NANOG members;
First things first - PLEASE NOTE: This is just an opinion from one old IT guy who used to have to use a dial-up connection from a small town in central Texas to connect to my "ISP" (term used loosely for the very early 1990's) in Dallas, Oklahoma City, and sometimes Shreveport, LA with my trusty Slackware box (with its screaming i386 processor/2MB RAM and 900 BAUD modem) just to get my FidoNet/UUCP email fix (just for those of us who remember the old "bang path" email via UUCP!) via UUNet. This passion grew into running multi-node Wildcat! BBS systems in early 1992 to small ISP's in the mid-1990's until which time my Southwestern Bell phone bills and customer churn killed this hobby quick and I had to turn to a full time IT professional to feed the family.
As the Internet continues to grow exponentially with the explosion of the IoT movement, let's see how every one's IPv4 boxes connect to an IPv6 only network (or their refrigerator) without the support of the IT community such as NANOG members to mangle the packets and push their packets through some sort of IPv4 to IPv6 transitional technology.
This thread is really getting on my nerves and old eyes as it fills my mailbox daily and I am sure I am not the only one.
Between the content providers that are complaining about there is not enough IPv6 traffic to justify the migration, vendors pushing products that do not support IPv6, to the carriers that do not support dual stack to the last mile customer, then the end-user that you hear saying "IPvWhaaaat?" on the end of the phone; it is up to us, the network engineers, network administrators, "Packet Pushers", and whatever title is bestowed upon us, to just make it work. That is what I hear day in and day out; "The sales team said it could be done so what is the problem? Get if fixed or we will find someone who can!" and I am in the public education space!
I feel for the network engineers, NOC operators, and cable/fiber teams of our great nation.
Just as an FYI: I remember when IPv4 was a "Fad" and took patience of Job (the biblical Job, not job) just to get the Win32's loaded on Windows 3.1 so it would handle a 32-bit address. This is not including the mastery of the AT commands that Trumpet Winsock required since each manufacturer put their own spin in their interpretation of what AT command should do what (I still can remember what "squeals and tones" were negotiating at what speed and the occasional nightmare that ATZ & AT&E1 just sit there with a blank terminal and silent modem).
Netflix can ban and block all they want.
Carriers can complain "Streaming media is using too much bandwidth", never mind that each and every one pays for transit bandwidth, even public schools!
We must remember our technology history;
- Ma Bell said that they were too big to be broken up
- IBM would always be king
- Unix such as System V/BSD/Open Systems/AIX/SCO/HP-UX/Sun Solaris would each rule the world.
- and my personal favorite - "No one would want to own a personal PC!"
Bottom line, whether we keep pushing onward with what we have, IPv4 and IPv6 or we adopt another protocol to replace the archaic IPv4.
The Layer 1-7 technologies which we all work with daily, were never designed with security as the primary concern when RFC 675 was created in 1974 by the Network Working Group with Vince Cerf and others.
I do not think Vince Cerf and the other members of the Network Working Group had Cryptolocker, Ransomware, on his mind when TCP/IP was "born" from this RFC.
We must keep pressing onward and pushing the envelope of our segment of the modern and some not so modern Internet.
Where would we be without the Vince Cerf's, Steve Job's, Bill Gates', Paul Allen's, DARPA, US Military, the fiber tech's that run, fuse, and terminate miles of fiber while others sleep, the network techs, net admins, programmers, and too many others to mention. Where would and would there be IPv4, IPv6, or an Internet at all.
Whether we are doing this as our jobs or as a hobby, driven out of passion for technology.
We owe the next generation(s) the benefit of our best work so that they have to opportunity to do their best as well.
Thank you NANOG community for the platform for me to express this rant/reflections; and the freedoms our country provides so I can do so freely.
Curtis Starnes
Senior Network Administrator
Granbury Independent School District
Granbury, Texas
IEEE Member since 2012
(Just for the record, these are my opinions and ramblings/rants, not my employers)