[ih] Memories of Flag Day?

Fri Aug 11 07:50:36 PDT 2023

or easier: ping6 www.cnn.com <http://www.cnn.com/>

or on your smartphone go to arin.net <http://arin.net/> and see what IP address it shows for you  (turn off wifi first)

or on your smartphone go to  test-ipv6.com <http://test-ipv6.com/>

Scott

> On Aug 11, 2023, at 10:21 AM, Andrew G. Malis via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> I just mistyped - I meant to type "ping6", not "ping". So try "ping6
> 2001:4860:4860::8888"
> 
> Cheers,
> Andy
> 
> 
> On Fri, Aug 11, 2023 at 9:53 AM Andrew G. Malis <agmalis at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Jack,
>> 
>> If you have a smartphone, then you're using IPv6.
>> 
>> You may be using IPv6 in your home network as well. Try opening a terminal
>> and typing "ping 2001:4860:4860::8888". If that works, then you're using
>> IPv6.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Andy
>> 
>> 
>> On Fri, Aug 11, 2023 at 8:17 AM vinton cerf via Internet-history <
>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> On Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 12:16 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
>>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> I've been wondering if the IETF is still effective today.   It's been
>>>> trying for decades to cajole the Internet into adopting IPV6.
>>>> 
>>>> Instead we now live with a multi-protocol Internet, and the complexity
>>>> and problems that come with it.  In the 90s, the world embraced TCP and
>>>> got rid of all the other protocols.   As I understand it, the IETF now
>>>> "puts new technology on the shelf, where anyone is free to pick it up
>>>> and use it" - quite different from the management process that
>>>> orchestrated "Flag Day" and managed the evolution of the Internet
>>>> technology in the field.   Some people have "picked up" IPV6, but many
>>>> have not.   I can't tell if I have. I also have no idea how I would do
>>>> it.   Or why I should.
>>>> 
>>> users should not have to care or notice.
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Perhaps someone can fill in the history of how the Internet got from
>>>> then to now?  I sent an email on this topic a week or so ago, but it
>>>> seems to have never come out of the elists.isoc.org system.   FYI, here
>>>> it is, in case you didn't get it:
>>>> 
>>>> --------------------
>>>> 
>>>> IIRC, the "Flag Day" was one piece of a larger plan.
>>>> 
>>>> I don't recall the timing of the pieces - it was 40+- years ago. But
>>>> there was also a bureaucratic action in that same era to declare TCP a
>>>> "DoD Standard", and require its presence in DoD procurements - any
>>>> computer system in a DoD purchase using networking had to have TCP.
>>>> Also, there was a program created by NIST (or was it still NBS then?) to
>>>> provide a test suite for conformance to the TCP standard.   So any
>>>> contractor who wanted to sell something to DoD had to have TCP, and by
>>>> going through the NIST test suite they could get a certificate proving
>>>> that they had TCP implemented properly. I don't remember which of these
>>>> happened in what order or how it related to Flag Day (1/1/1983).   But
>>>> it all seems to me to be part of some larger plan to migrate the
>>>> admittedly small existing network to a new standard.
>>>> 
>>>> At BBN, we went through the NIST process to become a certified testing
>>>> lab, so we could run the tests for anyone who needed it and issue
>>>> conformance certificates.  I'm not sure how many other such labs there
>>>> were.  We also provided consulting services to help people understand
>>>> TCP and figure out why their software didn't pass the tests.   This was
>>>> never seen as any kind of "money maker", but seemed important to do it,
>>>> since we had access to IMPs and such which made it easy to set up a
>>>> small test lab.
>>>> 
>>>> I never saw "the plan", but it struck me that there was a lot going on
>>>> behind the scenes to make things like this happen, outside of the
>>>> research or Arpanet community or technology per se, in order to
>>>> facilitate the introduction of TCP to DoD.  Maybe someone else knows
>>>> more about who was involved in all that activity.   Somebody made those
>>>> things happen...
>>>> 
>>>> In retrospect, it seems to me that such "soft technology" (conformance
>>>> certification etc.) was complementary to the technical work documented
>>>> in the stream of RFCs, and was important to making TCP "real", and
>>>> establishing a bit of regulation around its use "in the field" with
>>>> mechanisms such as "Flag Day" to enforce a migration from old to new.
>>>> 
>>>> The Internet is now arguably world class "infrastructure".   But, IMHO,
>>>> it still lacks a lot of the mechanisms that surround other, older,
>>>> infrastructures that move things from point A to point B - e.g.,
>>>> highways, electrical service, railroads, airplanes, etc.   The early
>>>> work on things like Flag Day, TCP Conformance Tests, DoD
>>>> Standardization, and such were the beginning of adding a management
>>>> structure around the Internet technology.
>>>> 
>>>> As near as I can tell, no such effort continues today.   It may have
>>>> faded away back in the 1980s, before TCP became the dominant
>>>> technology.   Perhaps the Internet is just too new for such machinery to
>>>> be created?
>>>> 
>>>> Other infrastructures have gone through stages as rules, regulations,
>>>> and practices congeal.  In the early days of electricity it was common
>>>> for accidents to occur, causing fires, deaths, or other disasters.
>>>> Electrical Codes, safety mechanisms, licensing, rules and practices have
>>>> made using electricity much less dangerous.  The same is true of
>>>> highways, railroads, etc.
>>>> 
>>>> I've always wondered what happened to that "management framework" that
>>>> started in the 1980s around the Internet infrastructure, and why it
>>>> hasn't resulted in mechanisms today to make the Internet "safer".   I
>>>> suspect all infrastructures need things like electrical codes, UL
>>>> testing, development of fuses, circuit breakers, GFIs, etc., that are
>>>> used in the electrical infrastructure.   But nobody seems to be doing
>>>> that for the Internet?
>>>> 
>>>> There's lots of such mechanisms I know about in the US to manage
>>>> infrastructures.  My car occasionally gets a government-mandated
>>>> recall.  Airplanes get grounded by FAA.  Train crashes are investigated
>>>> by the Department of Transportation.   Other governments have similar
>>>> mechanisms to manage infrastructure.
>>>> 
>>>> Has any Internet component, hardware or software, ever been
>>>> recalled...?   "Flag Day" was the last enforcement action I can
>>> remember.
>>>> 
>>>> Jack Haverty
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> --------------------
>>>> 
>>>> On 8/9/23 18:50, John Gilmore via Internet-history wrote:
>>>>> I had a "tourist" account at the MIT-AI system running ITS, back in
>>> the
>>>>> NCP days.  I used to log in to it over a TIP that had RS232 cables
>>>>> quietly connecting it to a Telenet node.  I'd dial in to a local
>>> Telenet
>>>>> access point, connect to the cross-connect's node and port, and be
>>>>> talking to a TIP, where I'd "@o 134" to get to MIT-AI.
>>>>> 
>>>>> When NCP was turned off on the Flag Day, that stopped working.  At
>>> MIT,
>>>>> as I understand it, they decided not to implement TCP/IP for ITS.  The
>>>>> workaround for tourists like me was to borrow someone's account at
>>>>> MIT-OZ, which had TCP support and could also talk to ITS (over
>>>>> Chaosnet?).  So I'd connect from the TIP using TCP to MIT-OZ, and then
>>>>> connect to MIT-AI.  It worked OK, though I had to remember when (and
>>> how
>>>>> many times) to double the escape characters.  My access was via a
>>> dialup
>>>>> modem, which was probably the slowest part of the whole system.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Moving to the present day...
>>>>> 
>>>>> I continue to see Internet old-timers who long nostalgicly for
>>> somebody,
>>>>> somewhere, to force a "flag day" to shut down IPv4.  The IETF has
>>>>> unfortunately been captured by these folks, who object to making even
>>>>> tiny improvements to IPv4 protocols on the grounds that "we shouldn't
>>>>> make it easier to use IPv4 because that would reduce the urgency of
>>>>> switching to IPv6".  It is taken for granted in much of IETF that
>>> "IPv4
>>>>> is dead, or it should be" even though it carries far more global daily
>>>>> traffic, to a far broader range of locations, than IPv6 does.  There
>>> was
>>>>> even a move to "declare IPv4 Historic" which would officially
>>> recommend
>>>>> that nobody use it any more.  That draft RFC was approved in 2017 by
>>> the
>>>>> Sunset4 working group on a vote of three zealots, but it got killed
>>> once
>>>>> saner heads looked at the implications.  For a discussion of that
>>>>> history, and pointers to the source materials, see section 4 of:
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-schoen-intarea-ietf-maintaining-ipv4-01.txt
>>>>> 
>>>>> (The IETF, predictably, declined to support the publication of an RFC
>>>>> describing this history or succinctly stating that IETF would continue
>>>>> maintaining IPv4.)
>>>>> 
>>>>>      John
>>>>> 
>>>> 
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