Wildcards in reverse DNS

[Karl Auer]

On Thu, 2007-01-04 at 08:25 -0500, dhottinger at harrisonburg.k12.va.us
wrote:
> Great for the city.  But if we are an island in the middle of all ipv4  
> routers, all the traffic has to be encapsulated in ipv4 packets.   
> Hence all speed increases are null because everything suddenly becomes  
> ipv4 instead of ipv6.

The islands will join up. It's a chicken and egg thing. IPv4 started out
as islands too, don't forget, and it had competition from many other
protocols, whereas IPv6 has competition really only from IPv4.

People can win a lot from IPv6 without having IPv6 connectivity to the
Internet. Autoaddressing, IPSEC, no broadcasts, VAST private address
space, etc.

>   I think the main reason they went with ipv6 was  
> because of the availibility of ipv4 addresses.  Although NATING would  
> handle the issue quite well.

NAT is a Bad Thing for the Internet. It is a classic
treat-the-symptom-not-the-disease response, and while it has saved our
bacon for now, the waters are still rising...

>   I wouldnt think that every device would need a public ip.

Even quite small organisations are running out of *private* address
space. IPv6 delivers a vast amount of private address space too...

Don't fall for what Richard Dawkins calls the Argument from Personal
Incredulity. The fact that you don't see it, don't get it, don't
understand it, don't believe it, don't want it or don't need it doesn't
prove anything. We cannot imagine what things the future will dream up
to do with almost unlimited address space.

>   Also IPv4 addresses were handed out quite willy  
> nilly.  Some institutions own huge blocks of addresses and dont use  
> them.  I have 3 class C's and only use a fraction of them.  But, I  
> wont give them up.

That's the problem, thanks for being part of it. There are people
sitting on largely empty /8 (!) and /16 networks who won't give them up
either.

>   Although my ISP is really eager for me to give  
> some up.  If the internet continues to grow, IPv6 will just be a  
> stopgap measure.  Those addresses are not infinite.

No, and there are already disturbing signs both of incompetence in
applying for stupidly large spaces and worse, of incompetence in
allocating stupidly large spaces. And of outright land-grabbing. The US
Government, for example, wanted an IPv6 /8 network. All for itself.

We will need to be *extremely* profligate with addresses to put a dent
in that vast address space. Sadly some people are already being
extremely profligate.

Regards, K.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)                   +61-2-64957160 (h)
http://www.biplane.com.au/~kauer/                  +61-428-957160 (mob)