[no subject]

There are lots of entities getting tunnels, as well.  At least through
Hurricane Electric, there have been 674 signups in the last 20 days [1].

What's our excuse?

> That's a pretty easy question to answer: Money.
> 
> Right now, there's no need to screw with the status quo. (from the  
> viewpoint of the folks who are making the money). So you keep selling  
> what you're selling, let the panic begin, then announce that you have  
> this wonderful new fully ip6 supportive product so you can sell them  
> the same thing again.
> 
> The cynic in me believes the Tier 1's are just waiting until they've  
> decided they can't bleed the turnip anymore before they decide 'Ok,  
> time to go to ip6'.
> 
> Last year, O'Reilly put out a wonderful book called Network Warrior  
> (for anyone who's new to the network field, I suggest picking it up...  
> it's a wonderful brain dump of a guy who's been doing network admin  
> for a very long time, and full of useful little tricks). It is my  
> sincere belief that the chapter on dealing with upper management  
> should be required reading for anyone who works in a corporate IT  
> environment, whether you're involved with netops or not.
> 
> In that chapter, he tosses around a few maxim's, the first of which  
> has stuck with me ever since I read it -
> 
> Network designs are based on Politics, Money, and The Right Way To Do  
> It - in that order.
> 
> That one sentence is a perfectly succinct  explanation of why the  
> adoption of ip6 has been so slow, and why it'll be a bit slower in  
> coming.

... and reaffirms everything I've believed about management all along.
McConnell [Code Complete, 2 ed., ? 28.6, "Managing Your Manager"], has
similar words of advice regarding managers:  "Technically competent,
technically current managers are rare.  If you work for one, do whatever
you can to keep your job.  It's an unusual treat.  If your manager is
more typical, you're faced with the unenviable task of managing your
manager.  'Managing your manager' means that you need to tell your
manager what to do rather than the other way around.  The trick is to do
it in a way that allows your manager to continue believing that you are
the one being managed."

He then goes on to talk about some methods on just how to do that,
including educating the manager.

> I'm actually trying to get the folks at work to put in a request for  
> an ip6 allocation so I can play with it on our sandbox segment. We're  
> already eating up a /18 and a couple /20's, but I'd at least like to  
> get to work on an ip6 implementation so we can do it right when the  
> time comes.

Just get an IPv6 tunnel from Hurricane Electric or another provider and
set that up for temporary use.  It's free to use, and you can get both a
routed /64 and a routed /48 from them (so you can experiment with
networking in various configurations and experiment with managing
subnetworks, too, while getting things situated).  The only thing that
you'll then have to do when you're ready to put IPv6 up "for real",
using the company's own assigned IPv6 addresses, is to renumber the
networks and stop using the tunnel (or, continue to use the tunnel for a
little while and transition over to the native IPv6 numbers, if you
want).  I use HE, and I am quite happy with the reliability of it.  I
had tried SixXS in the past, and had issues keeping their tunnel up.

> > I'd absolutely _hate_ to be double-NATed.  One NAT---the router
> > that I have here---I can work around.  Two?  One here, and one at the
> > ISP?  That's much harder to work around.  Of course, that'd be one way
> > that the ISP could save money, using one NAT at each node.  But it'd  
> > not be worth it.
> 
> That's actually my biggest worry. If Comcast ever starts handing out  
> RFC 1918's via dhcp instead of real IP's, I'll move to another  
> provider in a heartbeat. I think Bellsouth started that crap down in  
> Florida at one point, but the outcry caused them to reconsider.

Yeah.  IPv4 providers in really dense areas or with really high
subscriber counts have been known to do that when they don't have enough
addresses in their pool to serve them all.  Not only does it introduce
the possibility that the ISP will somehow conflict with the customer's
network (think about what would happen if the ISP gives 192.168.0.1 to
someone as an IP address, and their own private network is
192.168.0/24).  Not good.

> > As things stand today, there are 38 /8 blocks that are unallocated  
> > [2].
> > The estimates that I have seen estimate the exhaustion of the IPv4
> > address space in anywhere from two years to four years, depending on  
> > the
> > level of allocation that the exhaustion is being estimated for.
> 
> Oh, you should subscribe to the NANOG mailing list. The predictions  
> are much more dire than that :)

I don't doubt it.  There are paranoids and fanatics in every field.  :-)
There are some people that I know of that seriously think "Oh, we'll
never run out," too.

> >  It's
> > time for ISPs to saddle up and get ready to deploy, and work with
> > vendors to ensure that the hardware being sold will work properly.
> 
> Honestly, you can't blame the vendors for this one (at least not in  
> their enterprise hardware). Cisco and Juniper have had ip6 support for  
> a very long time now, so they did their part. The ISP's need to be  
> yelling at their peers and the people they purchase transit from to  
> get the ball in motion, those are the folks who are really holding the  
> show up.

Part of the process can be organic---and in fact, will be.  After all,
*someone* controls various pieces of the Internet.  If Comcast starts
doing IPv6, for example, then the people downstream from them (such as
myself) will have IPv6 service.  Then, not only is there a bit of
pressure put on other ISPs to get IPv6 going, but there is a large
implementation of it.  There is also pressure on the vendors if that
happens---after all, Comcast isn't exactly a small ISP, and nobody would
want to be known as "the company whose routers won't work with Comcast".

Hrm.  Big business can be useful sometimes, I suppose.

> 
> > There will almost certainly be a period of chaos that everyone will
> > remember during the transition, but that's life, and life cannot  
> > always
> > be made nice and insulated.
> 
> Honestly, I think it'll be like Y2K. All the unnecessary build up and  
> then .... poof. One day your dhcp lease will refresh and you'll have  
> an ip6 IP instead of ip4 and things will just work.


Assuming that we wait for there to be no more IPv4-only hardware, sure.
But that will be a long time.  The catalyst for people getting rid of
IPv4-only hardware will be the lack of availability of IPv4 itself,
whether that is caused by people stopping native IPv4 services, or by
actually running out of IPv4 address space altogether.  But one thing is
for sure:  additional software is required before IPv6 will happen, be
that software on the client workstation, or in the firmware of the CPE
that ISPs use to grant access to their network to subscribers.  I
honestly don't know how the process of an ISP assigning a /64 to a user
would work, precisely, but I am sure that it requires an IPv6-specific
service of one sort or another on the client, be that in the network
stack or running as an extra program (like a DHCP client would).

(Which reminds me, I either need to modify my desk phone's firmware,
find modified firmware, or get a new desk phone---it's the only device
in my apartment on the network that is IPv4-only at this point.

	--- Mike

[1] http://tunnelbroker.net/usage/accounts_last_20.php

-- 
My sigfile ran away and is on hiatus.
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