OT: was: Re: AT&T Uverse IPv6 vs. Mac OS X 10.(old)

[Noel Chiappa]

Apologies all for the OT; just a few _brief_ replies. If anyone wants a
serious discussion about this, the internet-history list would be the place
to start it.


    > From: Charles Anthony

    > What they did was 'NAT plus IPV6 will solve everything.'

Yes, but not explicitly; the 'official' IETF position was 'IPv6 will replace
IPv4', and they pretty consistently refused to acknowledge that NAT would
likely play a major role.

I 'sort of' understand the second part - NAT is, architecturaly, very grubby
(for a long list of reasons this is not the place to go into) - but it soon
got the point of ostrich-like refusal to recognize reality - which meant that
instead of an _architected_ approac to using NAT, it mostly got an utterly
'ad hoc' adoption.


    > From: Robert Johnson

    > So, I'm curious what your objections to v6 are

It's different from IPv4 (i.e. old code can't understand it), but not
different enough (i.e. it doesn't have enough new capabilities to make it
worth switching to - IPv4 has many architectural issues, but that topic is
too complex to go into here).

    > how would you solve the shortage of IP addresses?

You have to start by realizing that IPv4 addresses serve at least three
functions: i) identify the communicating device (in the sense that 'Noel
Chiappa' identifies me), ii) says _where_ the thing is in the Internet (like
a street address does IRL), and iii) is used by intermediate switching nodes
to forward traffic. So the first step is to pull out ii) and iii), which can
be done without modifying the hosts, and there are many designs that did so.

Alas, a fuller discussion of this complex topic is not really appropriate
here... Ask on internet-history, if you want to know more.

	Noel