Subject: How the IPnG effort was started

From: "Christian Huitema" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 7 Nov 2004 19:30:08 -0800

> On Sunday, November 07, 2004 12:44 PM, Dave Crocker wrote
> To: Noel Chiappa; [email-masked]
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: IPv4 consumption statistics and extrapolations
> 
> 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.
>
> ....
> 
> 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.

On this point, Dave is correct. The IAB meeting occurred during the INET
conference in June 1992 in Kobe. The issue of IP address exhaustion had
already been debated on several occasions. You can check the minutes of
the IAB meetings at http://www.iab.org/documents/iabmins/. As Noel
mentions, he was actually one of the first to point the issue of address
space exhaustion, as mentioned in the minutes of the October 1990
meeting. 

> And CLNP was not proposed until well into that process.

Actually, if you go look at the minutes, you find that the subject of
OSI transition, coexistence and competition was very much in people
minds. In the same October 1990 during which Noel presented the issue of
address exhaustion, the IAB also spent a lot of time discussing NSAP
addressing. The next meeting, in January 1991, featured a discussion of
whether TCP and OSI will continue in parallel or whether one will
replace the other. The proposal in 1992 to base an IPng on CLNP was
pretty much a continuation of these discussions, and it did indeed come
in quite early in the process.

-- Christian Huitema

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From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Sun, 7 Nov 2004 22:46:03 -0500 (EST)

> From: "Christian Huitema" <[email-masked]>

    > The issue of IP address exhaustion had already been debated on several
    > occasions.
    > ...
    > The proposal in 1992 to base an IPng on CLNP was pretty much a
    > continuation of these discussions, and it did indeed come in quite
    > early in the process.

Yes, and the chief "selling point" people were using to push CLNP was....
larger addresses. And when the IETF wasn't thrilled about adopting OSI
protocols, they set up the IPng process, which picked.... IPv6.

So I think my orginal messages (that IPv6 exists because of a previous round
of concern about IPv4 address exhaustion, which was used by the proponents of
yet another protocol that was going to "replace" IPv4 to push for their
protocol's adoption) was right on target.

	Noel

---

From: "Christian Huitema" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 04:31:13 -0800

> So I think my orginal messages (that IPv6 exists because of a
previous
> round
> of concern about IPv4 address exhaustion, which was used by the
proponents
> of

That is not quite what the minutes convey. The main argument behind CLNP
then was convergence, at a time when many believed that OSI protocols
were poised to develop and at a minimum lead to a "multi-protocol
Internet". This perception changed a lot in a few years, between 1990
and 1994, as OSI deployment stagnated and the Internet exploded.

Did the "OSI convergence" perception caused the IAB/IETF to be more
receptive to the arguments about address space exhaustion and routing
table explosion? Maybe in some people's mind, but they were a minority
-- the concerns were well shared. In any case, an important argument for
the proposals that lead to IPv6 was precisely to have none of the OSI
baggage. For better or worse, it was mostly defined as "just IPv4 with
larger addresses".

-- Christian Huitema

---

From: "Michel Py" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2004 20:16:09 -0800

<shameless rip-off scheme>
> kre wrote:
> Either it dies (or atrophies, which is essentially
> the same thing), or IPv4 is replaced by something.

Robert, I have a deal for you. In exchange for a sufficient and
significant number of individual donations of $1,000 or more from this
mailing list readers, we will not start an argument about it and split
the profits 50-50. What do you think?
</shameless rip-off scheme>

Michel.

---

From: "John Loughney" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 18:06:11 +0200

Harold,

> Numbers are for losers and technologists.

Except that numbers seem to	cross a number of languages better than, say, 7-bit ASCII ... YMMV.

John

---

From: "Peter Ford" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 15:57:41 -0800

Jeff,

In terms of being "inside the ISP space", I would include all of those
people who build software and hardware for ISPs such as router, switch,
firewall, etc..

My taxonomy intended to differentiate between app/host vendors and
IP-transport/router-switch vendors.

Apologies to all in my broad brush polar coloring of the world.

I actually disagree: I contend that IPv6 can happen without the ISPs.
Why couldn't the entire world end up running IPv6 on top of IPv4?  What
is the total number of ISP demarcations needed for everyone in the work
to interconnect with the Internet?   

If at some later point in time the ISPs join the IPv6 party, then the
world will be better off.

(I am of course arguing at the ends of the spectrum of possibilities,
reality might live somewhere in between)

Regards, peterf  
(an app/host kind of guy ... :-), but I used to be in the IP-transport
biz)

---

From: "Michel Py" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2004 17:25:25 -0800

> Stephen Sprunk wrote:
> I predict things will continue roughly as they are now, and
> when the IPv4 space is approaching true exhaustion the prices
> of PI and PA space will rise so much that it will exceed the
> cost of converting to IPv6. Then IPv6 will take off, and not
> before.

I agree, and will take some time as rising prices will inevitably push
everyone to tighten their NAT setup, which will free a bunch of
addresses and push the date into the future even more.

The trouble is that people that would need IPv6 the most are the ones
that can't offer it nor expensive IPv4, so we might end up with a divide
between the haves and the have-nots.

Sadly, I don't think that telling Joe Redneck that if he does not
migrate to IPv6 now someone in a middle-east or developing country will
have to NAT later is going to help much.

Michel.

---

From: "John Loughney" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 20 Nov 2004 09:07:20 +0200

Spencer,

Inertia is actually a fairly stong force, and IPv4 has a lot of it.

I'd be happy to point out some shipping products & announcements from carriers about IPv6, however.

John
------------------- Original message -------------------
Subject: Re: How the IPnG effort was started
From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Time: 11/18/2004 11:10 pm

I apologize in advance for feeding this thread, but the conversation 
seems to be diverging from what I thought we had actually been 
previously...

IIRC, we've semi-recently been off to the land of "PCs in homes and 
cell phones". I can say I was honestly dismayed that cable providers 
in the United States went to IPv4 instead of IPv6, but they did. I can 
say I was honestly dismayed to learn (in the past year) that the 
Push-to-talk Over Cellular (PoC) 1.0 specifications (*) changed the 
3GPP IMS specifications (that required IPv6) to use IPv4 instead. But 
that's what's been happening lately.

I'm not nearly as interested in forecasting the future as some of you 
guys, but it seems like we do have to recognize that deployment of 
IPv6 in either residential access or cell phones would reverse some 
pretty recent trends. Trends do reverse, but I haven't seen a 
deceleration point yet, much less a "tipping point" in these networks.

Sorry!

Spencer

(*) Available from a variety of places, including 
http://www.ericsson.com/mobilityworld/sub/open/technologies/ims_poc/docs/poc_relase_1_0_spec

From: "Peter Ford" <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2004 1:12 PM
I think there are at least two possible scenarios:

1) a bunch of kids in college write cool software and document how 
they
do it, and band together with other interested parties to form a
consortium of people who build stuff that uses IPv4 as a bearer and 
run
their own protocols on top of it (e.g. IPNNG ).  Over time, people
recognize there may be economic gain in deploying IPNNG networks.

2) Some of the incumbents think about (1) and do the same.   They do 
it
with the two largest constituencies of data networking in the next 5
years (PCs in homes and cellphones).   They may have actually started
the development of same several/many years ago.  They might actually
think about using IPv6 in place of IPNNG because they are lazier than
bright college kids with time on their hands :-).

---

From: "Michel Py" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 20 Nov 2004 09:59:55 -0800

>> ISDN which 10 years ago was supposed to be the digital miracle that
>> would save us from the analog crap and take over the world
> Kai Henningsen wrote:
>... well, over here that is pretty much exactly what happened ...

Maybe traveling outside of your country would give you a better idea of
the meaning of "world". Go to south America. Go to Asia. Go to Africa.

> Over here, a standard ISDN line (two channels, three numbers)
> costs pretty much exactly the same as two analog lines (two
> channels, two numbers), and always has.

Which is twice as much as my single line, that gives me 3megabit of data
instead of 128kbit. Have a good day.

Michel.

---

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Sat, 20 Nov 2004 16:06:51 -0500 (EST)

> From: [email-masked] (Kai Henningsen)

    >> To put it another way (and mangle a well-known phrase in the process),
    >> if life gives you lemons, you can either sit around with a sour look
    >> on your face, or make lemonade. NAT's make me look sour too, but I'd
    >> rather make lemonade.

    > Except I cannot see a way to make lemonade from NATs.

There are all sorts of people doing so, in at least three projects I can think
of.

I'd name them, except that they probably don't need the attention - it could
well result in pressure to shut any IETF component down, because it's not the
One True Religion Which Is Going To Take Over The World.

Then again, they'd probably just happen outside the IETF purview anyway, the
way NAT did.

	Noel

---

From: "Michel Py" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 20 Nov 2004 19:42:16 -0800

> JFC (Jefsey) Morfin wrote:
> Is your IP address related in a way to your telephone
> number (what the ART (French FCC) questionnaire would
> imply as something to consider)?

No. The IP address is assigned from my ISP, the phone number by my phone company. I could choose another ISP if I wanted, my phone number and phone company staying the same.

The rest is for the numerous French readers only...sorry about the O/T.

De toute façon, ce que font les Français personne n'en a rien à foutre de ce coté de l'Atlantique.

> We are just seeing developping the situation we saw
> developping in early 80s, when Europe started to develop
> sure, stable, secure, professionnal services

Ah ouais ouais je m'en rappelle bien. Surtout de 81 à 95, avec le monopole de France Télécom qui a fait du minitel la 2ème source d'impôt après le revenu. "professionnal services" c'est comme ça que tu appelles la branlette assitée par minitel? Dans le milieu des années 90 la connexion à l'Internet coutaît 10 à 15 fois plus cher en France qu'au E.U. Faudrait arrêter de prendre les gens pour des cons.

Michel.

---

From: "John Loughney" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Nov 2004 09:17:44 +0200

Hi Paul,

As you are aware, just because it is possible doesn't make it a good idea.

John

------------------- Original message -------------------
Subject: Re: How the IPnG effort was started
From: "Paul Vixie" <[email-masked]>
Time: 11/20/2004 8:19 pm

let me apologize in advance.  it's saturday here and i'm behaving offtopicly.

> One question.  Governments don't assign street adresses at birth, why
> would they assign IP addresses? IP addresses are addresses, not Internet
> Identifiers.

well, here in the land of the PATRIOT act, there's been some discussion of
taking a DNA sample at birth and keeping it on file.  a one-way hash of the
numerical analysis of the sample would make a very unique value.  think of
it as the human equivilent of ethernet's 48-bit MAC address.  don't laugh,
this kind of thing plays really well in "the red states" where the executive
branch of the U.S. government is trusted beyond any possible reproach.

128 bits ought to be just about right.  so, ipv6 may yet come into vogue.
-- 
Paul Vixie

---

From: "Thomas, Shannal" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Nov 2004 21:13:06 -0500

I concur.

Thank you, 
Shannal L. Thomas 
Operations IT Architect 
Phone Number: 9046335847 
Mobile Number: 9046084478
Pager Number: 9044336333 
mailto:[email-masked] 

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] <[email-masked]>
To: Eric A. Hall <[email-masked]>; Christian de Larrinaga <[email-masked]>
CC: Noel Chiappa <[email-masked]>; [email-masked] <[email-masked]>; Peter Ford <[email-masked]>
Sent: Sun Nov 21 18:36:50 2004
Subject: Re: How the IPnG effort was started

At 21:31 21/11/2004, Eric A. Hall wrote:
>My feeling is that there has to be a group effort to change this, and it
>needs across-the-board cooperation. VCs need to be shown that
>bidirectional reachability is in their ultimate interest, in that it opens
>the door for new technologies and products. Small carriers need to be
>convinced that providing lots of addresses to each user won't bankrupt
>them or make them non-competitive (probably the place where government has
>the most to contribute in this whole thing is underwriting loans against
>IPv6 equipment in SOHO ISPs). Edge gear that provides NAT technology also
>needs to support v6 technolgy, and so does edge gear that doesn't. It
>needs to be a lot easier to get private routable space so that small orgs
>aren't implicitly forced to use NATs. Etcetera.

Full agreement with this. You can equate it for the average internet user 
to "there is a new internet, this is what it provides the old internet did 
not provide, make sure that your next purchases are compatible with the new 
internet".

The new features list must be appealing and true.

"IPv6 = IPv4 with larger addresses" does not make a new Internet. So either 
the IETF drops the issue, either the IETF defines a new internet, or the 
IETF does as Harald said: it bundles a precise desription of what IPv6 does 
and does not do and transfers the IPv6 product to people who will use it to 
build a new internet for the users. But the more the IETF keeps talking of 
IPv6, the more it delays its possible acceptance by the public. The last 10 
years since the IETF started discussing IPv6 14 years ago show it may 
continue for ever otherwise.

jfc