Subject: Re: [Int-area] [v6ops] IP-capable nodes must support IPv6 - new draft-george-ipv6-required

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2011 11:47:13 -0500 (EST)

> From: "George, Wes E [NTK]" <[email-masked]>

    > I imagine your average consumer is going to be a lot angrier when we
    > tell them that the shiny new internet-connected device that they just
    > got for $winter_gift-giving_holiday 2010 is basically obsolete .. due to
    > a problem that we've known about for many years. The vendor of said
    > device shares some blame for being short-sighted, greedy or both .. but
    > I still don't know how IETF is going to answer the question as to why we
    > didn't require IPv6 sooner.

The IETF is not the Protocol Police. All it can do is design stuff, put it out
there, try and make sure everyone knows about it, and hope people use it. If
there is more than a minute handful of people involved in the networking world
who doesn't know what IPv6 is, I would be totally astonished. So the IETF has
done what it can.

If manufacturers aren't doing it (whether because they don't think their
customers have any use for it, or whatever), that's their informed (to
whatever degree) choice. People aren't children, you can't order them around
like 5-year olds to eat their broccoli.

	Noel

---

From: Rémi Després <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2011 18:44:47 +0100

+1

What IETF must provide is specifications of what is meant by IPv6, ICMPv6, SLAAC, IPsec, ...
Then, vendors that claim they support any of these know what they are committed to.
But they remain free to decide what they support.

RD

Le 11 janv. 2011 à 17:47, Noel Chiappa a écrit :

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> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/v6ops

---

From: "George, Wes E [NTK]" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2011 17:56:44 +0000

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Noel Chiappa [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 11:47 AM
> 
> there, try and make sure everyone knows about it, and hope people use
> it. 
[WES] There's no enforcement being proposed here. It's a guideline just like
anything else that IETF (or any of the myriad standards bodies that we might
name) generates. However, plenty of companies cite RFCs and drafts as
shorthand for the features and services that they want to have work on a
device or network specification with the full expectation that they'll be
updated as necessary to remain current. Updating them to reflect changes and
evolution is part of what we do at IETF.

Distilling this down, you're basically saying "you can lead a horse to
water, but you can't make him drink." I'm merely recommending that we be a
bit more forceful in our leadership to the water, instead of being neutral
on the question of whether you should implement IPv6 on your device or
software.

> If there is more than a minute handful of people involved in the
> networking world

[WES] The degree of IPv6 awareness varies vastly by area of focus. There are
plenty of folks who refer to IETF standards or need to know about IPv6 that
are not within the networking world (and its little bubble of IPv6
cognoscenti) per se. And even if the networking folks understand that it's
necessary, sometimes things like "it's an IETF standard, we need to do it to
comply with the standard" is enough to push a justification through the
business folks who probably don't.
> like 5-year olds to eat their broccoli.
[WES] Yet we generate standards all day long with words like MUST that we
expect the same manufacturers to follow to the letter. This argument can be
made about any standard we generate! So is IETF's collective opinion
relevant or not?
I am under no illusion that adoption of this draft will *solve* the lack of
IPv6 support in consumer electronics (or anywhere else), and I am fully
aware that businesses will make their own decisions. That doesn't remove
IETF from any responsibility to make a recommendation as to the current
reality, which is that IPv4 *only* isn't going to keep working indefinitely,
at least not in exactly the same way that it did before IANA exhaustion. I
as an operator am asking for them to do so in order to make my job (trying
to keep my customers' service functional) easier. This means trying to give
me some help in the space where there are lots of devices that I don't have
any control over, even if it's just a nudge in the right direction. 

Wes George