Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Ben Franksen via Core-talk <core-talk at aps.anl.gov> · Wed, 17 Mar 2021 19:21:26 +0100

Am 16.03.21 um 19:33 schrieb Johnson, Andrew N.:
> On Mar 16, 2021, at 4:32 AM, Ben Franksen
> <benjamin.franksen at helmholtz-berlin.de> wrote:
>> 
>> Am 16.03.21 um 09:44 schrieb Zimoch Dirk (PSI) via Core-talk:
>>> On Fri, 2021-03-12 at 03:34 +0000, Johnson, Andrew N. via
>>> Core-talk wrote:
>>>> https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/M-21-07.pdf
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> 
- Andrew
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> TL;DR Do we have a problem?
>> 
>> I may be wrong, but AFAIU only facilities in the US have a problem.
>> They need to convince their over-bosses that they get an
>> exception.
> 
> Sorry, but if we don’t consider how we can add support for IPv6 soon
> EPICS will probably no longer be eligible for use by the kinds of
> large experimental facilities that have funded its development to
> date, and it will die. I’m not saying it’s urgent, but we should
> start to plan for it.
> 
> That OMB memo was signed by the previous US administration, but I’m
> pretty sure it wasn’t developed by their political appointees, and
> IMHO hoping that the new administration will rescind it would be a
> mistake. Existing DOE facilities will almost certainly be getting
> exemptions of some kind, but EPICS doesn’t have a monopoly in this
> field and if we don’t support it many future Government-funded
> projects will have to find an alternative since IPv6-only networking
> will most likely become a non-negotiable requirement at some point.
> This isn’t likely to be unique to the US either.
> 
> IPv6 use has been growing and many cellphone networks now depend on
> it (that DJB article which Ben found has a last-modified date of
> August 2003). There’s a page with links to several adoption
> statistics websites at 
> https://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/ipv6/statistics/

I was linking that page as proof that the problems with IPV6 adoption
were well known for a long time. Now, 20 years later, we are forced (by
government decree, no less) to adopt an IPV6-*only* policy just because
"offering V4 and V6 in parallel is just too difficult" (quoting from
memory).

I said "we" above and I mean it. My response to Dirk wasn't meant to
imply that facilities outside the US can lay back and sit this out! *Of
course* other governments around the world will follow the example of
the US, as they do with everything else.

Cheers
Ben
-- 
I would rather have questions that cannot be answered, than answers that
cannot be questioned.  -- Richard Feynman

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System