The world in which IPv6 was a good design (2017)
What a great post, about something I've been working on almost as long as Avery. I'm sad I missed it the first time it came around.<p>I was going to write a long response here, but I think I'll save that for a blog post (short summary: I disagree vehemently with what I believe the premise here to be, think that people shouldn't be waiting for the IETF to give them permission to build new network layers, am fairly certain there's no such thing as a "layering violation", and think overlay networks are/will-ultimately make IPv6 irrelevant). So on this thread I'll just pick some nits.<p>Ethernet networking is not as gross as it's made out here. ARP isn't entirely pointless! For instance, at the ISP I ran tech for in the 1990s, I was able to pretty seamlessly move our "data center" and corporate offices across Chicago without renumbering just by exploiting ARP (I wrote a dumb proxy ARP policy router). We did similar things to route traffic to the particular terminal services customers were dialing into, or to the ISDN router who's PRI happened to service a particular customer. An IP purist would object that we weren't using OSPF the way God intended us to, but it worked and was probably more reliable than the bona fide routing protocols we replaced that with.<p>This narrative also, I think, gives short shrift to DHCP, which does a lot more than pick IP addresses out for new endpoints, but also pretty much fully configures their IP connection. If you had to tech support 10,000 random customers in the era before DNS servers were transparently assigned at connection, you're not pining for the simple elegance of RARP.<p>Also: nobody should care about "IGMP-snooping bridges", since IP multicast is and always was hopeless.