Re: draft-ietf-dnsop-v6-name-space-fragmentation-01.txt

[Måns Nilsson <mansaxel@sunet.se>]

--On Wednesday, March 20, 2002 14:09:06 -0600 Rob Austein
<sra+dnsop@hactrn.net> wrote:
>   Start out with all zones (v4 or v6 content) available via v4
>   transport.
> 
>   Use dual stack resolvers (or forwarders or whatever) in IPv6 land
>   until IPv4 is dead.  In latter stages, this probably means tunneling
>   IPv4 addresses into IPv6-only clouds for this purpose.
> 
>   Eventually this will start to break down.
> 
>   Customers who are just in the v6 cloud (lack access to dual stack
>   resolver for whatever reason) will start complaining about not being
>   able to reach sites (will look like ordinary failures).  V4-based
>   servers will push their zones into v6 space as well, if they care,
>   if not, perhaps we don't care about them.
> 
>   Servers that are just in v6 land will start popping up when v4
>   addresses get really hard to obtain.  Clients stuck in v4 land will
>   whine to their ISPs, who will install translation boxes or will
>   upgrade the customer's software or whatever so that customer is now
>   on v6.
> 
>   Eventually the number of people remaining in the v4-only cloud will
>   not be worth supporting, and will be orphaned.  This will suck, but
>   it's what happens with every technology change.  So we live with it.
> 
> Johan and I expect to do some work on further detailing the problem.
> So please read the above as an attempt to provoke discussion, and
> perhaps as a dead-simple model against which others can be measured
> (that is: anything that's obviously even worse than this proposal
> probably need not be considered).

I think we can summarize this to "we need to surf precisely on top of the
big transition wave, not braking it, perhaps gently speeding it up". 

The path lined out here seems to be -- at a glance -- a viable
"minimal-pain" transition model. The crucial thing is that we need to
embrace the eventual reality of breakage for v4-only systems, as a natural
consequence of progress. After all, who expects a local-battery,
non-rotary-dial 1920's phone[0] to support direct-dial? 

-- 
Måns Nilsson            Systems Specialist
+46 70 681 7204         KTHNOC
                        MN1334-RIPE

[0] http://www.beredskapstid.org/bilder/originalbilder/falttelefon.jpg