Slashdot Mirror
IPv6 Ready For A Spin
ibjhb writes: "Sprint and WorldCom are itching to launch the IPv6. This will provided us with the 'zillions' of extra addresses not provided by the current IPv4. There's other capabilities, including increased sercurity. ZDNet carries the story ..." Seems like we've been talking about IPv6 for as long as I've been using IPv4.
Sorry, but we really do need more public addresses. As you note, public servers need public addresses. And if you want to receive incoming calls on your IP cell phone, it'll need one too. There are 6 billion people on the planet and only 4 billion IPv4 addresses. So even if we could get good utilization of the IPv4 address space (a hopeless cause), there's no where near enough.
IPv6 provides a large enough address space to give several thousand addresses to every square inch of the earth's surface. Switching to IPv6 really will save the day.
And complete together with the maniacal laughter.
Apparently, the moderators like it when you talk dirty to them.
>> According to the always pragmatic Linus T., Linux is an OS.
Well, since he's the author of the kernel, he gets to name the kernel, but I think RMS, head of GNU, who created the OS, gets to name the OS, and he calls it GNU.
RMS *AND* Linus refer to GNU/Linux as GNU/linux
If I replace just the kernel with HURD it becomes GNU/HURD
If "Linux" supports something, you're referring to the kernel. Linus used GNU before Linux was around. He created Linux WITH GNU and used GNU as the OS for the Linux kernel.
GNU can be used as the OS for MANY kernels.
GNU was not made for linux, linux was made for GNU. GNU was made for HURD, Linux is being "borrowed" by GNU untill HURD is finished.
Its in the manifesto, read it, its on your LINUX cd, along with the GPL'ed GNU OS.
The combination of DDNS (Dynamic DNS) and DHCP could be very cool. You'd never have to do any TCP/IP configuration on your machine (thanks to DHCP), but you'd still get the luxury of having the same DNS name all the time (even if the actual IP address changes from time to time).
Actually, typically the difference between residential and business service is quality of service and support, not the bundled services.
For example, if you were to get T1 service and it were to go down at 2 am, you could call them up and have them run a diagnostic on your line while you on the phone and get them to come out in the middle of the night and fix it if there was line trouble.
Also, several providers have different guarantees and quality of service ratings between their business and residential packages. Some go as far as to build a completely seperate network which has a lower saturation rate for business customers than residential customers.
As far as DSL is concerned, consumers typically get ADSL while businesses get SDSL. While bandwidth might be bandwidth, the latency differences between the two types of circuits is much different. Telcos have been running HDSL in place of T1 circuits for some time now when it's cost effective to do so (SDSL is sometimes referred to as HDSL-2).
Also note that more IPs given to a customer implies that the customer will have more machines on their network acting as servers and more bandwidth usage on average. It's a cheap way of doing accounting.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
but if they want a TLA (/48), it's gonna cost them $20,000 per year. For a /35 or anything less, it will cost $2,500.
That's reversed! the number is the number of bits in the network number. The subnet gets the rest. So a /35 costs $20000.
At any rate, a /48 is a huge space to work with (80 bits)! That's 2^48 entire internets!.
In practice, that is sub-divided into 16 bits for subnets (an entire class B sized space) and the rest is per-host (enough to comfortably hold the entire current internet 2^32 times!).
At that rate, they DO grow on trees.
The easiest way to engineer that is to buy a /48 and divide that into 16232 regional offices. Each office then can feel free to accept as many customers as it wants (and has capacity for) since the 64bit host address is guarenteed to be unique worldwide.
The real question is which providers will be stingy and try to screw the customer for every last penny, and which will just provide the bandwidth without hassels. Since it is a compeditive industry, the former won't last long.
I'll bite and assume you're not really a troll... but I have no idea where you got that idea. It doesn't matter what the word size of your processor is. Software can be written to handle words of arbitrary numbers of bits. How do you think your 4-bit HP-48 can handle those huge numbers?
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
but it's 4 bit internally ... the size of one binary coded decimal number. See http://www.hpmuseum.org/saturn.htm
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
I think the real problem is going to be getting the end-user machines upgraded to IPv6. Five years ago it could have been done, but now that grandma and grandpa and all sorts of redneck lusers are having a hard enough enough time just getting their little Windoze machine to read e-mail and browse cnn.com (or nascar.com), how easy will it be to get THEM to switch? You can try to wait them out until they get a new machine, but then someone will buy their old used machine.
Sounds like elitism to me. How many Grandmas, Grandpas, and 'redneck lusers' do you know that actually set their IP addresses? Most get them via DHCP. Most of these machines are Windows-based machines, which soon will quite easily support IPv6 (Windows ME) and may already (anyone know if Win98 supports it?). If anything, ISPs (who these end-users are connecting to) can mass e-mail their customers and say, "Look, we're moving over to IPv6. If you're running this version of this operating system, be sure to upgrade with files found here." Send that out over the course of a prep period (say, 4-6 months) and then when the time is up, just start migrating, leaving one bunch of lines using IPv4 addresses mapped to IPv6. It's not that hard.
And, I mean, that's just one very painful solution. You could also map IPv6 addresses on your end to a block of IPv4 addresses you keep for machines that specifically need them, making the entire process.
The whole, "Older users will be alienated!" is a cry of the alarmist. The true implementers will find a way around this. Yes, with all technology upgrades, a select few will be obsoleted, but don't you trust that the people who want to implement this have thought of ways to get around possible roadblocks?
256^6 (better stated as 2^48) is the number of individual IP addresses per "IP block" (what your ISP would give you). The total number of IP addresses would be 2^128, or 3.40e38.
No.
Roughly, total area of Earth == 5.11e14 m^2 (if I've done my calculations right).
Total number of IPv6 IPs available == 3.40e38
IPv6 density == 6.66e23/m^2
Total number of IPv4 IPs available == 4.29e9
IPv4 density == 8.40e-6/m^2
So with IPv6, you will get an IP density 7.29e28 (or 73 nonillion for Americans; 73 sexiard (?) for Europeans) times greater.
Hmm that's a good point. Although IPv6 theoretically speeds up (or at least) eases routing, so I wouldn't be surprised if some of the major switches started going to IPv6 within the next few years. If that can trickledown to the minor backbones (armbones maybe), then it Mom and Pop ISPs should be able to offer IPv6, forcing the ISP oligopolies to compete. I still think it's over 5 years until we see the "big shift", where things go from mostly-IPv4 to mostly-IPv6, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were select colo's or ISPs offering IPv6 addresses in the major centres within a couple years.
IPv6 addresses are 128 bits in length in total. They are expressed like so (IIRC): word:word:word:word:word:word:word:word where each 'word' is a hexadecimal number with length 4 (i.e. 16 bits).
When an ISP assigns you an "IP", however, it doesn't assign you a single IP. It assigns you a block. It might assign you 048a:3092:1a8e:ff44:3900:x:x:x. This gives you 2^48 separate IP addresses to use. The idea is that the remaining 48 bits correspond to your MAC address, so that as long as each computer you have connected has a different MAC, it will have its own IP. This also has the added benefit of making routing painfully easy (routing at the Ethernet level is much easier than routing at the IP level).
I'm sure I've got something mixed up, but that's the basics behind it.
Not to be too offensive, but you do understand the ideas behind a free market, right? "What's in it" for ISPs is that if they don't get their ass in gear, they are out of business because everyone else has a better product.
But unfortunately, Linux is not an OS. Having IPv6 in the kernel is fine, but it is a *major* PITA to get even the basics (ping, traceroute) recompiled, etc. FreeBSD is way ahead of the game in this case.
That depends. Which of those is the thing you do with dogh before you bake it ? That's the one I meant :)
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Some OS vendors and hardware manufacturers have been delaying IPV6 support for too long.
However even MS now runs with IPV6 if neaded. Cisco, IBM Sun all have support. Linux of course has had it since 2.0.x
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
That's right, but you will still need a router between the ISP line and your local net. And if you run Linux 2.4.0-test2 with the latest netfilter on this router, you even have a working IPv6 firewall :-). Just hope future Linux distributions with IPv6 (SuSE already announced IPv6 for 6.4, PLD ships IPv6 for a while) and 2.4.0 kernels will ship with a predefined simple firewall included.
On the other hand, NAT usually prevents using end-to-end authentication with IPSEC (also part of IPv6), as a changed IP header will invalidate the signature over the IP packet.
But Linux is coming closer...
SuSE 6.4 is announced to be IPv6 ready.
PLD (http://www.pld.org.pl/) already is.
The current rawhide contains at least basic IPv6 functionality (both ping and traceroute are there).
For one, 128 bit vs 64 bit vs 32 bit has nothing to do with processors when it comes to network addressing.
There are several factors for going completely overboard with the addressing.. It is better to err on the side of overkill (when it dosen't effect preformance) in that as our need for the internet starts to expand into more areas of our life, we risk getting into the situation where we are now. That being internet addresses being a scarse resource that must be concerserved.. When your wristwatch, pda, laptop, tv, vcr, coffee maker, etc, etc, are all connected, the last thing we want to have to deal with is lack of address space.
Granted, all that is a damn long way off. And people will have to start to get damn serious about their network security before I am going to be able to start a pot of coffee at home from an atm machine or someting wacked like that.
Remember, when ipv4 was concieved, noone thought it would ever run out of addresses. Yet its right around the corner...
...
. ""The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and
. intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb."
- My Blog - http://www.memestreams.net/users/rattle/
I was going to suggest the same thing, actually. Good standards never die. People are still using mainframes, television, and QWERTY keyboards. IPV4 will continue to exist in some form when your grandchildren are learning networking.
DHCP is just a tool, and like most tools can be used for good or evil. (heh)
/release' and an 'ipconfig /renew' if you need to push the settings out faster.
It doesn't just set your IP address. It sets your default gateway, your DNS server(s), your WINS server(s), extra routes, time server(s), domain name... all sorts of things. From working quite a bit with Microsoft DHCP, I think that particular implementation offers about 80 possible settings that can be transmitted to the clients. This is most likely documented in an RFC, but I haven't a clue which one offhand.
It's EASIEST from a network-admin standpoint to have everyone use floating IPs. However, the existing DNS structure is not really set up to support the concept of hostnames that can change on an hourly basis. There are modifications to it that are starting to get into production, mostly spearheaded by Microsoft. (and I personally DO NOT suggest you trust your DNS infrastructure to that company -- any foothold you give them into your central infrastructure will someday be used against you as they fight to eliminate all other operating systems from your network.) BIND, the gold standard of DNS, does now support dynamic updates, but I haven't tried to get this working yet.
If you don't have an updateable DNS server, you can get around that problem by using DHCP reservations. I use them a LOT. They do take a bit more work, but I think the payoff is worthwhile. You end up mapping a particular IP address to a particular MAC address -- essentially tying an IP address to an Ethernet card. (which means that IP addresses follow cards, not machines, which you have to be aware of.) But you set the client to full-automatic DHCP. It THINKS it's a floating client. It doesn't know that it will always get the same IP number.
This lets you push big changes out in X/2 time, where X is your DHCP renewal interval. (clients renew their lease when 50% of the duration expires). Instead of having to visit every client to adjust their WINS settings if a server goes down, you just adjust it at the server and the whole network soon knows about it without you needing to do anything else. You can also tell everyone to do an 'ipconfig
Because of all these niceties, it's unlikely DHCP will go away as we transition to IPV6. The concept of automatically-configured network settings is just too useful to go away. It will undoubtedly morph over time, and Microsoft will probably rename it at some point to make it sound new so they can sell it to you again, but the basic concept is here to stay.
Ok, granted, 32 bits wasn't quite enough.. but what is the point of a 128 bit IP address? 64 bits would be more efficient to deal with (since we're getting 64 bit CPUs a plenty, whereas we may never see a 128 bit desktop chip) and would still provide us with 16 quintillion possible addresses. Is 16 quintillion not enough?
The most important thing is backward compatibility... As with DOS, 16 bit windows, x86 architecture, the sheer number of IPv4 users prevents any radical change. As long as it is not certain that the all machines hooked up to the internet speak IPv6, a switch will certainly not be made.
The best solution would be a 'great switching day' (like with the switching from the many different european currencies to the euro on jan. 1 2002). However, due to the architecture of the internet (no one controls it) I don't see that happen.
Normally I keep up with current stuff like this, but I've never looked much into IPv6... Is there room for backward compability, or is this going to be one of those "please change your ip by august 31st?" type things?
Seems like we've been hearing about IPv6 for forever now.
---
--
Mmm, yes, I don't know about WINS servers and time servers... But nameservers etc. are supposed to be solved by "anycast" addresses. An anycast address goes to the "closest" host performing a certain function, such as name serving. I will not be surprised if some of these other services get an anycast address, as well.
Ethan
All of this is taken care of for you in IPv6 as well, albeit in a different sort of way. The subnet mask is handled by "Router Advertisements", DNS is handled by an "All DNS Servers" multicast (if I remember correctly, I could be wrong - this may be an advertisement as well), etc. IPv6 is truly a next generation protocol in *many* ways. There is a DHCPv6 spec, but I doubt that many (if any) installations will have to use it as all of the functionality in DHCPv4 is automatic in IPv6 via its 'stateless autoconfiguration'.
For more information, see:
Every IPv6 RFC I've read (that I can remember) has been a good read, so check 'em out. :-)
EthanDON'T FEED THE TROLLS!
:)
PS: Yeah, I noticed the recursion. Did you?
NASA is already using multicasting on some of their internal networks to efficiently send high-rate spacecraft telemetry streams to multiple destinations.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
ipv6.org has lots of stuff for the less well informed, including the implementations that are currently available.
Oh, and the Linux HOWTO.
Ideally, because if they don't you'll go to their competition and they won't get any more of your money. (Ideally...)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The time to turn a name into an address would be proportional to how many names there are, not how many addresses they are. (Actually, it's more likely to be proportional to the log of the names, or even faster if hashing or some other structure is used. Don't worry, you'll know what all this means very soon. :-)
Anyway, I wouldn't worry about that. You have a lot more to worry about from proliferations of domain names than a proliferations of addresses. And frankly, I bet the system in place can pretty easily handle that as well. It's very distributed and parallizable.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Right now, NAT is pretty popular since it's a good way for a bunch of machines to share the single little IP address that the ISPs typically hand out. A side benefit of NAT is that you almost always get a firewall as well. They just go together, ya know?
But when ISPs that handing out IP addresses by the thousands, I think more people (especially people who aren't security conscious -- that's 99% of the population) won't need NAT. So they'll just simpler routing, which will likely pass all traffic.
I have a feeling that a lot of people's LANs are going to be wide open to attacks when IPv6 becomes widely used.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
...and the digits glowed red too, what more could you ask for???
But it won't happen in a day. Deployment has already begun, and you would know this if you had bothered to read the article. Through tunneling, IPv4/IPv6 gateways, and such, IPv6 is being deployed over a matter of years and years. This is not some simple "flip the switch and work really really hard for one day" sort of thing.
Slow, aren't you? look at http://public.pacbell.net/dedicated/dsl/dsl_busine ss.html vs. http://public.pacbell.net/dedicated/dsl/dsl_basic. html
/27 by default. But that's hardly "the only difference."
Business DSL offers secondary MX service, usenet feeds, domain registration, and primary and secondary dns for your domains. Oh yeah. And the deal about coming with a
But they don't just "grow on trees." Have you bothered to look at ARIN's allocation policies for IPv6?
/35 or anything less, it will cost $2,500.
Pacbell hasn't even ventured into deploying IPv6 yet, but if they want a TLA (/48), it's gonna cost them $20,000 per year. For a
But then you need to ask yourself the real question: 'What am I smoking and why do I think that ISPs depend on the revenue from "selling" IP blocks?'
Sprint (NYSE: FON) is also looking to IPv6 as the vehicle for far higher levels of service security and performance
Looks like there's little bit of spin going on all right. When the spin gets intensive it'll look like this:
Sprint is charging ahead with IP v6 technology. IP v6 will let us provide unparalelled performance to our customers. Our leadership in this area makes us the only choice.
MCI/Worldcom will of course issue the exact same press release.
You can gauge the health of a technology by measuring the amount of corporate spin it generates.
--Shoeboy
Most people are expected to get address blocks from their ISP (and the ISPs from their next-tier providers). Globally routable addresses are (as now) available from the IP registries: ARIN, RIPE, APNIC. You can go to their web pages and see what the policies are for getting IPv6 address range allocations: they're pretty stringent.
Did the article have any actual news? Nothing I saw there was new--- Sprint has been part of the 6bone for a while, and testing out IPv6 on the VBNS is nothing new, right? It seems we're still waiting for sufficient demand for IPv6 service before anybody bothers offering it...
I'm fully aware that hosts are capable of operating in "dual stack" (IPv4 and IPv6 mode), and I apologize if I gave the impression this was not possible. However, doing so means that they must have both v4 and v6 addresses. All the additional addresses v6 promises you don't matter if you still have to talk v4 to get to the rest of the world.
IPv6 deployment will hardly be "just there". Even if all your devices are IPv6-capable, this is a far cry from enabling it, configuring everything correctly (like ensuring DNS gives out v6 addresses), and getting v6 service from your ISP.
I don't see v6 happening on the large scale any time soon, either. The ugly truth is that if you upgrade your network to IPv6, you still need to speak IPv4 with the rest of the world. So, your snazzy-new network's hosts have to go through a protocol translator (a NAT box that does v6->v4 conversion) to access anybody (read: most of the world) that hasn't upgraded to IPv6 as well.
Compare this with using IPv4-to-IPv4 NAT. NAT is more widely deployed and understood, and probably easier to put in place than converting your entire network or setting up lots of v6-over-v4 tunnelling. Sure, you don't have globally visible addresses for each of your hosts. But new services have to be designed taking NAT into account anyway.
Until there are enough IPv6 hosts to make speaking IPv6 useful, there's no incentive to upgrade networks and hosts. The claims of increased security and QoS over v4 are, in my opinion, vastly exaggerated--- just because v6 has a "flow identifier" field doesn't mean anybody's decided something useful to do with it.
See "I'll stick with IPv4 for now, thank you" from Network Fusion for a "testimonial" from a network administrator who's just as happy not upgrading his network...
But then you need to ask yourself the real question: 'What am I smoking and why do I think that ISPs depend on the revenue from "selling" IP blocks?'
I'm not smoking anything. Money is money, and when the only difference between several of PBI's Consumer and Business DSL packages is the size of the subnet, instead of bandwidth, then I think they make money from renting larger subnets. Duh.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
Regardless of what that page says, I've received everything on that list except for a secondary MX service with my 5-ip home account. Functionally, the only differences between the 5-ip home and /27 business are the extra IP numbers.
I understand though, how experience can often be confused with stupidity, especially if you're the sort who always believes what you read, even from PBI.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
Along with the concept of free market economy is the concept of a cartel. If a business can make more money withholding a service, they are likely to do so as long as their competition does so as well.
Witness the (until recent) stagnation of ISDN and DSL, in favor of higher cost T-1 and fracT-1 lines, astronomical gas prices in the western states, and airfare wars.
The free-market model doesn't hold well in this particular instance because for IPv6 to really take hold will require its implementation
(at some level) by ISPs.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
Hopefully this will be the end of it, but somehow I doubt it:
Your in-depth factfinding mission was based on the assumption that I only have one domain name, fury.com. That assumption is incorrect.
If you had dug a little deeper, you'd have noticed that fury.com was registered before anyone offered DSL service, and before PacBell offered dialup internet service at all.
If you dug deeper than that, you'd notice that I have three domain names registered, and that two of them fulfill all the criteria you mentioned, except for the backup MX records. As I said on my earlier post, I don't use PBI for backup MX service.
To respond to your final query, anyone who wonders why someone might choose to use two ISPs for their business isn't someone I'd want in my IS department.
The point I was making in my original post, since you obviously missed it, is that for those people who want more than 5 IP addresses, regardless of other services, PBI grants no other option than to step up to a level of service that costs a great deal more.
That this expanded service offers more bells and whistles is immaterial to those consumers who don't need them, and serve only to distract managerial boneheads from the fact that they're being forced to pay a great deal more for what, in their case, amounts only to more static IP addresses.
I hope this answers your questions.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
While I understand that every ISP out there would like to have a virtually limitless number of IP addresses to alocate to their subscribers, won't this damage their business model?
If I pay PacBell nearly twice as much so I can have 5 IPs instead of one, or pay five times as much for a 32-address subnet, will they still be able to justify charging more for multiple IP addresses when they grow on trees?
Will the switch to IPv6 end up costing them a good deal using this revenue model, or will we all switch to (horror of horrors) a per-byte revenue model?
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
How many IPs fall into the lowest level "block?"
If I buy a block from NSI or whomever, can I "symbolically link" it to say, a SW Bell DSL line?
Just little things I'm wondering about, I'm not too versed in internet architecture.
Surely you can't expect to change the workd in a year? The switch to IPv6 is not a small or easy task, and the fact that it is just beginning now is a sign of things to come: busy Sysadmins, busy programmers, busy tech support centers. If you don't yet have a job in IT, now's your chance.
Really good for the power breakers :-)
Can't sleep, clowns will eat me....
Sound familliar?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Uh - wouldn't that mean we have 225 IP addresses for every square metre of the earth now?
Not a flame, but if we keep adding IP's in proportion to the number of users (unrealistic) then it won't be that long at all before numbers are getting tight again.
Or has this all been adressed before?
"In person, WAP'ed up and making your life a misery!" BOFH, 2003
Yes, but for all the places out there who currently have class A's they will be given a block of ipv6 addresses based on their ipv4 address, which means that instead of the class A having their usually 16 million addresses, they will probably not have trillions upon trillions of addresses, mainly for the sake of simplicity in the switch. Once this is switched over, the new ip addresses will be assigned in a totally different way, and won't be waisted. Plus its highly possible for those Class A's to give back a trillion or so addresses once things get cleared up.
Would someone kindly explain the significance of "029A:7734:029A:7734..." to me? Thank you.
The 29A is 666, but I don't have a clue what 7734 is - it's 30516 in decimal, but what signifigance could 30516 possibly have?
AHhh... and now it all makes sense. I had tried playing with 7734 in it's decimal form, never even occured to me to treat it like just a normal number. DOH!
the 666 seems obvious, but the 30516 stumps me, it's sorta similar to 3:16 but it obviously isn't. oh well.
Since your UID is smaller than mine, I can only conclude that you're trolling. -s20451 (410424)
Ok, i'll bite. I dont get the joke...
I know this is OT, but what're you using to do that? =] Right now we're using Ghost over IPX and that kinda slows down the network a bit when we try to put images on a whole lab a once... i'd be very interested in seeing a multicast system for this ;)
BRTB
BRTB
I may be wrong in my assumptions, but I think DHCP (or a close relative) will be even more needed.
Will the ability to give a fixed address to anyone on the planet who wants one be embraced
The way I see it, you could only have a fixed address with one ISP. If you change ISP's, your IP's would have to change to keep the routing tables consistant.
In the future, I believe that conventional computers will take up only a tiny bit of the used IP's. The other used IP's will be assigned to appliances of some sort or the other.
Which do you think would be more likely to be accepted by the mass consumer market, a refrigerator that you had to telnet into and setup networking parameters (that you don't even understand) after you purchased it, or moved it, or changed ISP's; or one that you just plugged in that got the necessary configuration info from your ISP automagically?
What I do see is a proliferation of the DYNAMIC DNS services that match up your "common name" with the current IP that you are assigned.
icebox1.myidentifier.pers.us => 248:183:53:3:221.128.105.18
When I move and my refrigerator gets a new IP, I can be assured that the Dynamic DNS gets informed of this behind the scenes without me even thinking about it.
Most users won't even know that there is any sort of number behind the name that they use to access their refrigerator.
load "linux",8,1
DHCP in v6 will not exist in the form we think of now in v4. The equivalent is the adding of a MAC address to the end of your local network upper address. Since v6 is tied to an actual geographical route, you just have to tack on the MAC address to the end to get a unique IP.
Of course I could be wrong on this but this is my interpretation of the RFC's.
Some day it'll be only 2.2*10^20 addresses per solar system. And then? IPv8 will have to feature time traveling packets (send know, receive yesterday), self filling contents (send a packet and let it automagically collect its content) and of course an extended address space of 12345*10^4321 addresses per molecule. There is very little chance of addresses running out.
More than likely trying to figure a way to make administrator's lives easier when they release it.
Release "it"? What's it? IPV6 in the wild? The specs have been out there for a long time, and people are already running it. It's not as if now, after a long and tiring process, Sprint and Worldcom are saying, "Here it is! ipv6!"
--- Where's my X.400 protocol decoder?
true. short of routers rejecting ipv4 packets from *all* the router macnufacturers, it isnt going to happen. heck, i have ipv6 enabled on my linux boxen and i cant get routed because the ISPs router doesnt support it.
Ender
Nothing to see here
Actually I got this from a Sun Microsystems article and this is how they put it:
, 456
IPng supports addresses which are four times the number of bits as IPv4 addresses (128 vs. 32). This is 4 Billion times 4 Billion (2^^96) times the size of the IPv4 address space (2^^32). This works out to be:
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211
This is an extremely large address space. In a theoretical sense this is approximately 665,570,793,348,866,943,898,599 addresses per square meter of the surface of the planet Earth (assuming the earth surface is 511,263,971,197,990 square meters).
------------------------------------ Step into my Office... WhY? Cuz your %$#$ing Fired...
Good to know. The information I was reading up on came from Sun Microsystems and just basically stated that the Extensions for IPv6 options could have Fragmentation and Reassembly under that extension.
Could you give a breif description on what ICMP is and how it works? If not, any clues on where I can read up on this?
Thanks,
Gregg
------------------------------------ Step into my Office... WhY? Cuz your %$#$ing Fired...
I am actually doing a report on this and found some really good articles and other tidbits at the following:
- Paper.html#CH2
5 6 addresses.
http://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng/html/INET-IPng
http://www.6bone.net/misc/case-for-ipv6.html
As far as compatibility goes, they (Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)) have really worked hard on making a solid set of standards for this. The Sun.com resource I posted goes into pretty good detail on how this will all come together.
Before reading this article, I was totally under the impression that the ONLY need to go to IPv6 was due to lack of IPv4 addresses but that is not the case at all. IPv6 has a ton of nifty add-ons as far as the extension headers and the size of this new header is really only about twice the size of the IPv4 header. The new extension header includes:
Routing - This is considered Extended Routing which is based somewhat on the IPV4 source routing steps.
Fragmentation- This will allow headers to be fragmented and be able to reassemble itself back together.
Authentication- This will include integrity and authentication checks to enable better security over the IPV4 standard.
Encapsulation- This also deals with security and enables the packet to be kept Confidential.
Hop-by-Hop Option- this will allow hop-by-hop processing.
Destination Options- Optional information that will be examined by the destination node.
Also some cool facts:
The issue of the number of addresses availible for IPv6 works out to be around:
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,4
And this breaks down to about 1,500 IP addresses for each square meter on the surface of Earth and that an estimated fifteen percent of the address space for IPv6 would be used in the initial switchover from the old standard to the new standard.
-Gregg
------------------------------------ Step into my Office... WhY? Cuz your %$#$ing Fired...
Does anyone here think that, when the whole of the Internet has moved to IPv6, DHCP-like autoconfiguration will die? Of course DHCP helps when a large group of intermittently-connected hosts share a small block of addresses, but will this ability be needed when IPv6 gives enough bits to address every atom on the planet?
The problem I see with DHCP is that it is a hindrance to the little guy, a way to enforce unnecessary ISP pricing structures, and even somewhat of a barrier to free speech. When an ISP makes its users configure their hosts with DHCP, they keep that host from having a permanent address. It is somewhat more difficult to run a public Internet server when the server's address changes constantly. Services exist to dynamically point a DNS name to a DHCP-configured host (I use tzo.com), but this still represents a hassle and undermines the reliablility of the server's network connection. Plus, if your ISP gets tired of your practice, you may be faced with an ultimatum: lose your account or upgrade your connection to the highway-robbery level. That's right; if you wanna play, you gotta pay -- even though you're paying an arm and a leg more for the same technology as before.
So what will it be? Will the ability to give a fixed address to anyone on the planet who wants one be embraced, or will dynamic addressing still be enforced on the lowly ISP subscriber?
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
We can only hope.
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
" Most of these machines are Windows-based machines, which soon will quite easily support IPv6 (Windows ME) and may already (anyone know if Win98 supports it?). "
Windows 98 does not support it out of the box, and neither does Windows 2000, for that matter. It is possible, though, to download the Windows 2000 patches from here.   An Intro into Microsoft's take on Ipv6 can be found here
NTT in Japan started using IPv6 commercially in March, according to this article here
>> I think the real problem is going to be getting the end-user machines upgraded to IPv6.
This is right on target. It'll be pulling teeth getting people to upgrade. So I don't think there will be much of a push to get people to upgrade.
>If anything, ISPs (who these end-users are connecting to) can mass e-mail their customers and say, "Look, we're moving over to IPv6. If you're running this version of this operating system, be sure to upgrade with files found here."
No, it really won't work this way. There is a much smoother migration path than this. We're just going to have to live with dual stacks and other kludges for quite a while.
> The whole, "Older users will be alienated!" is a cry of the alarmist.
Mostly true. For a long time, we'll have dual stacks or gateway machines and such, so old stack users won't be alienated. But there will come a day when servers start doing ipv6 alone (not just security conscious sites which will come sooner, but fairly generic sites like search engines and about.com), and then the last ipv4 holdouts will be alienated.
FreeBSD supports IPv6...
didn't at one time I read that the government was developing a version of IPv6 that encoded the mac adress into the IP, and try to have it shipped with Win2k? or was that a /. comment, or even something else?
If the mac address is encoded... SECURITY?!?
-DrkShadow
Guys, this will probably get moderated into the dirt and have me coming up with a -4 score, but I honestly see IPv4 as the metric system in America, how long now as the US been switching the the Metric system? 50 years? I think we're looking at the same with IPv6.. everyone is talking about how great it's going to be, and how wonderful all these new features are going to be.. but honestly if you look at ALL the servers all the everything on the internet that's using IPv4 (well.. lol that IS everything) for us to have to stop all that and change to different protocols and stuff, it isn't just going to happen anytime soon or at all.. I don't care if major companies DO jump on the IPv6 band wagon, I just don't see as becoming big as some people would like to see it happen.. of course this is coming from the mind of a 17 year old systems admin and I haven't been in the field that long so who am I to say that? but thats just my .02.
-Thanks bubu_.
In my playing around:
FreeBSD 4 and up has integrated IPv6. Its not
entirely transparent, but its there and it works.
Solaris 8 has nice, functional IPv6. Its so
well integrated that frequently I don't know that
I'm running across IPv6 unless I explicitly check.
OpenBSD 2.6 came up with IPv6 on the default
install, I'd assume it is the same as FreeBSD, since both are based off the KAME project.
Linux/Slackware has the weakest IPv6 support
of the lot that I've used short of Windows. I mean in terms of the implementation... its just a
button you push in the kernel, yes, but the
userland was horrible trying to get going. Redhat
or Debian might have better support.
Windows NT/2000 IPv6 support, at this point,
is a joke. You can ping, but not too much else.
They haven't even updated the patch for IE to IE5.
(But Microsoft is the innovators! REALLY!)
Other OSes that I've heard have integrated IPv6
support are BSDi and AIX.
For lots of information, check:
http://www.ipv6.org/
http://www.freenet6.net/
--
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
This is so simplistic as to be borderline FUD.
i pngwg-addrconf-privacy-01.txt.
Try checking out:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-
--
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
IPv6 is more than just address space. If you haven't done your research before posting then there's no point in me doing it for you. Enough other people have posted useful links for the uninformed. Not much can be done about the deliberately ignorant.
But for the other incorrect statements you've made:
- The money for IPv6 has already been spent. Its already here. The money will be wasted if IPv6 is NOT used.
- AT is a way of pretending you have more address space than you do. Do you know what's better than pretend? REALITY!
- If you think IPv6 would cost more to put into effect than cleaning up the current IPv4 mess, then you really have no concept of the state of things.
--
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
I was wondering since there's going to be "zillions" more addresses, are the prices for IP's going to be going down at all?
-motardo
This is not a flame against you personally, but I don't want to make a seperate post to this topic. Has anyone reading this website read a thing on IPv6? Almost every question I've seen here could be answered with 10-15 mintues worth of reading at the IPv6 site. If you're curious about IPv6, do some reading, it's going to be more important than any single OS or programming language in the years to come.
IPv6 is supported in the default kernel with OpenBSD (not supposedly; i've got a system running it).
rfc 2465 Management Information Base for IP Version 6:Textual Conventions and General Group.
December 1998
___
Some links: /pages/ipv6.html /public/784/packet/july98/9.html
Sun http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/ipv6/
IBM http://domino.ngi.ibm.com/patrick
Cisco http://www.cisco.com/warp
W3C W3c site and mailing list search
IETF http://www.ietf.org/html.charter s/nat-charter.html
___
> 640k should be enough for anyone.
:-)
Devide the number of IPv6 adresses by the surface of the earth in cm and you will see that the adress space is big enough until we learn how to manage FTL interstellar travel and communications. (and probably even then until we learn how to travel between galaxies...).
FWIW: If all IPv6# are distributed equally over the earth an area of the size of a stamp (roughly 1cm) gets nearly 6.7*10^19 numbers.
Even if only 1/million-th of the adress space can really be used because of organization etc. that are still ~67 trillions. Heck, every gramm of earth could still get 57000 adresses....
(If the numbers are wrong blame bc
I'm clueless in this area, so treat me like I'm 2 years old, please (not by slapping my hands). Anyways, was there ever an IPv5? If there was, assuming we don't use it because it was essentially broken, why was it dropped and not re-engineered to become what we know as IPv6. If there wasn't, then why not?
--Drew Vogel
IPsec (encryption on the network layer) is mandatory for IPv6. See for example RFC 1825. Linux has an IPv4-only implementation of IPsec, see FreeSWAN.org. Hum, tracing,.. IPv6 by default builds host addresses from a prefix (kind of subnet mask) and the 48 bits ether hardware address. Since the latter are supposed to be uniq, voila, even better than intel's pentium serial numbers. But IPv6 allows many addresses per interface, so you could use the automatically generated ones only for, say, booting from the net, and use chosen or random addresses otherwise. Have a nice Day.
I can't help but wonder who'll be first to get stuck with 029A:7734:029A:7734...
Well, 0x029A = 666. so I see where that comes from... but where the fsck does 7734 come from?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Wouldn't it make more sence to implement an infinitly extencible protocol to avoid having IPv9705 ?
Of course, the actual format of said protocol would take quite a lot of clever forethought in and of itself, and I'd be the ninth to point out that that task is far beyond my megre talent.
Oh well. Maybe someone will suggest this for IPv8. You know there will be a version 8, don't you?
Shawn Poulsen (Fruan)
"On Slashdot, many obvious things are insightful." - Annonymous Coward, 2000/7/9
Unfortunately, the designers of IPv6 did something which seems disagreeable to me, and chopped the 128-bit address space of IPv6 in half!
There are no more subnets in IPv6 -- instead, everything is split into a 64-bit network ID and a 64-bit node ID.
So, every IPv6 network is going to need a 64-bit network ID... from the small networks you have at home, to the huge networks of the cable companies and DSL companies! I predict most IPv6 networks will have relatively few nodes in them, compared with the 64-bit node ID space, and there will eventually be a shortage of network ID's.
Why did they do this? Supposedly, the purpose of this is so that they can autoconfigure clients by using the 64-bit hardware address as the node ID. (This is a massive invasion of privacy, using your hardware address as a permanent "cookie" for your computer, even across different connections, but that's another thing to debate.)
By having such a huge address space for the node ID, the chance of collisions is almost none, and it becomes possible to keep the same node ID even while on multiple network ID's (as a multihomed host will be doing).
Still, I wish they would have thought about these two issues, address space and privacy...
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
"What do you mean our workstations won't work with it? I don't care about that -- this article says that IPv6 is where it's at, and I want it now."
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
I think the amount of addresses is cool to think about:
5 6 different IP addresses can be assigned. This means that if we set the world population at 10 billion, there is 3.4*10^27 addresses per person, and if assign addresses by land mass, an average of 2.2*10^20 addresses per square centimeter. There is very little chance of addresses running out.
It is 2 to the 128th power which means, 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,4
From a FAQ
-- four
>ping liver Pinging liver [234.561.568.457.123.745.357.910] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 234.561.568.457.123.745.357.910: bytes=32 time<10ms TTL=128
Reply from 234.561.568.457.123.745.357.910: bytes=32 time<10ms TTL=128
^C
"Yeah, sure I'll have another beer."
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
As of 1995 , Apple had prototype IPv6 going. According to them, they were the first "consumer OS" to demonstrate working IPv6. Given that the other consumer OS of the time, pretty much was Win 95, I'll believe it...
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
I always kind of wonder whether this will divide the whole internet along monetary lines. When this switch happens, networks in the third world are likely going to take significantly longer to upgrade, if they do at all. Also the transition would create a glut of very cheap, very good IPv4 routers that might be just too tempting to someone who has to create a network on a very small budget.
Since you can browse an IPv4 network from IPv6, but not vice versa, this creates pockets of the internet only accessable to people with the cash to upgrade their routers. Maybe I'm wrong, I hope I am, because I don't much like the ramifications of having two "internet classes"
Such a price the gods exact for song: to become what we sing - Pythagoras
I think many of you may be ahead of yourselves. When I was at this years Networld+Interop in Las Vegas, most of the 'experts' giving talks on networking completely dismissed IPv6 as buggy and flawed. Most said that the next ugrade will be IPv7 or something. Apparently the IPv6 standard is a bad compromise between different and competing visions of what the internet should be by the major players in the industry. It was also rushed out the door without much feedback from the internet community. I am far from an expert in the matter, but perhaps somebody else could enlighten us of the technical problems with the IPv6 protocal.
--pcb
'Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.' B. Pascal
well, it doesn't look that good here, but I believe that if you type 7734 into a calculator, and then turn it upside down, you get HELL.
"This is not a company that appears to be bothered by ethical boundaries."
Attorney General Mike Hatch on Microsoft
Classful routing died five years ago because the routing tables were going out of control, and because class C was too small, but class B was *way* too big.
So they came up with CIDR (classless inter-domain routing) which uses variable net masks to group routing blocks geographically. They divided up the rest of class C and used that all up, so now they're cutting into the old class A. So lots of cable modem customers have 12.*.*.* addresses now.
For more info on CIDR, see RFCs 1812, 1817, 1860, etc.
However, with 128 bits, it is likely that end-users will get *at least* 48 bits (enough to use Ethernet addresses and reduce the need for site-local DHCP), probably 64 bits, for their own use. So a block with a 64 bit prefix will be treated like a single 32-bit address today.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I think the real problem is going to be getting the end-user machines upgraded to IPv6. Five years ago it could have been done, but now that grandma and grandpa and all sorts of redneck lusers are having a hard enough enough time just getting their little Windoze machine to read e-mail and browse cnn.com (or nascar.com), how easy will it be to get THEM to switch? You can try to wait them out until they get a new machine, but then someone will buy their old used machine.
Sure, sites with DNS entries can always be given an IPv4 address for backwards compatibility, but that doesn't solve the problem of all the jillions of potential client machines out there with ancient IPv4 protocol stacks that may never be able to connect to anything with an IPv6 address but no IPv4 address. (Though I suppose a sort of reverse-NAT could be done if you combine a NAT box with a DNS server and have it spit out 10.x.x.x addresses.)
It's also a problem for those with legacy machines, including antique computer collectors.
I personally expect to be ready when it comes, but I'm pretty damn net savvy and I'm still not sure what I'll need to do to get IPv6 compatible.
It could become a fiasco on the level of the metric system, and it could create a new divide between the "haves" and the "have nots".
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Any kid who grew up in the '70s can tell you that 7734 is the word "HELL" upside-down on a calculator. :)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Are we really ready ? Do we have working IPv6 implementations for Cisco IOS,Linux,Win xx ? As far as I know, FreeBSD and some ... )
others have good implementations, Linux's implementations is still buggy, Windows doesn't have anything ( except for some non-microsoft
TCP/IP stacks,that have some support), and last time I checked, cisco didn't have stable support for IPv6 ( somebody tried it and said
that he doesn't want his router crashing this often
Maybe you haven't heard, but these days there isn't a distinction between clients and servers thanks to VoIP, IM, Napster, Freenet, etc. Every machine is a server these days, so it needs a global address.
You don't have to use a MAC address; you can use any address that's not used on your subnet if you're concerned about privacy.
And you don't even have to wait for your ISP to support it. Just turn on 6to4, and with one IPv4 address you can get quite a few IPv6 subnets (each of which contains 2^64 addresses).
Windows already supports 6to4, BSD probably does, and I don't know about Linux.
This is _GREAT_ news. Not only is there a chance that everyone will soon have
high-speed access, but there's also a possibility of a fixed IP address for
everyone. I can't help but wonder who'll be first to get stuck with
029A:7734:029A:7734...
There is more security involved, but far less privacy. Now your MAC address is tied to your IPv6 address, making all packets traceable to a certain computer. /. ran something about this a while ago, look for that if you want more info.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
Desire is not an occupation.
The vast majority of new end-user firewall stuff coming out lately is software, and per-machine. All that's necessary is the spreading of the Good News about firewalls (which is sure to happen after we get another solid DDoS involving clients on cable modems) and we're set.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
How long will it take before every computer can handle it? Won't some computers/programs totally choke on it?
YouTube & Google Video -> podcast http://castcluster.blogspot.com/
Acctually, Since the universe had only 10^80 particles, I could only assume that every particle (atom, eletron, proton, photon, quark) within the control of humanity (the whole earth, moon and eventually mars) could each have an address...
Now, to keep track of every particles address wouldn't we need a computer that consisted of the same amount of particles? And would this computer need to keep track of it's own particles addreses? Then the computer would become VERY large and become the size of the universe.
Perhaps this has already happened and we are all part of a computer keeping track of email addresses and just don't know it!
Still #1 -- Lonely Gay Geek
The way things are being pushed in the mobile market, the $ involved and the potential consumer base (which would require the IPv6 address space) means that suppliers of mobile internet access devices and services will be a major influence in shifting the 'net towards IPv6.
Therefore I reckon in 2 to 3 years time, we will be using IPv6 to download our pr0n in a secure and efficiently routed manner...and perhaps while on the go ;-)
They're going ahead with it. Save your comments for IPv7.
They include it as a module already, which makes a lot of sense. For the most part, folks don't use IPv6 yet so it would be bloat to compile it into the RH stock kernel.
If you have an auto module loader, it'll find and load ipv6.o as soon as you try to use ping6.
If you don't, just insmod it.
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
RH 6.x has a kernel module for it instead so as to not bloat the kernel of the majority of users, who don't yet use ipv6.
Just insmod ipv6 or run an autoloader.
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
It's about time. The sooner the better, if you ask me... (first post(?))
--- If something doesn't feel right, you're probably not feeling the right thing.
They should have done this at the start just in case... Isn't hindsight a wonderful thing ;-)
--- If something doesn't feel right, you're probably not feeling the right thing.
OK, wait, let me start again... Lots plus lots times lots equals....
...faints...
--- If something doesn't feel right, you're probably not feeling the right thing.
I could look it up, but maybe someone else is interested, too; any experts out there care to comment on the state of support for IPv6 in Linux?
How about *BSD?
IPv6 is supposed to have multicasting capabilities.. one address sending data out to many different addresses simultaneously. What can this be used for? Besides the obvious (streaming media), could you use it to continuously broadcast a static web page, say once every second? So instead of sending a seperate copy of that page for every hit, a web browser just grabs the next broadcasted copy of the page.
--
Information wants to be my BITCH!
I understand Mac OS X to support IPv6 natively. Are they positioned to take advantage of this switch like no other "consumer OS"?
--
$tar -xvf
Is it going to be in a similar manner to IPv4 aka class A,B,C,D and E blocks. How does one aquire the rights to public blocks? Has the routing concept been changed?
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Checking back through the RFCs will swiftly reveal this was a competitor for what we now know as IP version 6. Given that version 9 was allocated to TUBA (another competitor) I would hazard a guess that the next "live" version of IP after IP version 6 will probably be IP version 10.
I'm new to programming (currentley enrolled in programming course.) so if my question is totally retarded forgive me.
But it would seem to me Extending the amount of IP addresses would slow down the net.
To find a web page you don't know the name of you use a search engine ie. a coffee distributer in your hometown. You know have a zillion more refrences for the search engine to check = Longer search time.
Shouldn't the priority be using addresses in a more efficient manner. Or is that what IPv6 is about?
Stupid sig.
IPv6 is cool. Once the implants + wireless 'net comes along, every person in the world can have their own personal IP address--so we wouldn't need names anymore I guess.
Scary or funny? I dunno.
"My brain is being portscanned"
Looks like i won't be memorizing my IP addresses anymore :P hehe
you should know BSD is better then linux. oh yeah, start that flamewar of linux vs bsd... of course, any real bsd user keeps his mouth shut because he doesnt want *lamers using the os and ruining it ... blah blah...
:) i love to say 'linux sux bsd rulez'
bsd license is much more free/open then GPL, just to let you know.
this is a troll comment. sue me
what took them so long?
We need to call that day, from then on "SysAdmin Appreciation Day"
- chris
- chris@unbeliever.netspam
- i hate capitals
- aim:arikel6000 / yahoo:blackrose91
Does anyone have links to whitepapers or other references explaining the increased security that's purported to come with IPv6? I too am guilty of not doing much research into this topic, but I've heard several rumors that IPv6 addresses will be much more easily "traced" to their owner.
Any insight?
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Microsoft does have some reasonably complete experimental stuff (ip stack and some basic utils, such as ping and ftp client) for nt4 and w2k. http://research.microsoft.com/msripv6/
...if you divided each square meter of the earth into as many pieces as there are square meters on the earth, each of these pieces would get something like one billion IP addresses. Overhead caused by routers and politics might be an issue, though.
I don't know what old version of redhat your using (2.0?) but as of 6.x IPv6 Is enabled they even have a special network device that is turned on at bootup for IPv6 routing.
Yeah, and they need all the reserch to put their own standards on this too. Or are they mended after the adverse ruling. only time will tell
Here's that URL again:
http://bugzilla.redhat.co m/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12310
Make sure that Redhat doesn't let this one drop!
Well, I am using Redhat 6.2.
/proc/net, there are no entries for
::1
::1(ip6-localhost) 56 data bytes
In
tcp6, udp6, snmp6, ip6_flowlabel,
igmp6 which are put there when IPv6 is enabled.
Also, on my Redhat 6.2 system, if I su to
root, and type: ping6
I get:
ping6: socket: Invalid argument
On another system where I have
compiled IPv6 into the kernel,
I get:
PING
64 bytes from ip6-localhost: icmp_seq=0 hops=64 time=0.1 ms
64 bytes from ip6-localhost: icmp_seq=1 hops=64 time=0.1 ms
I think Redhat should enable IPv6 in the kernel.
Suse Linux already does this.
What version of Redhat are you using?
On the Redhat 6.2 systems that I have,
modprobe ipv6 fails, insmod ipv6 fails.
If I do:
rpm -ql kernel | grep ipv6
there is no ipv6 module included by default. I need to manually recompile the kernel to get ipv6 support.
I still think that Redhat should include this support by default, to be on par with other Unixes and Windows 2000.