Subject: ipv6 adoption....

From: "Mike O'Dell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 12:50:25 -0500 (EST)

Perry,

anyone imagining that ipv6 will get an observable percentage
of total endpoint penetration any time soon only needs to look
at the onslaught of microcontrollers starting to ship with
IPv4 technology integral to them.

the microcontroller universe outnumbers everything else
by a huge margin, so it doesn't take a very large penetration
of that space to make incredible numbers, and at the rate
that's growing, it will be a substantial penetration.

these machines will have v4 but it will be a very long time
before they have v6.  why? because they are very resource
constrained, nobody will spend money near-term for dual-stack,
and a v4 product you can ship today.

also note that a number of chip makers are doing "hardware"
implementations of ipv4 stacks, up to and through transport
level crypto.  i'm not suggesting i think this is unilaterally a great
idea (quite the contrary), but they are being built and getting
designed into things.  some of these are "TCP UARTS", designed
to let really simple systems suddenly become web and internet
enabled, and others are designed to be high-performance devices
to offload some server processing.  again, they are getting
designed into things and once there, essentially immutable.

ipv6 may eventually be visible, but i predict most people
currently reading this will have grandchildren using ipv4
technology, whether they want to or not.

the first window for real volume penetration has been lost.

whether there will be another window is yet to be seen.

this is neither an attack on or defence of anything - it's
just my reading of the forces at work.

	cheers,
	-mo

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From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[email-masked]>
Date: 12 Nov 2001 16:10:31 -0500

> IPv4 technology integral to them.

Now that I'm in the embedded operating system business, allow me to
mention that IPv6 has started showing up as a customer demand
item. And no, I didn't induce that. (We ship with v6 of course, but
the fact that people have asked us about v6 independently has been an
interesting surprise.)

> level crypto.

Not quite. Chips like the various IBM 4xx series CPUs with
pico-processor mixins and and the Intel IXP1200 and such have
significant amounts of stack processing built in, but it isn't really
hardwired to v4. These "picoprocessors" aren't very smart, but they
aren't quite "v4 hardcoded" either.

I've seen tell of other units that have v4 hardwired in for purposes
like the ones you mention (i.e. smart toasters) but mostly what one
finds is that there are units with v4 microcode -- it isn't really in
the metal.

> technology, whether they want to or not.

Entirely possible. However, there will probably be people still using
X.25 in 20 years. The question is, though, how many.

I would by no means refer to the current number of v6 users as
significant from a global market perspective. It isn't. The number of
v6 users currently is many orders of magnitude smaller than the v4
world. However, nothing like this happens instantly, and the TREND is
pretty damn astonishing. I hadn't even sent a single v6 packet a
couple of years ago, and now many of my geek friends have v6 running
in their homes and offices, and I didn't give them help OR prompt
them. What's more, they've actually got a use for v6 for things like
NAT penetration. They can ssh to a specific machine in their home
network even though the cable modem only has one v4 address to give
out. Now we're talking about a tiny number of systems experts here
who're either using open source OSes or were (before XP) patient
enough to install the MS Research stack, but it is very different from
the days a couple of years ago where even v6 hackers never used v6.

Hell, I roamed onto a university campus wireless network not that long
ago, and for the hell of it sent out a router discovery message and
found myself on the 6bone. No, not quite the same as finding my
dentist using v6, but an astonishing trend, even from the point of
view of my wildest dreams.

I think we're still going to be below "observable user threshold" for
a while to come even while this growth continues. How long? I'm
planning on doing some quantitative analysis for a talk I'm giving in
a few weeks. I'll try posting results when I have them. Off the cuff,
I don't expect anything to show up in network statistics for a year or
two, but I'll know better soon.

--
Perry E. Metzger		[email-masked]
--
NetBSD Development, Support & CDs. http://www.wasabisystems.com/

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 17:40:53 -0500

> and a v4 product you can ship today.

you can also ship v6 today, with the v4 sites using 6to4.  the main 
barrier is not lack of hardware to support such a configuration, but 
lack of mindshare.  it will come.

Keith

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From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 16:14:07 -0800

>view of my wildest dreams.

The phrase "damning with faint praise" comes to mind.  Given how long IPv6 
has been in the pipeline, the fact that it is available at an essentially 
production level in a minuscule level, so far, says that we are looking at 
a 10-20 year adoption cycle.

IPv6 seeks to change an existing infrastructure.  That means that its 
adoption is vastly slower than an end-point change, such as adoption of 
MIME.  And it took MIME 5 years to become seriously available, and at least 
8 years before it was reliably available.

d/

----------
Dave Crocker  <mailto:[email-masked]>
Brandenburg InternetWorking  <http://www.brandenburg.com>
tel +1.408.246.8253;  fax +1.408.273.6464

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From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[email-masked]>
Date: 12 Nov 2001 19:32:35 -0500

Dave Crocker <[email-masked]> writes:
> The phrase "damning with faint praise" comes to mind.  Given how long
> IPv6 has been in the pipeline, the fact that it is available at an
> essentially production level in a minuscule level, so far, says that
> we are looking at a 10-20 year adoption cycle.

I'm really not sure that this is very bad at all seeing it from the
"inside". Two years ago there was nary an OS that came with v6. Now I
think the only significant one that is missing v6 support is MacOS X,
and that's only because they haven't figured out the right ways to
wrap the calls for the application layer (the kernel bits are
easy). Without any OS support, how could anyone run it, even people
who wanted to? The fact that we've moved so fast from a standing start
is pretty impressive. Consider how slowly IPv4 grew by comparison.

I think realistically speaking, mid 2000 was the beginning of
deployment in any real sense at all, and in terms of desktop OSes used
by the bulk of consumers, we've only had availability in a stock
OS for a few weeks now.

My opinion is that ten years is on the high side. Unlike v4
deployment, it is much easier to deploy v6 in a v4 world than it was
to deploy v4 with no internet around. However, anyone who thought this
could be done in less than years was not thinking clearly about the
problem.

> adoption is vastly slower than an end-point change, such as adoption
> of MIME.  And it took MIME 5 years to become seriously available, and
> at least 8 years before it was reliably available.

I disagree -- it is mostly an endpoint change, and the endpoints are
the hard part. The extant v6 network functions fine over tunnels on
most of its connections. Some of the biggest uses of v6 I see in the
short run are in overlay networks to get around v4 NAT hells for
network management.

The other thing to keep in mind is that it is perfectly useful to run
v6 machines in a v4 world -- it isn't like you won't be able to look
at cnn.com until cnn.com runs v6. The v4 universe forces me to use
translator boxes anyway, so there is no giant reason to use NAT boxes
instead of v4<->v6 gateways, but one has the advantage that one gets
real address space and can actually get at the individual machines
over v6, which is very hard to do in nested NAT world.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 13:33:11 -0500

> IPv6 seeks to change an existing infrastructure. 

no doubt this was the original intent.  these days I think it's an 
anachronism.  

IPv6 seeks to  provide services to a much larger number of hosts 
than were possible in IPv4, and to provide services (like global
addressing and the ability to support p2p and distributed applications) 
which are no longer generally available in IPv4.

this can be done initially without changing the existing infrastructure.
using 6to4, IPv6 is available today for those who have at least one
global IPv4 address.  the existing v4 infrastructure will be upgraded 
when there is sufficient (anticipated) demand to justify the cost.
In Dave's language, 6to4 makes IPv6 more of an end-point change. 

meanwhile, it will be attractive to incorporate IPv6 support into new
infrastructure.

the point is that the goal isn't to replace IPv4 with IPv6 so much as
to make IPv6 as widely available as IPv4.  once IPv6 is widely 
available, it will be attractive to applications developers because
it has fewer limitations than IPv6.  

and with 6to4 and most major OS vendors shipping IPv6 (and sometimes 6to4)
in their current product releases, we're closer to having IPv6 generally 
available than many think.

Keith

---

From: "Mike O'Dell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 15:16:16 -0500

general availability has nothing to do with "being used"

the OSI protocol implementations were available on all major
platforms at the time.  that didn't get them used by people.

are you the same Keith Moore who hops around every time anyone
goes near the end-to-end thing??  

if "two ships in the night" is an acceptable transition strategy,
then why did we place all the stupid compatability rules on
the protocols??  

this whole thing is intellectually bankrupt.

many good ideas were shouted down because they didn't meet
some Athenean standard purity, yet when the sanctified answer
is found to have a much worse case of Failure to Solve the
Real Problems, those standards are completely suspended and
victory is declared again and again without regard to history.

Ya know, if we'd just done TUBA, we'd have gotten to this 
degree of non-success MANY YEARS sooner and with a lot less
wasted effort.  then the effort and time would have been
available to pursue a real Plan B.

but that was then, this is now.

In the movie "Animal House", in the closing sequence where
the homecoming parade is being decimated by the unwelcomed
arrival of a swift kick of reality, the Junior Deputy Chief
of Truth Management is seen in quick cut after quick cut,
jumping up and down, screaming "All is well!!!!" louder and
with more anguish each time, until he's finally bowled over.

What does this have anything to do with the current situation.

Oh nothing, nothing at all.

	cheers,
	-mo

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 15:39:50 -0500

> general availability has nothing to do with "being used"

agreed.  but unlike OSI, there are reasons for applications 
to use IPv6.  however the applications that use IPv6 may 
not be as visible as many of those applications that use IPv4 - 
for instance IPv6 will be used more often for monitoring 
and control of remote devices and sensors - applications for
which address space shortages effectively preclude use of IPv4.

> platforms at the time.  

and "available" has nothing to do with either "useful" or 
"bundled with the OS"  :)

> then why did we place all the stupid compatability rules on

because it is very useful to be able to do packet-level translation 
for those devices/applications that are compatible with it.  the
fact that packet-level translation doesn't facilitate v4-v6 
interoperation for all applications doesn't mean it's not useful.

of course "two ships in the night" was not what was originally 
intended, it's just what turned out to be realistic in the short
term.  and it doesn't preclude an eventual translation in the long
term, it just makes it easier to get started.  

the point was if people get stuck on the end goal of a complete
transition to v6, then they can miss the fact that IPv6 has utility 
for new applications even while we're waiting for the IPv4 world
to migrate.  and this utility can help drive near-term deployment of 
IPv6.

> but that was then, this is now.

lots of water under the bridge since then.  and the circumstances 
have changed drastically since the shape of the IPv6 design was frozen.  

even with less ambitious efforts, it seems that we often end up
using protocols in ways that are very different from those for
which they were designed.

and the correct path is always more obvious in hindsight.

> with more anguish each time, until he's finally bowled over.

maybe we should just yell "For god's sake, they're looting the Food King!"
to distract those who can't deal with it.

Keith

---

From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[email-masked]>
Date: 13 Nov 2001 16:33:21 -0500

[a pretty long rant]

Look, Mike, whether everything was handled ideally or not, we've got
what we've got and it is being deployed. Its the best solution
available for a set of significant problems we're currently facing. It
does not fix all of them, but nothing does. We also can't go and say
"if only the IETF had picked this idea instead" ad infinitum.

> platforms at the time.  that didn't get them used by people.

True enough. Of course, I know of no one who really used the OSI
stack, whereas I can name a lot of people using v6 every day -- myself
included -- and the growth rate is pretty astonishingly fast right
now. Availability doesn't guarantee use, but lack of availability
guarantees non-use. I think the reason the use picture has changed is
that there was a lot of interest but no way to do anything about it
until now.

Perry

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 16:46:39 -0800

At 04:33 PM 11/13/2001 -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>stack,

not really true.  back then, those who used it tended to tout the fact.

>whereas I can name a lot of people using v6 every day -- myself

that's the real question, and the difficulty is making the assessment when 
one is in the middle  of the activity.  my own sense is that v6 remains a 
thoroughly fringe activity.  That is, it has a very, very long way to 
reaching critical mass.

>guarantees non-use.

correct, as long as one does not misunderstand, and think that availability 
is a goal.  it is a necessary intermediate step, but of no direct utility.

d/

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