The IPv6 Mess

The problem will solve itself when the price of an ipv4 address becomes prohibitive. Either that, or telcos will see ipv4 addresses as a valuable source of revenue and intentionally drag their feet. And then the internet will die.

<i>"It gets worse. The IPv6 designers don't have a transition plan"</i><p>This is either an old article or the author is not up to speed. Good example why you should date your articles. I met with Cisco a couple months ago and they detailed their IPV6 strategy to us from the service provider perspective. In short: They're throwing a bunch of different strategies at the problem to cover all the bases. It's not an elegant solution. More like brute force with a focus on preserving total interoperability. This stuff is already in the wild today on a small scale. It works. Comcast, COX, TWC, etc all have active deployments and are looking at large scale rollouts over the next year.<p><a href="http://www.ict-partner.net/en/US/prod/collateral/iosswrel/ps6537/ps6553/white_paper_c11-558744-00.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ict-partner.net/en/US/prod/collateral/iosswrel/ps...</a>

That posting is from 2003.

Part of the reason we don't just map IPV4 space into IPv6 space, I recall reading, sensibly, was that it would make routing a mess, and potentially even get messier.<p>The idea was to re-issue address space in a more coherent manner to make things easier to manage at the peering level.... which seems sensible.<p>It also a mistake to think of the internet you see today as "Designed".... the protocols were designed, but the particular way we use them, the parts we didn't use, and the way the internet grew as it did was organic, not pre-planned. To expect some people to get together and come up for a rock solid plan to migrate all that to IPv6 is to ask for something completely unprecedented. The tools need to be there to allow for organic adoption and growth.... and nobody should be "selling" ipv6 addresses.... there are more than enough to go around, that was the whole point. IP address space was never intended to be monetized.

I recommend everyone take 15 minutes and look up a guide to configure a 6to4 address on any interface they have with a public IPv4 address. Try with the anycast address first, and if that doesn't work get a tunnelbroker account. My opinion is all these problems can get solved over time only when everyone is first connected to the network. (there are some guides to setting up a gateway for your 'private' hosts, like this: <a href="http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:gX-Stzp_WdgJ:www.anyweb.co.nz/tutorial/v6Linux6to4+linux+6to4+gateway&#38;cd=4&#38;hl=en&#38;ct=clnk&#38;gl=us&#38;client=firefox-a" rel="nofollow">http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:gX-Stzp_WdgJ:www.anyweb....</a>)

I'm quite confused why this is getting attention. It's not hugely difficult to enable a public IPv6 address on a server alongside the IPv4 address. The advantage of doing so? If one runs a serious website, there are many more back-end servers that handle database requests etc. than there are user-facing webservers, and all of these back-end servers can use IPv6 to talk to each other and the webservers. If IPv6 addresses are cheaper and easier to get, then it's a win for the company. They can upgrade each internal client-server pair to IPv6 in unison since they're a single organization.

An odd article. He seems to think there ought to be a Grand Plan forcing the transition.<p>Servers can have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, there's no need for everyone to just switch over at once.<p>I strongly suspect that the big providers will start rolling it out over the next couple of years, and that this will filter down to local users after that.<p>My main problem is that very few home routers support IPv6, so they'll need to be replaced. But this can happen over time, with people on IPv4 being behind NAT, and thus having less accessibility to soem applications, they can make their own choices about when to upgrade.

My guess is China and/or India will come up with their own solutions for transition and the rest of the world will be forced to follow that. It will probably represent a defining moment in history of the internet, when leadership passes from the West to the East.

maybe what we need to do is have servers/networks that validate that whether a client supports IP6 or not. And if it doesn't, start serving those requests more slowly than others.<p>Of course, that means a lot of code changes. but it will definitely create incentives to get ready for a change<p>if speed declines for you 10% a month for a year, you'll consider upgrading. and if outages are scheduled for you that at first last 5 minutes, then 15, then 30, eventually I expect people will take the actions required to get ready for a scheduled switch to IP6<p>its all a bit heavy handed though. its much better if we gave people more performance for making the switch and somehow passed the real costs of the delay on to people that insist on delaying.<p>maybe we should just have a market price for ip4 addresses and you pay that price unless you upgrade