I Have Never Felt So Good About Something So Horrible

19 February 2011 by 5 Comments

Terry Slattery, who had been around the block a few times before I knew there was a block, makes several keen observations here about how we might see IPv6 deployed early on, what with all the ballyhoo about IPv4 finally receiving 2 in the hat. In summary:

  • ISPs hand out IPv6 addresses instead of IPv4. Minus 1 for increasing ISP support costs.
  • NAT continues its vaunted role as IPv4 life support. Minus 1 because it won’t last forever.
  • ISPs start charging more $ to go beyond the few IPs required to uplink. Plus 1 for likelihood. [Ethan adds, minus 1 for style.]
  • v6 to v4 gateways allow v6 clients to talk to v4 applications. Plus 1 for already happening today. [Ethan adds, minus infinity for adding infrastructure complexity while letting developers off the hook, at least for a while.]

There’s a bit more in the article, but I was left with one question. Are the network engineers going to have to “make us go“, AGAIN? Is it going to be up to the packet pushers to keep a bunch of legacy junk working because developers, sysadmins, and the rest just can’t seem to do what it takes to allow IPv6 to function as it was designed to? Okay, maybe not all the sysadmins. But you know what I’m saying.

IPv6 is a paradigm shift. I get that. But it’s dawning on me that the engineers aren’t the ones with the biggest problems. Paving the highways to support IPv6 will prove to be the easy part. Retooling the cars to run over the highway – that’s going to be the hard part. And because it’s hard, the next skills we network engineers will really have to develop aren’t IPv6 skills as such. Instead, the mad skillz will be in making all that old IPv4 junk work in an IPv6 world.

I have never felt so good about something so horrible as prolonging IPv4′s life. I expect to be employed forever.

Filed Under: Blogs, IPv6 Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
About Ethan Banks

Ethan Banks, CCIE #20655, is a hands-on networking practitioner who has designed, built and maintained networks for higher education, state government, financial institutions, and technology corporations. Ethan is a host of the Packet Pushers Podcast, which has seen over one million unique downloads, and today reaches a global audience of over ten thousand listeners. Also a writer, Ethan covers network engineering and the networking industry for a variety of IT publications. He is also the editor for the independent community of bloggers at PacketPushers.net. Follow @ecbanks.

  • http://etherealmind.com EtherealMind

    In the column of “nothing ever new”, the more I think about IPv6, the I’m reminded of the days when NetBEUI, IPX and IPv4 all ran on the same network. It’s not so hard.

    Well, you get used to it. You make very good point that Network Engineering is a core function.

    greg

  • Bob Plankers

    As a sysadmin I would love it if developers figured it out. Take Oracle for instance, they have something like two products that can do IPv6, and the other 500 products need a 6-to-4 proxy in front of them. Terrible. Perhaps it is just because developers don’t have IPv6 connectivity, and it’s chicken & egg, but they need to get on it. Now.

    • FRom

      Yep-yep, not only with Oracle, but even with beloved Microsoft.
      The have released Lync Server 2010 November last year. I have asked them being on TechEd: what about IPv6 support in Lync?. “Not in this version” I have got in reply…

  • John M

    Sounds like a good time to go into Network Engineering to me…

  • http://www.netcraftsmen.net Terry Slattery

    I’ve not identified a financial incentive for anyone to move to IPv6, and that’s the real reason it isn’t moving forward very fast. It will start moving when IPv6 contains a customer base that businesses covet. If ISPs do NAT for their customers (both end-users and businesses), then that incentive will forever remain at arm’s reach.