Norbert Bollow wrote: [..]
Unless there is a good solution that allows end user organizations (e.g. companies of any size) to run IPv6 only on some of their network segments, it will mean just additional pain for little or no gain to run IPv6 in addition to IPv4. This is both with regard to the aspect of cost and also from the viewpoint of complexity management from the perspective of the organization's IT manager.
Most of the "Applications" that people are is Web-based nowadays. Thus just setup an apache2, squid or other proxy that can handle v6/v4 and you are done. Every other application that you are thinking of are either home-grown or commercial and in most cases don't support IPv6 yet, or will be hard to upgrade.
There is an easy solution for that: IPv4 + NAT, IPv6 Native. Solves all your problems. Yes, you will have to run two protocols, so what. Otherwise you will end up adding a lot of hacks in your network to handle that you don't have IPv4. Maybe in a year or 20 one can start thinking about IPv6-only networks.
It's in theory possible to upgrade all networks to dual-stack, yes, but as long as there are no sufficiently strong incentives to use IPv6 for production purposes, IPv6 will continue to be used for ping traffic almost exclusively.
Which is why NNTP is causing so much traffic, I guess ;) I've also a 'view' on some non-consumer networks, which clearly show that there is more than 1% of IPv6 traffic in networks, just because things get IPv6 enabled and it gets used.
Under these conditions, I don't see how I could with good conscience recommend to my customers to make any IPv6 related investments besides ensuring that all routers which are bought from now on should be be dual-stack capable and performace-tested with respect to IPv6 also and not just with respect to IPv4.
And that is also the only thing that you have to do: Be prepared. For the rest, you don't HAVE to move to IPv6 yet, and especially not to an IPv6-only environment.
In summary, I don't think that the necessary incentives are in place so far to really get the IPv6 transition going....
Hence my call to revive the Swiss IPv6 Task Force.
And what would any "Task Force" do to "help" this? Write up more policy documents which nobody reads? There are a zillion of these "IPv6 Task Forces", the only thing I hear is that the conferences tend to be pretty good. The actual business result seems to be fairly minimal though (except for the companies sticking time into them and getting some customer advantages out of it)
2nd: IPv6 maps IPv4 addresses into a specific IPv6 prefix. So if you talk purely IPv6, you can address an IPv4 host by using the ::ffff: prefix.
As pointed out by Jeroen, IETF is deprecating this
Already deprecated this. Past tense, already happened a long time ago.
, but apart from that, I'd agree that it's a possible approach. Of course you'd still have to arrange for a NAT-PT (Network Address Translator - IPv6/IPv4 Protocol Translator)
Which, if you would have read my mail a bit further would have read is also deprecated.... See RFC4966.
IVI is the current method of solving IPv4<->IPv6. See link in other mail.
[..]
Even besides the issue that using a prefix which is (no longer)
It was NEVER supposed to be used on the wire.
The Internet moves really fast, try to keep up at least a little bit ;)
Greets, Jeroen