[no subject]

If you do none of this at the time of processing the acquisition, then
what will you do?  Either merge the networks into one large subnetted
beast, which may require renumbering, or tie them together with an
intermediary machine functioning as an address-translating bridge of
sorts.  Then, later, you'll wind up doing one of the above things,
_anyway_, and duplicating a lot of the work that went into the initial
setup of the network to begin with, because you'll have to treat it as a
project all on its own.  How is this saving any money, time, or work?

> I think the main issue here is the fact that we look at things from  
> two totally different viewpoints. You've already changed over to ip6  
> and are anxious for everyone else to follow suit, whereas I look at  
> things from the viewpoint of what I have to deal with at work every  
> day. I'll give you absolutely no dispute that ip6 solves quite a few  
> problems. But unfortunately, it's not as simple as logging into my  
> routers, typing
> 
> config t
> ip 6 enable
> 
> And having everything magically work. So sure, having to NAT your  
> acquisitions traffic because they're using the same local range  
> becomes unnecessary in ip6. But the amount of private companies  
> running ip6 aren't exactly pre-dominant. So your point is germane from  
> an academic standpoint, but from an every day one, it sounds alot like  
> the guy in the back saying 'I told you so' to his peers (when it's  
> probably management who shot the ip6 conversion down in the first  
> place) instead of pitching in to help with the consolidation

Management should have nothing to do with technical details.  If they
do, it's the IT department's fault for operating in such a way as to
give management the idea that they can dictate things that are totally
unrelated to business functions (unless they're in the network business,
and then, well, they ought to have been there before anyone else,
anyway, in the interest of knowledge and experience, and that's just a
sad company if they're not).  Management belongs to the business, and IT
does what is necessary to make the things that management wants to do,
possible.  That's the way it is.  I've said it more than a few times,
and I'll say it again:  IT's job is to maintain things, such as the
network.  IPv6 was (and still is) deployable in the course of routine
maintenance---which, IT departments are already funded to do, because
that's their *job*.  So then, why aren't they doing their job?

("I was just following orders" is an invalid response, too.  It just
means that both the management *and* the IT department need to be
replaced, not just one or the other.)

> That depends on what you consider a commodity router. I picked up some  
> 3640's fully loaded with ram and flash for quite cheap, and have them  
> deployed at the edge and core of my home network, so FTP and IPSec  
> aren't issues, though I haven't tried SIP yet.

How do you get IPsec through a NAT at all?  I know of no ALG that can do
it, because then the payload and the packet header no longer match up.
That's why IPsec is always tunneled through something like UDP.  You
_could_, in theory, route IPsec through a NAT if you opt not to use AH
support, but that simply reduces the amount of security that IPsec
provides (AH provides a hash of the packet, and that hash cannot be
easily recomputed by Mallory or any other intermediary without the keys,
so it prevents modification or covert replacement of the packet).

> Honestly, the fact that the wal-mart routers don't support the work- 
> arounds isn't NAT's fault. It's Belkin's, and Netgear's, and Cisco's  
> for trying to be cheap by assuming the folks who are going to buy  
> those routers won't have any need to get the advanced protocols around  
> NAT.

ALGs are kludgy at best, and ugly, brutal hacks at the norm.  SIP, for
the most part, "just works" when there is end-to-end communication
between the peers.  Start introducing the latency required by ALGs (some
of which have to, by necessity, use lots of processing power and need to
be a dedicated d?mon), and the complexity of the routing between hosts,
and you begin to have issues, particularly with something like SIP.  I
don't know of any embedded router that I would 

> > the IPv6 Internet will start becoming larger very soon.  Tunnels may  
> > be
> > all that is available now, but Comcast is already using IPv6  
> > internally
> > for the management of some of their CPE as of May 2007 [1].
> 
> I'd imagine Comcast would have to, they're still working on the  
> consolidation of their network, and from what I've heard and seen from  
> my own service, they're having issue. At the rate they buy people, I  
> can just imagine what a balancing act it is to keep it all working.

That is certainly part of the issues that people have in the areas where
Comcast has just acquired the previous provider.  I haven't had any
issues with my service outside of an outage or two provoked by weather
in a while.  

> As far as the adoption relatively soon.... I think five years is  
> highly optimistic. Ten years may be a little more likely. Basically,  
> ip6 isn't going to get implemented until the ip4 space runs out. And  
> when that happens, the companies who are holding on to large swaths of  
> unused blocks are going to make a killing, as the demand for new IP  
> blocks reaches an all time high. Finally, when it reaches a point  
> where it'd be more cost effective to adopt ip6 than continue buying  
> ip4 blocks, that's when ip6 will start seeing widespread adoption.

Well, I suppose you're probably right---we here in the U.S. are behind
in just about everything, it's only appropriate that we stay there, eh?
At least the guys that designed the network used in the Olympics for
this year have the idea.