AWS and their billions in IPv4 addresses

Re:AWS and their billions in IPv4 addresses by bluGill on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @03:05PM (#24841175)

I worked on the first switch ever sold in 1995 - it didn't support IPv6, but I assure you all the engineers working on it were aware of IPv6 and assumed IPv4 would be long gone by today. For reference back then we were more concerned about how the switch handled IPX (Novell Netware) than IP. Everything else since then was designed in the era where IPv6 is coming soon enough that you ensure you can support it with a software update if you don't support it.

That isn't to say IPv6 couldn't have been done in a backward compatible way. I can think of ways to do that, and dozens of pros and cons - even though I haven't been in networking for 20 years and so I've forgotten a lot.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AWS and their billions in IPv4 addresses by TheDong on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @04:14PM (#24841908)

> ensure you can support it with a software update if you don't support it

For hardware, that doesn't sound that different from not supporting it. Convincing end-users of internet hardware to update their switch's firmware is hard. Ubiquiti has done a pretty good job of making updates actually doable, but for most hardware I doubt it'd happen more quickly than the hardware itself would fail.

> That isn't to say IPv6 couldn't have been done in a backward compatible way. I can think of ways to do that

Can you explain any of those ways?

[ Parent | on HN ]