[AusNOG] IPv4 Exhaustion, APNIC EC, and James is a nice bloke ; -)

[Mark Newton]

On 17/07/2008, at 2:47 PM, Noel Butler wrote:
>
> The biggest problem we have is address space horders

I'm not entirely sure that APNIC agrees with that assessment.

And even if they did,  how would you propose to deal with it in a way
that pushed the practical effects of exhaustion out to the end of the
next decade?

Regardless:  In my experience, performing an IPv6 implementation on
an IPv4 network that isn't currently carrying it isn't any harder than
performing an MPLS implementation on any IPv4 network that isn't
carrying MPLS.

Are there wrinkles, bugs, annoyances and incomprehensible
failures?  Sure.  But I think most of us are paid to turn features with
wrinkles, bugs, annoyances and incomprehensible failures into
saleable products, and ought to be able to take it in our stride.

The issue with IPv6 isn't so much the network (that bit's relatively
easy), but with the back-end systems.  Billing, provisioning, address
allocation, security, DNS, load-balancing, etc.  The actual nuts and
bolts of trucking IPv6 packets around the network are pretty
straightforward, but the software support and training issues are
something akin to the magnitude of problem all the finance and
manufacturing industries had with their COBOL code in the run-up
to y2k.  Except in their case, a bit of auditing revealed that almost
all of their systems coped with 4-digit dates, whereas even trivial
examination reveals that almost NONE of this industry's systems
deal seamlessly with 128-bit IP prefixes.


   - mark


--
Mark Newton                               Email:  newton at internode.com.au 
  (W)
Network Engineer                          Email:   
newton at atdot.dotat.org  (H)
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