|So what are you saying?
I'm saying that IPv6 will be a hard sell since it brings great upgrade
costs and offers a reduction in the functionality that people expect and
depend on.
I don't see the upgrade costs for regular users. Users are by now used to upgrading monthly (if not more often) to plug the latest and greatest security holes, so a software upgrade to install IPv6 functionality somewhere in the next three years or so isn't a huge hardship.
Functionality won't disappear unless people turn off IPv4, which I don't expect them to do. (I even get strange looks from people in IPv6 circles when I say I want to run IPv6-only hosts for test purposes.)
|That we should give up on IPv6 because IPv4 w/NAT is so great that we |don't need it?
By posing this question, are you suggesting that we really can't make IPv6
as great as IPv4+NAT? Or that we shouldn't even try?
As long as IPv6 isn't a full superset of IPv4+NAT then it's going to be possible to argue that "IPv6 isn't as great as IPv4+NAT". But I think we can and should add all the missing stuff to IPv6.
|Or that we should add NAT to IPv6?
By posing this question, are you suggesting that the only way to make IPv6
as great as IPv4+NAT is to add NAT to IPv6? If that is true then the market
will take care of adding NAT to IPv6; we don't have to bother.
If we're going to be doing NAT anyway why bother with IPv6? Yes, there are some advantages regardless, but those alone aren't worth the hassle of upgrading the whole internet.
|I'm not buying. IPv6 is superior to IPv4 (with and without NAT) in many
|ways.
Unfortunately, being "superior" in some abstract sense is not sufficient for
something as utilitarian as a networking protocol suite. We have to examine
actual usage requirements.
Yes. But note that this doesn't have to be the actual end-user.
|The trouble with networking has always been that even poorly |designed networks can work well so there is little incentive to do it |right.
I don't buy into the idea that users are not entitled to the functionality
that they now enjoy just because it is somehow tainted by having once been
provided by NAT.
Well, there was a time when I had email without spam too. Sometimes progress isn't progress. It is becoming quite apparent that having a stable internal network and an ephemeral externally reachable network provide seamless functionality can only be achieved using very dirty hacks. NAT is one of those hacks, two-faced DNS is another one.
If you are claiming that there is just no way to deliver
that functionality with a network that is *not* poorly designed then I think
you have to reconsider your definition of "poorly."
Disagree. The internet supported address portability until 10 years ago. This was a poor design because it doesn't scale, regardless of the usefulness of the functionality.
|That's 6.4 billion addresses, a little more than four times what we |have available today, for no more than 1.3 billion users. Can someone |please explain where the other 4 addresses per user go?
I did not write the above quoted text and I have no explanation for it.
I know.
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