[governance] FW: [] Fwd: IPv4 Address Exhaustion Milestone & Comcast Starts DOCSIS IPv6 Trial

Lee W McKnight lmcknigh at syr.edu
Sun Feb 6 11:53:47 EST 2011 

Hi Avri,

Nice summary. Write your book!

A couple addendums: first I am far from an IPv6 enthusiast/apologist, sorry if my 'ipv4 is history' comment gave wrong impression. What comes next I agree isn't a usual topic for this list, but falls into the 'next generation Internet' or 'future Internet architecture' discussions and research projects going on around the world. But civil society should weigh in early on its priorities; and help shape that future

Now a quibble: 'all the best minds' were NOT convinced of IPv6, some just ignored it and focused on other items like extending IPv4's useful life and figuring out what might come after IPv6. I was working with original Internet architect David Clark at MIT in 94, who was always quite skeptical. So slow 'birth' of IPv6 was no surprise to me.  In fact pre-2000 I was comparing it to y2k, since the costs of transition to the next addressing space had not been thought through...on that sidebar David could be a great IGF plenary speaker as he has remained active on both future technology and policy fronts.

Next re NATs - I agree that was key in extending the life and utility of IPv4 beyond what early IPv6 enthusiasts imagined/wanted. A co-developer of Network Address Translators, Bob Frankston, also well known for co-inventing electronic spreadsheets, gave a keynote talk at our '7th WiGiT Meeting' a week ago. His talk on 'Ambient Intelligence and Wireless Grids' -  can be  viewed at http://wglab.net....in a couple days when my students have it uploaded.

Lee

PS: By 9th or 10th WiGiT meeting, fyi, we expect to have a skeletal framework for a new open specifications suite, which would enable an new class of software or -edgeware- to envelop any IP network, software, service, content and users in a secure and private 'grid.' Initial work is with National Science Foundation support,  Prof. Tamal Bose at Virginia Tech and I co-lead the Virtual Organization..which includes Seneca Nation of Indians, a school for students with disabilities, and soon, South African university, as well as small businesses and others...It costs nothing to join, open specs will be modular and interoperable, and backward-compatible with both IP v4 & 6 nets....anyway, there will be other new approaches to these problems but after a decades work on wireless grids...we are about to start : ). Look for early draft versions of the open specs in about 6 months as well as early implementations, or better yet, webconference in or join us in person March 14th at 8th WiGiT...more info on http:/wglab.net in due course.




________________________________________
From: governance-request at lists.cpsr.org [governance-request at lists.cpsr.org] On Behalf Of Avri Doria [avri at acm.org]
Sent: Sunday, February 06, 2011 12:51 AM
To: IGC
Subject: Re: [governance] FW: [] Fwd: IPv4 Address Exhaustion Milestone & Comcast Starts DOCSIS IPv6 Trial

Hi,

I have not researched it, just lived through it, especially in the years of the IETF.  I have been following, and participating at times, from the time the IPng issue got started.

There may be various histories that could be glued together to tell the story.  I have seen bits and pieces, and I know that Jeanette wrote some good stuff about the early period.  In fact I met here when she was first researching it from a social science perspective and I was mouthing off about it.

I have not written anything on it, though it may be an idea to do so someday, though there are so many things I would like to write someday when I not longer have to spend most of my time writing governance feuilletons for a living. Not likely, but a nice thought - I have so many things I never finished writing.

Some of the chapters might include:

- the story starts with requirement  that were ignored when the beauty contest picked the winner.  and the fact that the winner was picked before it was time and the work was complete on the candidates due to political pressure to have a solution now. After in 1994 all the best people already knew that all IPv4 was going to die in a year or so.

- It includes the inability of anyone to get people to commit to fixing the routing architecutre while going through the pain of changing the address structure.  This even though there were candidate solution that included routing architecture considerations.  Many of us believe that architecture and addressing must always be worked on together.

- it includes a very strange tale of the inability of some very smart people to persuade anyone to include the notion of variable size addresses, or at least fixed addresses that allowed for IPv4 encapsulation.

- It goes through at least a decade of hubris where IPv6 was going to replace IPv4 any day now and the elite of IPv6 drank very expensive scotch to toast to the universal deployment of IPv6  (the fact that they drank Scotch instead of Irish was already a good clue that something was very wrong)

- It includes years of miscalculation that IPv4 was the walking dead so there was no reason to think about coexistence.

- it would include chapters of how CIDR and NAT saved IPv4.

- it would discuss the economics of IP addresses and the fact that even though the need to have strict hierarchy is no longer that great, a free market in IP addresses is still prohibited.

- it would discuss the sacred cow legacy IPv4 address blocks and the multicast blocks that have never really been exploited.

- it would discuss the new reality where we need to support 2 protocol stacks and the routing infrastructure to support those 2 protocols.  We no longer have one Internet, we have 2 Internets that exist side by side, but are separate universes.  Good for router hardware sales, but not really an optimal solution.

- It would include the stories of people who dedicated their lives to marketing a solution that nobody really wanted and made a fortune in the process.

- it would discuss that in the future, while there will be IPv6 in the network, there will be IPv4 for most of our lifetimes.  The routing architecture is still a disaster, and there will be many new solutions to keep IPv4 going, so that unless vendors switch over based on political pressure, many of us will continue to use IPv4 for a very long time to come.

As I said, IPv6 has come far enough so it will probably survive - I used to believe that could/should never happen but I long ago gave up fighting it.  But as we celebrate its alleged ascendancy, I just wanted to point out the sad path we took to get to this point and warn that we should not expect IPv6 to be the last address solution, nor should we expect that it will be an easy road ahead.

Me, I am still trying to figure out how to route on names and to avoid bothering with psuedo-numbers (aka IP addresses) anyway - why translate from one name type to another? Given that routing is getting less hierarchical all the time, these numerical names may someday be an anachronism of the past.  But this is a governance list and not technical research speculation list, so that was probably off topic.  And I apologize for being an IPv6 heretic and a party pooper.

cheers,

a.






On 5 Feb 2011, at 17:22, Thomas Lowenhaupt wrote:

> Avri,
>
> Could you please point me to the "sad phenomenon" / "sad story" you refer to below. I have not seen anything that presents the existence of controversy about IPv6. If there's nothing currently out there, some type of de-teching would seem to be in order, perhaps by some on this list.
>
> Best,
>
> Tom Lowenhaupt
>
> On 2/2/2011 5:33 PM, Avri Doria wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Unless of course the powers that be decide to allow a open market for aIPv4 addresses instead of forcing people to use a grey or black market.
>>
>> I find this forced ending of IPv4 to get a protocol that could not succeed on its own to be used, a sad phenomenon.  I participated in the IETF all the way from its selection, through the many scare tactics and failures up until this campaign and I still see this as a sad story.
>>
>> I think the purveyors of IPv6 may eventually succeed at getting us all to use it (though I still would not bet on it), but the history of IPv6 to date, beginning to end, is just pathtetic.
>>
>> a.
>>
>> On 2 Feb 2011, at 16:39, Lee W McKnight wrote:
>>
>>
>>> As McTim reported already:
>>>
>>> IPv4 is history...
>>>
>>> Lee
>>> ________________________________________
>>> From: Dave Farber [
>>> dave at farber.net
>>> ]
>>> Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2011 3:06 AM
>>> To: ip
>>> Subject: [IP] Fwd: IPv4 Address Exhaustion Milestone & Comcast Starts DOCSIS IPv6 Trial
>>>
>>> Begin forwarded message:
>>>
>>> From: "Livingood, Jason" <
>>> Jason_Livingood at cable.comcast.com<mailto:Jason_Livingood at cable.comcast.com>
>>> >
>>> Date: February 1, 2011 9:43:53 AM EST
>>> To: Dave Farber <
>>> dave at farber.net<mailto:dave at farber.net>
>>> >
>>> Subject: IPv4 Address Exhaustion Milestone & Comcast Starts DOCSIS IPv6 Trial
>>>
>>> Dave – For IP if you wish.
>>>
>>> A major milestone in the draw down of IPv4 addresses has occurred. APNIC's recent allocations mean that the final five address block now go to each RIR, one to each.
>>> See:
>>>
>>> <http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9207498/Address_allocation_kicks_off_IPv4_endgame>http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9207498/Address_allocation_kicks_off_IPv4_endgame
>>> <http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/world-ipv4-stocks-finally-run-out-19674>http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/world-ipv4-stocks-finally-run-out-19674
>>>
>>>
>>> Also, yesterday we at Comcast announced that we've started native dual stack production trials on our DOCSIS network (native IPv4 and IPv6), the first DOCSIS network in North America to do so. The trial will soon expand beyond Colorado and each user receives a /64 allocation of roughly 18 quintillion IPv6 addresses. (A bit of an improvement over one IPv4 address I dare say!)
>>>
>>> See
>>> <http://blog.comcast.com/2011/01/comcast-activates-first-users-with-ipv6-native-dual-stack-over-docsis.html> http://blog.comcast.com/2011/01/comcast-activates-first-users-with-ipv6-native-dual-stack-over-docsis.html
>>>
>>>
>>> Regards
>>> Jason Livingood
>>>
>>> Archives
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