast majority it only appears to work because of a lot of work behind the scenes to workaround what NAT breaks. In fact, a lot (not all, but a lot) of the modern complaint about surveillance and dependency on third parties continuing to provide servers (cf Zune and Revolv) is down to the need to workaround NAT.

Unfortunately, people don't believe anything is broken because of all this work that makes it appear as everything is working OK for them.