[TriLUG] Want to Participate in World IPv6 Day?

[Aaron Joyner]

The simplest reason I see for IPv6 follows from these two points:
1) Your's, mine, and everyone else's complacency is only possible
because of Network Address Translation (NAT).  Otherwise, we'd have
been out of addresses years and years ago.
2) NAT is bad for the Internet.

NAT is the bane of interoperability for real-time protocols ala RTP
(ever had one direction of a VoiP call fail to pass voice traffic...
probably a NAT problem), makes any client software which needs
incoming connections (multiplayer gaming, etc) more complicated for
the user (try telling your mom to forward ports on her router) or
complicated for the developers (read: buggy) to deal with UPnP, etc,
etc, etc.  There are many other technical arguments, but you can
easily read around and find those.

Perhaps most importantly, NAT reinforces the decentralized / "channel"
world view that those at <insert ISP or media company> would like to
support, in particular that everyone is consuming content as a client,
not delivering it as a server.  That is not the decentralized nature
that the Internet was founded on, and that I personally think is
important to it's future.  That world view fuels provider's business
decisions like asymmetric DSL/Cable service and trying to divide the
two groups up and charge them both to use the network (see the usual
net neutrality debates).  The motivations for the big content creators
is obvious, they don't want competition from the YouTube generation,
they want to maintain the status quo where everyone sits on the couch
and watches whatever is this month's equivalent of 2 and a half men.

If you want to maintain the health of the Internet as a home for the
free flow of information, innovation, and the closest analog to a
level playing field you can get in our society, it is important to
support IPv6.

With that rant out of the way... the World IPv6 day is primarily a
coordinated effort to suss out the bugs in IPv6 routing and
implementations, and have a way to inform the public that most *every*
website they visit that day might be broken, and it's probably not the
website's fault.  :)  The reason providers don't universally support
IPv6 is that turning it on will mean a small but noticeable number of
their of customers suddenly loose the ability to connect to their
service.  For a business, that's a pretty strong disincentive, so very
view businesses support IPv6 via the native access mechanisms.  There
fore, customers can't get most services via IPv6, so they have no
incentive to migrate.  World IPv6 Day is one step towards breaking
that gridlock.

I for one welcome the departure of our IP-constrained IPv4 overlord,
Aaron S. Joyner


On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 11:20 PM, Greg Cox <glcox at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Mar 2011, John Broome wrote:
>
>> I asked my TWTC rep if they were ipv6 enabled and she wanted to
>> schedule a meeting to "sit down and talk about what ipv6 means for our
>> company".
>>
>> I don't want a sales spiel woman.  i want a really long ip address.
>
> I like sales spiels.  Sell me on why?
>
> For all the rending of clothes and cries of "OMG WE'RE OUT OF IPv4
> SPACE!  THE SKY!  SHE IS FALLING!" that I hear every other month, I can see
> no reason for going forward (right now).
>
> Financial?  I still pay more for my first checked bag than I would
>  for my first, second, third, and fourth IP.
> Datacenter services (dns/dhcp/etc)?  4's is sunk costs.  6's will
>  be new spend/learning.
> Features?  Everything** I would do in 6 I can do (and more)
>  in 4 with less infrastructure and thought.
>  (ok, maybe not anycast.  OSPF is ick.)
> Interoperability?  The larger world hasn't hit critical mass or offered
>  a 'killer app' (let alone basics) on v6.
> Geek cred?  Meh.  If it floats your boat, fine.  But I don't hear a lot
>  of people taking the plunge and converting or running overlays
>  out to their 6-to-4 tunnel at home.
>
> Until something changes, I have all the incentive in the world to
> sit tight on 4, let more devices develop support, and show up late
> to the party after there's reasonable transition paths.
>
>
> p.s. yes, those meddlin' ipv6 kids should get off my lawn.
>
> --
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