How Engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. Saved Ethernet

Re:How Engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. Saved Ethernet by mixmastamyk on Tuesday April 09, 2024 @08:35PM (#39985756)

Well, you asked for a design and I gave one. Any change is ultimately going to require a software rollout. (I suppose you could squeeze a byte into an underused header in the short term.)

The argument upthread was that v6 was too big a change, resulting in a slower than anticipated rollout. And perhaps merely shoehorning another byte or two into v4, say v4.1 would be easier and more quickly accepted by the world.

Possibly—I'm not strongly arguing for either, besides the fact that v6 didn't solve any problems I was having besides the world running out of addresses. It's a lot harder to grok at a glance though.

Also, a smaller change wouldn't break existing networks, just like the existence of v6 didn't break v4.

(This is basically the Python 2 to 3 transition argument in global form.)

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Re:How Engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. Saved Ethernet by bluGill on Tuesday April 09, 2024 @08:42PM (#39985805)

so we did what you proposed. Ipv6 is simpler than ipv4. You can handwave details different but they all suffe, from the same problem of rollout.

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Re:How Engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. Saved Ethernet by mixmastamyk on Tuesday April 09, 2024 @11:13PM (#39986620)

You have a unique definition of simple.

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Re:How Engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. Saved Ethernet by bluGill on Wednesday April 10, 2024 @09:53AM (#39990757)

I have actually seen the protocol specs for both IPv4 and IPv6. IPv6 is simpler than IPv4 - but you probably never looked into how to do source address routing which you are required to support when you implement IPv4 even though nobody uses it (If you try I'm sure that the large backbone providers will block it)

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