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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.
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).
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?
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.
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 ?
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.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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
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
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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...
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
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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
while i don't have the code in front of me, i have looked at it. ipv6 is REALLY fscking cool.
::192.168.221.12 ( note: this is off the top of my head so don't expect it to be syntactically accurate ;-)
The designers understood the inherent need for backwards compatibility and so it was there from the start. (you can check one of the older issues of 2600 for the code - as well as everywhere online) - for your comfort. ipv6 is fully backwards compatible with ipv4 - i believe an ipv4 addy would look something like 0:0:0:0:192.168.221.12 - you get the picture. In addition, colons can be substituted in the place of zeroes...something like
There are basically 2 basic things to remember with ipv6. 1) It's hex - so good luck remembering your subnetting tables, etc. hehe 2) The transition from 4 to 6 can be as quick or as gradual as you need. - check your local linux kernel as well...there's already ipv6 code living in it.
FluX
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#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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.
FreeBSD's 4.0-RELEASE branch supports IPv6. If you're interested in getting your own IPv6 Internet address and being connected to Internet6, the Kame project is what you're looking for.