On 14 Sep 2021, at 3:46 AM, Eliot Lear <l...@ofcourseimright.com> wrote: > …. > There is no evidence that any other design choices on the table at the time > would have gotten us transitioned any faster, and a lot of evidence and > analysis that the exact opposite is more likely.
Elliot -
If by “design choices” you mean the criteria that we set forth for the new
protocol (IPng), then that’s potentially true - it’s fairly challenging to
hypothecate what impact different technical criteria would have had on the
outcome.
If by “design choices” you mean the tradeoffs accepted in selecting a
particular candidate protocol and declaring victory, then I’d strongly
disagree. I believe that we had the appropriate technical criteria for IPng
(very nicely compiled and edited by Craig Patridge and Frank Kastenholz in
RFC1726) and then made conscious decisions to disregard those very criteria in
order to “make a decision” & “move forward.”
All of the IPng proposals where completely deficient with respect to transition
capabilities. In the rush to make a IPng decision, the actual IPng Transition
Criteria [1] that mandated a straightforward transition plan from IPv4 was
simply acknowledged and then declared as “resolved" because we would also
simultaneously form some working groups to study all of the transition
requirements and made good on the transition criteria via future
deliverables...(deliverables that were subsequently not delivered on)
The right answer would have been to formally and critically evaluate each of
the candidate protocols against the requirements and not make any selection
until candidate presented itself that actually met the required technical
criteria. Instead, IPv6 transition was left as an afterthought for the
operator community to solve, and thus the battles with the IETF on NAT-based
transition for nearly two decades to get this basic technical requirement met.
FYI,
/John
Disclaimer: my views alone - made from 100% recycled electrons.
=== [1] The actual IPng Transition criteria (per RFC 1726) are as follows -
"
5.5 Transition
CRITERION
The protocol must have a straightforward transition plan from the
current IPv4.
DISCUSSION
A smooth, orderly, transition from IPv4 to IPng is needed. If we
can't transition to the new protocol, then no matter how wonderful
it is, we'll never get to it.
We believe that it is not possible to have a "flag-day" form of
transition in which all hosts and routers must change over at
once. The size, complexity, and distributed administration of the
Internet make such a cutover impossible.
Rather, IPng will need to co-exist with IPv4 for some period of
time. There are a number of ways to achieve this co-existence
such as requiring hosts to support two stacks, converting between
protocols, or using backward compatible extensions to IPv4. Each
scheme has its strengths and weaknesses, which have to be weighed.
Furthermore, we note that, in all probability, there will be IPv4
hosts on the Internet effectively forever. IPng must provide
mechanisms to allow these hosts to communicate, even after IPng
has become the dominant network layer protocol in the Internet.
The absence of a rational and well-defined transition plan is not
acceptable. Indeed, the difficulty of running a network that is
transitioning from IPv4 to IPng must be minimized. (A good target
is that running a mixed IPv4-IPng network should be no more and
preferably less difficult than running IPv4 in parallel with
existing non-IP protocols).
"
In short:
1) The protocol must have a straightforward transition plan
2) A number of ways to achieve this which are to be explored
3) IPng must provide backward-compatibility to IPv4-only hosts
4) The absence of a well-defined transition plan is not acceptable
===
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