Subject: (ngtrans) host requirements

From: Joao Luis Silva Damas <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 23:20:00 +0100

Host requirements rfc:

 From 1122

This RFC enumerates standard protocols that a host connected to the
    Internet must use, and it incorporates by reference the RFCs and
    other documents describing the current specifications for these
    protocols.

get something equiv. that includes v6. Unless v6 is enabled by 
default on all hosts (APIs are present and accesible, network drivers 
support v6), there is not much point in asking app developers to 
support it.

Also, if you consider there is only one Internet, v6 *MUST* be a 
requirement. If it is an option we will have 2 Internets with some 
hosts present on both.

Will vendors of desktop OS's fill any pressure from such an RFC? 
Well, maybe - maybe not, but if the IETF itself doesn't make it a 
requirement...

Cheers,
Joao
--

---

From: "D. J. Bernstein" <[email-masked]>
Date: 18 Mar 2002 23:02:51 -0000

Joao Luis Silva Damas writes:
> requirement.

Right. And not just configurable ``IPv6 support.'' All servers and
clients have to talk to IPv6 addresses just as smoothly as they talk to
IPv4 addresses. Someone setting up a site on an IPv6 address has to be
able to talk to the entire Internet, just as if he had used an IPv4
address. See http://cr.yp.to/proto/ipv6.html.

> If it is an option we will have 2 Internets with some 
> hosts present on both.

Even worse, everyone will insist on being connected to the _real_
Internet, the IPv4 Internet. An IPv6 Internet that can't talk to the
IPv4 Internet won't offer any extra value to customers, so who cares how
cheap its addresses are?

The way to break out of this loop is to make sure that IPv6 addresses
_can_ talk to the entire IPv4 Internet.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago