Subject: Re: IPv4 consumption statistics and extrapolations

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Sun, 7 Nov 2004 12:00:09 -0500 (EST)

> From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>

    >> *IPv6 only exists because of a previous round of FUD about IPv4 address
    >> exhaustion* - one spread by the proponents of yet another protocol
    >> that was going to "replace" IPv4 - i.e. CLNP.

    > Noel, this assertion is just plain wrong.

So what was Kobe and the ensuing Boston Tea party about, then? Look, I'm not
saying there wasn't concern about address space usage rates, and eventual
exhaustion - clearly there was.

(And - and how ironic is this - one of the *earliest* references to comlete
address space exhaustion was in a presentation *I* gave at the 19th IETF, in
December 1990, at Boulder, Colorado - up until then we had mostly been
worried about the usage rate of class B's.)

However, my perception was that the IPng effort was started in response to
concerns raised by backers of CLNP, who did so in an attempt to push adoption
of CLNP. Would we have started work on IPng without those efforts? I don't
think so, but YMMV.

    > the market found a way to route around our non-responsiveness.
    > ...
    > We would probably have had to learn to live with NATs in any case

This I actually agree with, but with a slightly different spin: I think that
even if we had written an IPng spec overnight, the market would almost
certainly still have gone with IPv4+NAT; just less overall hassle, plus the
*other* reasons people deploy NAT (which you list).

	Noel

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---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 7 Nov 2004 15:44:11 -0500

On Sun,  7 Nov 2004 12:00:09 -0500 (EST), Noel Chiappa wrote:
> > >  *IPv6 only exists because of a previous round of FUD about
> > >  IPv4 address exhaustion* - one spread by the proponents of
> > >  yet another protocol that was going to "replace" IPv4 - i.e.
> > >  CLNP.
>  So what was Kobe and the ensuing Boston Tea party about, then?

You are confusing a mis-handling of making a decision with the 
instigating cause for the effort that involved that decision.

Kobe came roughly a year after work was done on considering the 
problem of rapidly depleting address space availability.  There was 
plenty of basis for the concern about address space.

And CLNP was not proposed until well into that process.

Kobe was the culmination of a protracted process of disconnection 
between the IAB and the rest of the community.  (And for what it's 
worth, the parallels with the current disconnect between the community 
and the iesg/iab are pretty striking.)  That CLNP advocates controlled 
that later decision process is significant but not in terms of the 
core technical problem that was being addressed.

>  Look, I'm not saying there wasn't concern about address space
>  usage rates, and eventual exhaustion - clearly there was.

you attributed the effrort to a CLNP consipracy.  That's a pretty 
silly assessment, no matter how serious and damaging the CLNP error 
actually was.

>  However, my perception was that the IPng effort was started in
>  response to concerns raised by backers of CLNP, who did so in an

we had a lot of OSI types involved with the IAB at that point, so 
there is some guilt-by-association that accounts for your erroneous 
perception, in my opinion.  But there were plenty of non-OSI folk also 
concerned about address depletion.  

>  This I actually agree with, but with a slightly different spin: I
>  think that even if we had written an IPng spec overnight, the
>  market would almost certainly still have gone with IPv4+NAT; just
>  less overall hassle, plus the *other* reasons people deploy NAT
>  (which you list).

wow.  i think we agree about that, too.

I think that the leaf-network admin conveniences permitted by NATs has 
long been ignored by the IETF community. 

In general, we have architecturally ignored too many of the boundary 
issues between independent environments.  And I really like the use of 
the term "tussle" points to refer to these; it strikes me as a really 
key perspective on their role.

d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
+1.408.246.8253
dcrocker  a t ...
www.brandenburg.com

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From: Scott W Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 7 Nov 2004 15:55:22 -0500

> of CLNP. Would we have started work on IPng without those efforts? I don't

My recollection is that CLNP was not a motivator, it was recommended as
a bandaid, in reaction to the perceived problems.  After we did that,
the CLNP proponents ran with it (and we got Kobe).  

Remember the ROAD meeting where you said "CLNP is only slightly less
paleolithic than IP"?