[very nice cross posting going on here ;) ] On Sun, 2006-04-16 at 12:10 -0400, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote: [... large snip about trying to bash shim6 which is not finalized yet, thus how can you bash it ? Note: extra sarcasm included in this post. Eat the eggs with salt. ...]
Oh, and one thing I should have said last time: Technical arguments are important, but they are only part of the decision process.
In other words: "You are right with your arguments, but I just threw your args away as they are futile based on the comparison of money earned this way or the other."...
People (like me) have explained that the Internet is a business, and in addition to being .. technically unsavory to many people, shim6 is simply not viable in a business setting.
And as you will only care for your business for the coming 10 or maybe 20 years you really can't care what happens to the internet afterward. The idea of IPv6 is (still not was) to have it around for quite some time longer than the lifespan of IPv4. Fortunately, the PI thing is far from the end of the world and will only help catch on, see below. Of course any vendor will love the idea of having to do another IP version of course, bring in the cash ;)
Neither backbone operators (vendors) nor end users (customers) are warming to the idea. Just the opposite. (At least in general, the one-in-a-million end user with DSL and cable who likes the idea 'cause he can't figure out how to spell "B-G-P" or doesn't want to pay for it is irrelevant.)
Irrelevant for you as they don't give you money. Indeed, you only look at your own business interrest (and who can blame you for that ;) (Once though the internet was there for the masses and not only for the ones with cash)
So how do you get a technology widely accepted when the majority of people involved do not think it is the best technical solution? When the majority of vendors supposed to implement it will not do so for technical -and- business reasons.
There is for you indeed a business reason to not like it: the end-site won't have any reason to stick to the upstream. Which is indeed a bad business for many of the 'vendors' you mean. As Eliot Lear also said very clearly: Thanks for lining the vendors and all the stockholders pockets ;) That is in the long run, most likely in the coming 10-20 years the IPv6 routing tables will not have 'exploded' yet, but the folks selling equipment and having stocks of those venders after that most likely will have a nice retirement fund. Thanks to you! Nevertheless, the PI thing is really *not* a bad thing, as it can be used as an identifier for shim6, which is actually perfect. It just saves on having to do a complete policy process for getting address space for this type of usage. But thanks to this, this won't be needed and thus in the end anybody who can get PI can use a shim6-alike solution and won't have any problem with the upstream that actually wanted to lock them in by letting them pay loads for an entry in the BGP tables. Thus people voting for PI, thanks for helping shim6 or another solution in that space, progress a lot :) And finally on a much brighter note, especially for the shim6 folks: I know of quite a number of endsites that don't want to use BGP, the don't care about an entry in the routing tables, but do want to be multihomed in an easy way and also want to have 1 unique address space on their local network, but do want to use different upstreams. Shim6 will be perfect for this and thanks to the PI space their is the perfect identifier. Greets, Jeroen (being sarcastic, I guess the amounts of chocolate did it, but hey, I have a great excuse being only 7 mins away from the Lindt&Sprungli factory outlet, happy easter! ;)