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Vint Cerf On Broadband, Wireless, IPV6 And More
Carnage4Life writes: "There's a very interesting interview on Upside with Vint Cerf [?] who is currently senior vice president for Internet architecture and technology at MCI Worldcom.
In the article he discusses the problems facing the current specifications for wireless protocols, UUNet and how it will be adapted to face the future (maybe by becoming an optically switched network), his home wireless network, IPv6 [?] and his expectations of how broadband will change the Net. " Ya ever think what the world owes these guys? Wow.
I think the argument that customers do not want or need broadband is proven by the rapid uptake of internet-enabled mobile phones. These phones are enormously popular despite having neither the bandwidth nor storage capacity for the downloading of warez and pr0n.
There was one exchange that surprised me, however:
UTe: If all the ISPs are competing for address space, won't ISPs that want to offer always-on DSL or cable modem have a business incentive to go to V6?
Cerf: That's a good point, and I hadn't thought about making that point to the ISPs in fact, but that's a good one. You know, generically it's clear that you use up more address space with all these on. But it didn't occur to me until you just mentioned it that maybe that would be a good way of persuading other ISPs to go to V6.
Vint Cerf is an acknowledged genius. Isn't this "revelation" really just commen sense? You would think that in his position at MCI that he would have been making this point a couple of years ago to his own people.
At any rate, I enjoyed his views on the move to optical switching. That has been talked about in the past on slashdot and I hope to hear more about it in the future.
On an off-topic aside, I wonder what it must be to work at Microsoft. Per Vint Cerf's comment regarding their network speed, and their move to wireless LAN's, they must have a great working enviorment. At my current place of employment, I'm lucky if I ever get download speeds comparable to my home DSL service.
Did you read my post, smart ass? So FreeBSD is IPV6 ready, and so has been Linux for almost 2 years now ... so what? The only thing you'll be able to do with it is ping, FTP, and telnet. GREAT!!!
I think you've mis-remembered what Vint Cerf said - IPv4 was designed in the mid-70s; before that point, ARPANET was based on the NCP, a sort of combination of TCP and IP in one protocol (e.g. it did reliability at the router level).
The ARPANET grew well beyond 9 nodes even while still running NCP - it had 15 nodes by 1971, according to http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jea/papers/2Nets.html - and I'm sure the IPv4 ARPANET had many more than that.
Have you actually tried looking for IPv6 apps? For example, searching freebsd.org for ipv6 produces http://www.freebsd.org/ports/ipv6.html, which lists Apache, Zebra, and numerous IRC, email and news clients, not to mention GNU Emacs.
n ux-status-apps.html - elsewhere on that site there are pointers to Polish and Japanese distributions that integrate IPv6 support. Debian and Red Hat have also started IPv6 support work.
Most of these should port easily to Linux, but there's also a Linux IPv6 apps list at http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/status/IPv6+Li
Hint: do a web search before posting next time...
You've just changed the problem for the worse - now you have to allocate port numbers from the already cramped port number space (see www.iana.org for the list of known port numbers, which is not necessarily those used).
When you install a new fridge, you'll have to somehow work out the port numbers it uses and then allocate them to public port numbers on your NAT. This will be a manual process, and of course if you install two appliances that want to use the same port number, you end up having to allocate different port numbers, then remember them all...
IPv6 is so much easier it's not even funny - just plug a device in, it autoconfigures itself with IP addresses, finds out the nearest router, and then maybe hooks into SLP (service location protocol) or an LDAP directory so you can query your new fridge. Spot the lack of manual configuration...
so what? The only thing you'll be able to do with it is ping, FTP, and telnet
It's the fault of the stupid ass developers. Steven's has info on coding for IPv6, and probably has for years. Unfortunately we won't be seeing any new editions of his fantastic books.
But you don't really need to completely switch to IPv6 right away. It is straightforward to run v4 over v6, so you can run all 300 of you napster clients.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
We've been talking about running the Net to everything in the house, and the current IP protocol just can't handle it.
:-). A much more reasonable solution would be to set up the house as a private subnet behind a router/firewall combo. And in this case you only need one IP address per house.
Well, you probably don't want to make every appliance in your house freely accessible from the 'net (I wonder how much fun it will be to hack toasters... "Drat! My toast's burned again. Damn hackers!"
You want IPv6 mostly because it's a better protocol, not only because it has a larger address space.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Well, if they hadn't been silly and given away their work they might have made some money... oh well...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
... then there wouldn't be any internet and we wouldn't have to put up with your trolling.
--
E_NOSIG
It's a sad day when Slashdot feels it has to explain who Vint is. Vint is more than the guy who wrote TCP/IP; he's also one of the people who has lead and driven the Internet all these years, and worked to keep it open for all of us. He's also a really nice person to meet. He's one of the ubergeeks of the Net, alongside Jon Postel; one of the real greats.
Fortunaltely for us all, though, Vint is still very much with us!
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Actually to use four numbers in decimal format to represent 64 bits it would have to be four sets of 16 bits. A 16 bit number is from 0 to 65535 so the format would be:
65535.65535.65535.65535
a little unwieldy, no? And that's only 64 bits. IPv6 has 128 bits, I believe. So as you can see, sticking with the 4 place addresses and decimal format is really out of the question.
the only reason people want/need broadband internet access is for the downloading of pr0n, MP3 and warez
No way!! Do you know how fast you can reload Slashdot on an unloaded T3?? Hell, over DSL you can still get almost 100 refreshes a minute!
Can we say 'First Post Baybee!'?? C'mon now! Say it with me! 'First Post!!'
.sig: Now legally binding!
So it seems.
i would have thought the easiest and most backword compadable upgrade would to go from 255.255.255.255 to 64 bit 512.512.512.512 but ive seen mostly hex used in the docs that ive read.
Err...huh? 512 is 2^9, so you're proposing a 9*4 = 36-bit address. This would entail exactly as much work as going whole hog to a 64-bit address (2^16*4), as you'll still need 2 32-bit words for the address (which means absolutely everything has to be rewritten), but it would only double the address space. The reason those docs use hex is that it makes dealing with binary arithmetic easier, 0xFFFF is rounder than 65536.
Cheers,
-j.
It gets even worse when you realize all those companies that have 1 or more computers (IP Addresses) per employee. I guess all of them get to play games with their firewalls too!
CSG_SurferDude
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
The points he makes about IPV6 are extremely valid. We've been talking about running the Net to everything in the house, and the current IP protocol just can't handle it. 4,162,314,256 (254^4) addresses just is NOT enough. The only question is when will the current implementation fall apart due to scaling factors?
We've been hearing for years (At least since 1993) that we will run out of addresses in 2 years. Somebody always manages to come up with a work around, but at some point, we will run out of workarounds. It sounds like (finally) somebody is taking the bull by the horns and making it happen.
CSG_SurferDude
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
IPV6 does have lots of promise, but like the article said, there's not enough ppl damanding it.
Not to start a flame war, but when big companies like Nortel and AT&T produce decent products that will do Voice over IP with the services we're currently used to, you'll see a big demand for IPV6.
Companies are currently hiding before NAT Firewalls, which luckily is helping out the shortage to some degree, but once Voice over IP actually 'works', It'd be difficult not to have each station/phone not have a valid ip address.
Since the merger of Nortel and Bay Networks, I forsee some Voice over IP solutions coming out putting more of a damand on the Router Vendors for IPV6.
-Iota
God is Real Unless Declared Integer
First of all, I agree IPv6 has some nice features beyond address space - however, they are not all unique to IPv6, many are also in IPv4.
> Speed (simpler headers and simpler routing)
This should happen, but all the ASICs in existing routers need to be changed (unless the designers were very far-sighted and wasted some silicon on v6 support). Headers are bigger in v6, but it should be easier to do fast silicon because they are more regular (header options are faster to process too). As it happens, Intel's IXA and similar network processors may make it easy to do very fast routers using many parallel IXA-like chips (one vendor is doing a 180-IXA-chip router), for which IPv6 is simply a software upgrade.
IPv6 does make it easier to keep the size of core Internet routing tables down, but it seems that stub networks (e.g. enterprises or mobile phone networks) will migrate to v6 first, leaving core networks till last.
Probably speed will not be a deciding factor either way.
> Mobility (mobile IPv4 has relied on all stations involved having forwarding systems)
IPv6 has some advantages for mobility, because mobile IP was built into IPv6 hosts, but I can't remember what they are...
> Autoconfiguration (no more messing with DHCP or BOOTP configuration files)
Yes, but DHCP does more than ND (Neighbour Discovery) and RADV (Router Advertisments) - e.g. it configures DNS servers, domain names, etc. So DHCPv6 will still be needed in many environments.
> Security (IPSec is mandatory)
IPSec is mandatory, but it won't be turned on as default until someone solves the scalability and performance issues of IKE (Internet Key Exchange protocol, which authenticates both parties and sets up keying material). PKI is the only scalable way to do IKE currently, and PKI is a nightmare. Also, IKE has quite long delays (in the seconds) when setting up sessions, which is perhaps why it is typically used between IPSec gateways in tunnel mode.
> Optimised Connections (anycasting allows you to locate the nearest active server of the type you want)
Anycast is very cool, but not yet implemented in the IPv6 stacks I've seen (e.g. Linux). I think the IETF is still working on how this will be implemented.
> Quality of Service (another mandatory feature)
In what sense is QoS mandatory? I have Linux IPv6 set up at home, but I don't have RSVP installed. I work for a company that does QoS provisioning software, and the only QoS feature I can see in IPv6 that is different to IPv4 is the Flow Label (a 16 bit field that optimises the classification of app to app traffic flows, for use with RSVP). The Traffic Class field in IPv6 is identical in format to the TOS byte used in IPv4, and will use DiffServ in the same way.
> Multicasting (yet another mandatory feature)
Not sure exactly which bits are mandatory here, either. Multicast has been designed in, and is probably better supported in IPv6, though I've not looked at this in detail. Multicast routing protocols are a separate issue to IPv6 vs v4, they simply need updating to be able to route IPv6 multicast traffic. There is quite a lot of practical work in network management of multicast to be done still, whether on IPv6 or IPv4, though it is seeing some deployment. QoS is probably a pre-requisite for most people to deploy multicast - until you can control multicast apps' use of your network bandwidth, it's tough to allow them to be deployed except if you control the app servers very tightly.
I think the killer apps for IPv6 are:
* Address Space - this will drag people kicking and screaming into IPv6, in order to support always-on (good point from Vint Cerf about increased duration of IP address usage), lack of massively scalable NATs (let's see someone NAT 10 million cable TV users...), cellphones/smartphones with IP, home appliances, etc.
* Getting rid of NAT hassles - trying to get applications to work through NAT is a pain and sometimes impossible by design (e.g. IPSec transport mode). This is probably not a killer reason, but will help the decision, particularly where the end host must act as a server (e.g. sending short messages or news updates to a mobile phone).
* Mergers and Automatic Network Renumbering - if two companies merge, you currently have to NAT traffic between their networks, or go through the pain of manual renumbering. IPv6 lets you auto-renumber from a single point, everything 'just works'. Since 'within the firewall' applications in a merged network would still have to cross the NAT, and many protocols such as DCOM, CORBA and so on are NAT-hostile, this may be a strong motivation.
Ultimately, address space is the single biggest reason, particularly in Asia (which was late to the Internet and got a tiny allocation, allegedly smaller than some US companies have).
Ok, IPv4 uses 32-bit numbers (four dotted-bytes). IPv6 uses 16 dotted bytes (128 bits). I don't see why the current IPv4 network can't be treated as one network within IPv6, with 12 of the bytes set to a constant. That would make translation pretty easy, though of course software still has to be updated. I.e. 128.45.3.25 for example would map to 1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.128.45.3.25, and the range that's all ones would gradually expand to include other networks.
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
IPV6 has been out for years. 5 years? 6 years? And we still haven't got a transition strategy. I mean, the questions Cerf raises in this article are the same that 5 years ago! They are the same than in the IPNG RFC! The truth is: nobody has any idea how to do the transition.
Because, simply, the problem is NOT in infrastructure. Putting IPV6 in the backbones is almost trivial -- I mean, it could be done now already, you just encapsulate IPV4 in some way.
Now ... on the client side, it's another story. There is NOTHING ready on the client side. Absofuckinglutely nothing ready. Oh yeah, a whois client, and a name daemon. Maybe a telnet and FTP. And that's it.
Now, I have to ask myself, as a programmer, how would I do to support IPV6 in my programs? I don't have the slightest idea. I would'nt even be able to test them properly. Would there be an IPV6 compatible Apache, I would'nt be able to use a whole bunch of Perl modules with it. Of course, I would need an IPV6 enabled Perl. Etc, etc ...
This is a BIG problem. A lot of cash has to be thrown into this, like in a consortium or something .. but who will have the incentive to do this?
For what it's worth, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn came here to Montana a while back and in a small packed conference room at the university we were able to field some questions to these guys.
I was intrigued by what they had to say about the history of them developing TCP. The whole ipv4 that we have now comes from their original general assumption that at most only 9 network nodes at most (colleges, and research centers) would ever be using this silly thing. Now the much needed? shove towards ipv6 has even our toaster beeming with glee. What impressed me the most wasn't Vinton Cerf, but Robert Kahn. Cerf took the money and ran so to say. He has a BIG job at MCIWorldcom and is highly recoginized, but the real meat and potatoes programmer, Robert Kahn, does not have the big glitz job. He is quietly doing research as we code away at nights. This is the man that deserves recognition for the internet. He did the majority of the coding for the stack and was the driving force at it's implementation. Not to down on Cerf because they are both brilliant minds, but it seems the real coders out their never get their due share. For what it's worth...
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refrig: copy that toaster:2 transmitting butter now.
believing the big bang requires a certain amount of supernatural faith
"You've got your fiber layer, and you're going to carry some number of wavelengths on each fiber -- the term that is used is lambda for wavelength, so lambda means color, really. One fiber can carry a number of colors -- there could be as many as a hundred, maybe even more. Each color might be transporting as much as a terabit of capacity"I'm sorry, but did that give anyone else an erection, or is it just me?Sharkey
www.badassmofo.com
Usually, though, NAT and firewalling give you essentially the address space you want, with no extra deployment costs. Hence, the total lack of interest.
BUT, IPv6 also offers:
I dunno about you, but I think ISPs that can get a feature list like that would be far more interested than if they're told they get more IP space to sell. There are only a finite number of customers in an area.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)