Re: Will IPv4 be formally deprecated when IPv6 is good enough ?

On 14 okt 2003, at 16:13, Mark Smith wrote:

> A little later, it occured to me that maybe what the market might be 
> missing is a statement from the IETF, IESG and/or IAB, that IPv6 is 
> now *ready*, and can be deployed in production via the available 
> transition mechanisms, slowly replacing IPv4 (+ NAT). Maybe the market 
> is really just waiting for the engineers behind IPv6 to say "it's 
> basically finished, its now ready for you to use, pending your 
> applications being ported".

But unfortunately, IPv6 _isn't_ ready. See the site local debate. See 
the flowlabel goings-on. See the multihoming problem. I'm not sure what 
the status of DHCPv6 is except that I haven't seen it in the wild 
anywhere yet. And there are no reasonable other ways to dynamically 
find DNS servers in IPv6. That's all protocol stuff. Hopefully all of 
this can be fixed in the not too distant future. But there there is 
another extremely important issue that (in my not so humble opinion) 
must absolutely be fixed before making any such statement: the DNS. It 
is currently impossible to resolve DNS names over IPv6 transport, 
because the roots don't support IPv6 transport, none of the major gTLDs 
supports IPv6 transport and very few, if any, TLDs support IPv6 glue 
records for delegated domains.

I think we need IPv6 roots and at least one significant gTLD that fully 
supports IPv6, so that two IPv6-only sites can resolve each other's 
names and communicate without any IPv4 dependencies. We also need 
IPv6-only hosts to dynamically find DNS servers (or define some site 
anycast DNS addresses that can be hardcoded), have addresses that 
remain present/stable regardless of ISP connectivity. Some good 
multihoming wouldn't suck either, but since most end-users don't 
multihome this doesn't have to be a hard requirement. But with this 
other stuff in place such an announcement would be possible.

>    * configuration ease -  The protocol must permit easy and largely
>      distributed configuration and operation. Automatic configuration 
> of
>      hosts and routers is required.

This test fails because of lack of dynamic DNS discovery.

>    * mobility - The protocol must support mobile hosts, networks and
>      internetworks.

Hm...

> That brings to my mind two questions

> a) Is IPv4 going to be formally deprecated when IPv6 is good enough? 
> If so, are the related IPv4 NAT RFCs also going to be deprecated at 
> that time ?

Would it be a smart move to deprecate something that 100% of the 
systems connected to the internet use?

> b) Is IPv6 good enough yet ?

Not yet... but we're making progress.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
IETF IPv6 working group mailing list
ipv6@ietf.org
Administrative Requests: https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipv6
--------------------------------------------------------------------