On Wed, Aug 14, 2019, 10:34 AM James Knott via talk, <
talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On 2019-08-14 10:28 AM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> I don't know the reason for this.
The motive is to squeeze a bit more life out of IPv4, when they should
be putting the effort into moving to IPv6. IPv4 hasn't been adequate
since it became necessary to use NAT to overcome the address shortage.
This was a hack that caused it's own problems and now we have hacks on
hacks, to try to keep IPv4 going long after it's best before date.
Not to be trite here but "hacks upon hacks," I think that just about sums up most operating systems built since Bell pulled support for MULTICS. It was then that Ken Thompson developed his own file and paging systems to fulfill his desire to write a Space Travel video game.
Perhaps the hardest objective in any large scale change, is overcoming the status quo. For most business's, the operational costs for personnel training alone could be staggering. Business is hard wired to defray and defer costs. That is till necessity rears its head, then they will scream, shout, scramble and hack.
I'm a operational manual reader, out of both interest and necessity, so I came across this helpdesk manual for residential ISP's with tests for ipv6 use.
I think that parallel development, for the foreseeable future as the current literature reflects, is the business watchword of the day. Ostensibly this is to keep costs down to the minimum.
The last 18 months have posed significant hurdles for IT business's, as more and more latent defects, or undocumented hashes if you prefer, have come to light.
It is the nature of science to slowly and deliberately entertain new ideas which challange the status quo of currently held beliefs. It is the nature of business to do the same, albeit for different reasons.
Recognizing there is a problem is one thing, fixing systemic industry wide issues is another thing. From the beginning ipv4 was a DARPA networking test bed. Who knew at that time that personal home networks would become the titanic engines of industry that they are today.
As a final thought, often the needs of the developing world are overlooked by our more developed societies. It could hardly be fair to to those comnunities, which have gone to the trouble and expense of joining the connected world to say to them now, all that equipment we juat sold you a few years ago is obsolete now, you will have to upgrade or lose service.
My 0.2c FWIW