Subject: Re: AN interesting article. FYI... contd

From: Scott Bradner <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 20:13:17 -0400 (EDT)

the author's bio line

  Richard Adhikari is a leading journalist on advanced-IP issues for several
  major publications, including The Wall Street Journal, and is a regular
  contributor to Planet IT.

does not speak well for the wsj

Scott
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From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 11:39:46 -0400

> does not speak well for the wsj

Or perhaps for Mr. Adhikari -- the online WSJ search function turns up no 
IP-related articles by him since at least 1990.  (As a control, I fed the 
names of other WSJ reporters into the same search page -- those attempts
resulted in many hits.)  I also ran the same search on all major U.S. 
newspapers and business publications -- still no hits.  But I did find some
hits in Computerworld, Information Week, and the like.  It's possible that
the WSJ has picked up some stories he wrote for other publications; other
control searches did not turn up authors of, for example, AP wire stories
that the Journal carried.

		--Steve Bellovin

---

From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 11:39:46 -0400

--Steve Bellovin

---

From: "Mike Zintel (Exchange)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 11:09:23 -0700

It's helpful to contrast an ideal IPv6 world with today's world of DHCP'd,
IPCP'd, NAT'd, tunneled and proxied TCP/IP.

Part of the problem selling IPv6 is the success of the address shortage
work-arounds. Call attention to the usability and administration costs of
these solutions.

One serious problem still largely unsolved in today's world is the absence
of a unique identifier that can be used initiate a connection from the core
network to a (PPP or DHCP) transiently connected end node. This is part is a
result of PPP/DHCP enabled address pooling.

Mike. 

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Friday, August 27, 1999 10:51 AM
To: Pete Loshin
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: AN interesting article. FYI... contd 

Pete Loshin <[email-masked]> writes:

> At 11:05 AM 8/27/99 -0500, [email-masked] wrote:
> 
> >...The article may not
> >be useful for technical implementation information (or accurate facts
> >of any sort), but it does tell us a lot about what some common
> >opposition to IPv6 will use as arguments.  As such, we should be
> >aware of these arguments, and make sure we can get out the right message.
> >We can dismiss it out of hand, or we can use it to help shape our own 
> >advocacy efforts...
> 
> So, IPv6 is a gratuitous upgrade, a plot on the part of competing vendors,
> colluding with each other to scam customers?

	No, but that's what the article implies, and -- unless he knows 
better -- the reader will understand to be the case...

> 
> If that kind of argument held water with executives, do you think
Microsoft
> would be on its way to becoming a trillion-dollar company? (Before you
> flame me, Microsoft is certainly not the only offender with what some
> people might consider to be gratuitous upgrades, just the most
successful.)

	A perfect example, since they encounter (deservedly or not, 
depending on your perspective) this kind of "gratuitous upgrade"
attack regularly.  They consistently win because they are very good
at redirecting the discussion away from what it costs, and focus 
it on what is gained (or perceived to be gained).  They learn what the 
opposing arguments are (valid or not) and then directly combat them 
or direct attention away from them.  It isn't because the execs aren't
swayed by these kinds of bogus arguments, but because they (Microsoft)
know how to fight them.

> 
> How many new versions of Ethernet have we seen since IPv4 was rolled out?
> I'd say that upgrading the link layer is far more intrusive than upgrading
> the network layer, yet it's been done.
> 
> >	Imagine that some CIO has read this article and then asks you, 
> >"So, why should I buy into this whole IPv6 thing?  What about these 
> >infrasctructure costs?  What about the compatibility issues?"  How would
you 
> >respond (other than just pointing out that the author hadn't a clue)?
> 
> I'd give the CIO a copy of my book, _IPv6 Clearly Explained_ (Morgan
> Kaufmann, 1999). Then, I'd start throwing buzzwords around, like
> "competitive advantage" and "value proposition" while I explain IPv6's
> technical merits and the kinds of things you can do with that you just
> can't do with IPv4.

	An excellent response, and exactly the kind of thing I was 
trying to elicit.  If that CIO is swayed by buzzwords, we should respond
with buzzwords.  If that CIO is swayed by technical merits, we 
should respond with technical merits.  We have more than enough of
each to go around, and both are useful in the appropriate situations.

> 
> BTW, re: CMP (now part of Miller Freeman), the article about deploying
IPv6
> that so many of the participants of this list helped me write this spring
> for Data Communications (which will publish its last hard copy edition on
> October 21) has not yet been published--and might not make it into print,
> though I'm told it is supposed to make it into the last issue.

	I do hope it makes it...I'll look forward to reading it.  
Positive press is crucial to general acceptance.

> -pl

-andrew
-- 
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
| Andrew Kephart, AIX TCP/IP        These are my opinions only...IBM might
|
| SMTP: [email-masked]     agree, but I wouldn't count on it.
|
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------
+

---

From: Richard Draves <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 13:12:55 -0700

> We will need to replace/upgrade almost all of our equipment (mainframe
> datacenters, 10's of 1,000's of pc's, hundreds of routers, 
> thousands of
> eithernet switches, I don't know how many Novell, NT and Unix 
> servers).
> Everything has addresses buried in them (I know, we should 
> not do that but we
> have a lot of people in IT, so it happens and I cannot 
> assume).  We have custom
> code we wrote and custom code vendors have written for us, 
> some of whom are no
> longer in business (again, not right but it's life).  We will 
> have to throw-out
> applications as part of this.  I think that the job will take 
> 5-10 years to
> complete, with the help of 100's of people around the world.  
> We are talking a
> huge investment.

I am optimistic that we can & are developing transition techniques that will
allow the transition to IPv6 to be much more incremental. Legacy
applications should continue to function.

Rich

---

From: "Mike Zintel (Exchange)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 13:37:31 -0700

|One serious problem still largely unsolved in today's world is the absence
|of a unique identifier that can be used initiate a connection from the core
|network to a (PPP or DHCP) transiently connected end node. This is part is
a
|result of PPP/DHCP enabled address pooling.

This problem is currently addressed with dynamic DNS.  IPv6 will presumably
rely on the same mechanisms, perhaps more so since IPv6 addresses are less
stable...

I don't understand how DDNS alone will solve this in the absence of some
sticky address for every end node. 

If client initiated DDNS updates must occur, say, everytime PPP or DHCP
gives me a new address, how can we build a network where my moher can call
me when I'm not connected? 

Mike.

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Lanciani [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Friday, August 27, 1999 1:14 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: RE: AN interesting article. FYI... contd

I must play devil's advocate here.

"Mike Zintel (Exchange)" <[email-masked]> wrote:

|It's helpful to contrast an ideal IPv6 world with today's world of DHCP'd,
|IPCP'd, NAT'd, tunneled and proxied TCP/IP.

In today's world, at least some end users (i.e., those who got in before
so many addresses became "reserved") have stable, portable IP address space.
Under IPv6, no end user will have stable or portable IP address space.  This
may seem like a good equalizer to the have-nots, but it isn't a feature for
the haves.

In today's world, at least some end users can still take advantage of what
was once seen as a very important characteristic of the tcp/ip protocol:
as long as you control the end points, it can be made arbitrarily tenacious
independent of the reliability of the intermediate routers (assuming you
don't have a total, permanent failure of course).  Under IPv6, any active
tcp/ip connection is always at the mercy of renumbering.  Saying that
nobody expects tcp/ip connections to be reliable outside of the intranet
(as I have seen expressed here from time to time) ignores all those users
who expect just that.  Assuming that the problem will be easily solved by
adapting tcp/ip to survive renumbering is, I think, minimizing a very tricky
technical task.  (And of course, it does nothing for application-level
address knowledge.)  Any complete solution that renders tcp, udp, and
everything above largely independent of short-term address persistence
(perhaps by creating a new class of cookie that effectively becomes the
"first-class citizen" of identify) will make IPv6 addresses very different
animals from IPv4 addresses.  It may even make IPv6 addresses (at least in
the sense that they are administratively allocatable entities) superfluous.
This last is actually technically interesting, but it would obviate the need
for all the address allocation policy that we know and love, and things
don't seem to be moving it that direction.  And besides, there has to be
some pseudo-stable address space if only to provide a measure for billing...

In today's world, a NAT user has complete control of the stability of its
internal addresses and can hide its internal structure more-or-less
completely.  Under IPv6, the stability of the internal addresses (which
are then, granted, at least globally routable) is dependent on every
provider above the user.  Moreover, the internal structure is completely
exposed.  This is great for the ISP who wants to bill per-host, but of
little benefit to the end user.  Naturally, there will be IPv6 NAT boxes
(in several translation flavors) and I'll bet they will be used in V6<->V6
mode just to get the structure-hiding and firewall features.  But there's
not much point comparing NAT to NAT in this context...

|Part of the problem selling IPv6 is the success of the address shortage
|work-arounds.

We are observing evolution in action.  Apply the pressure of an address
shortage (even if artificial) and the market will adapt, but perhaps
not in the way some would like.  It would be neat if you could make
addresses valuable (dollar-wise) and then create a lot of wealth by
expanding the address space, but the market doesn't always work that
way. :)

|Call attention to the usability and administration costs of
|these solutions.

The problem here is at least three-fold.  First, a lot of these work-arounds
work very well and their administrative costs even over the life of a
company
may not approach the cost of switching to IPv6 (and IPv6 solutions are
not without their--hard to characterize--administrative costs).  Second,
some of these work-arounds offer features above and beyond expanding
apparent
address-space.  These features will still be required with a switch to IPv6
but
all the code will be new and untested.  More overhead tipping the balance
away
from IPv6.  Finally, IPv6 simply does not offer anything resembling an
expanded
IPv4 address space.  IPv6 addresses are qualitatively very different from
IPv4
addresses.  IPv6 addresses are closer to DHCP'd or even NAT'd addresses than
they are to stable IPv4 addresses, and IPv6 features tend to be of more
benefit
to ISPs than to end users.  Until all the collateral work has been done to
make
an IPv6 address a functional drop-in replacement for an IPv4 address in
whatever
applications are of interest to a particular organization, there may be
little
incentive for that organization to switch.  Even when this is done, IPv6
will
have to bring more than parity to the table.

|One serious problem still largely unsolved in today's world is the absence
|of a unique identifier that can be used initiate a connection from the core
|network to a (PPP or DHCP) transiently connected end node. This is part is
a
|result of PPP/DHCP enabled address pooling.

This problem is currently addressed with dynamic DNS.  IPv6 will presumably
rely on the same mechanisms, perhaps more so since IPv6 addresses are less
stable...

				Dan Lanciani
				[email-masked]