[clug] IPv6

[David Austin]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 5:57 PM, Paul Wayper <paulway at mabula.net> wrote:

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> On 01/12/2011 11:47 PM, David Austin wrote:
> > Perhaps DoD early adoption is a reflection of their propensity to
> > adopt sh*t standards all over the place...
> >
> > (not impressed that IPv6 is not backwards compatible)
>
> And how would you make it backward compatible?
> <snip>
>
What you're probably talking about is 'I want my IPv6-only machine to be
> able
> to access IPv4 addresses with no additional hardware, routing or proxies'.
>

Sort of.  Certainly it should be possible with a little effort on the part
of
my ISP.  Also it should be possible to upgrade backbones to IPv6 and
still carry IPv4 traffic within that.  Requiring that significant sections
of a deliberately anarchic thing to all decide to switch over at once seems
hopeful.


> <snip>
> give one the false impression that the reason you can't have backward
> compatibility is because some back-room boffins didn't think hard enough
> about
> it.  I personally doubt this.  There are plenty of good reasons for not
> being
> backward compatible, starting with it being an awful kludge however you do
> it,
> continuing through trying to avoid some of the naive assumptions about how
> networks theoretically worked, and ending at the practical abilities of
> modern-day technology and modern routing implementations.
>
>
Yes it's an awful kludge to think about.  But there must be O(billions)
of IPv4 devices out there.  And I do have doubts about IPv6 boffins.
See SMTP or voluntary TCP backoff windows.

Regards,
David