[TriLUG] Want to Participate in World IPv6 Day?

[Greg Cox]

Everyone's doing a really great job of underscoring my points.

If not for NAT then we'd be out of addresses?  So, what I hear
is that we have a system that's got a valid workaround.  If we
want to play "some protocol is WRONG on the Internet," there's
better candidates.  SMTP lets spam flow through like a sieve,
but we're fine with bolting on blackhole lists and SPF and
Bayesian filters and anything else under the sun because it's
just not practical to replace.  And that's just email, where
there's actual dollar costs to a b0rk3n protocol.  Yes, yes,
I know there's not a perfectly useful RFC waiting to replace
SMTP, but my point is: IPv4 has a lot of life and a lot of
momentum.  IPv6 is great, but it's a solution to something
that has yet to become a problem with serious impact.

Port Forwarding is too difficult for Mom?  Well, she's usually
more of a Wii Sports kinda girl than Call of Duty, but, she's
pretty sharp with a gui.  NAT, for as much as we might want to
beat it, is prevalent and reasonably understood/clickable in
devices you can pick up at the Buy More, so, things find a way
to get done.  But now if Mom has to go buy a brand new stateful
firewall, well... is that going to be something she knows how
to do?  "Honey?  My address is linenoise.  And what happened
to 8.8.8.8?"  Hope we get install imaging all automated at $WORK
so I don't need that DNS IP stuck in my head anymore.

Malicious companies as hubs?  Fine, Google knows everything about
us, Facebook and Twitter hold the keys to what we post there, but
they're useful because they have all the data and all your
'friends' are there.  And that strikes at the heart of this issue:
IPv6 hasn't made converting valuable, because nobody else is there
to talk to.**

Circumventing Twitter-as-a-townsquare might become easier for
individual technologies, but, that's all doable today, with a bit
more work.  But, there's still the ISP (yes, there's a lot in .us,
but we were holding up less-developed countries as an example), who
can shape you and cut you under government edict just as easily
on 6 as on 4.  "Treating censorship as damage and routing around
it" doesn't help if you're down to your last-choice route.


There's just no business case for early conversion yet.  I'm sure
we'll get there, and everyone who went early will get to giggle
as the rest of us scramble, and a certain multicolored doodle
company will mention that they've had ipv6 search for (then) 20
years.  But I'm happy to let a generation or five of gadgets
turn over/become compliant, and someone to write out some sane
migration plans for running overlays and then going pure-6.


**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect