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IPv6 and Wireless Networks
bemis sent us an article that talks about IPv6 and Wireless, and how the two seem to fit together pretty well. (Especially since at the rate we're going your home stereo is gonna need its own class C)
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I think it's time for ./ to list WHO moderated WHAT on the post in question.
I'll be honest here: I would *love* subnets with more IPs. The people who built our network put in more network drops (for mobile computers) than IPs were available on particular subnets. The way the network is wired (each subnet having it's own 'gateway' to the rest of the network) if too many mobile users connect at once some are left out because there aren't enough IPs available. This happened on the desktop subnets too, and I think our network guys have sorted it all out (eg. re-allocate the subnets to ensure that there is an IP available for each drop).
/48.
;)
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<i>Also, the powers that be recently carved out a huge chunk of address space for 6to4, so that every IPv4 address can have a
</i></blockquote>
That makes sense...
DNS issues...Currently, I can type 192.168.1.100 to get to a machine if the DNS is down... what happens with IPv6? 123.456.789.111.123.456.789.0? Actually, I'll shut my ignorant mouth and go RTFM. I've wanted to learn some more about IP anyway...
Verbatim
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
I'm waiting for IPv7, which will finally and fully link the Wired and the Real World, connecting everyone to the Wired (and each other) without using devices.
"Doko ni datte, hito wa tsunagatte iru." (No matter where, people are all connected) - from Serial Experiments Lain
get my own IPv6 subnet? Or does it already cost money to 'lease' your part.
-- Jason...
IPv6 and 3G Wireless are perfect for each other because both are blind alleys, technologies that are vastly oversold. Neither is half as good as its supporters imply, and IPv6 itself is a huge loser.
Cut to the chase: The main reasons that the referenced article states that IPv6 is useful are 1) security, and 2) end-to-end voice. NEITHER is materially better in v6 than in v4! IPSec (which has its own problems) works in v4; v6 doesn't make it more secure. And contrary to the bushian Big Lies going around these days, IPv6 does NOTHING for QoS by itself! It got flows wrong too. You can run IPv4 over MPLS and get QoS; IPv6 by itself doesn't get you QoS. QED.
IPv6 is a bad protocol, a political compromise from the NSFnet days of yore, which has a high cost of adoption and few benefits. The IPv4 address space ain't done yet -- first off, NATs solve a lot of problems. Second, the former "class A" space 64-126 is still reserved; it could free up a LOT of CIDR space, if ICANN weren't playing games.
TUBA was a better proposal, but the IETF dropped it at the last minute because it was tainted by the whiff of OSI -- kind of a redbaiting approach to protocol design. What's needed now isn't IPv6 but a rethought Internet layer, one that's not devoted to fighting the religious battles of the 1970s and 1980s, but one that's designed to carry diverse applications with reasonable overhead.
And wireless? Well, 3G has more bandwidth, but not cheap bandwidth -- look up what the spectrum auctions netted and figure out how much you'll need to pay to cover that bill! It's fine for voice, but don't expect to watch on-demand-TV on your cellphone's screen, unless you're willing to pay macro {dollars,euros} per minute. Now the LAST think wireless (land of costly bandwidth) needs is a huge wasteful header overhead! IPv6 assumes basically free bandwidth. Wireless needs its overhead the way the Sahara needs more sand.
IPv6 won't be deployed until it is in Microsoft's best interest. So what if the your Linux box and home LAN (or even the backbones) run IPv6. Microsoft controls 90% of desktop computers and a huge percentage of web servers and corporate networks. If these computers don't support IPv6, who is going to use it? Pay for IPv6 hardware, software, and admins? Microsoft will make or break IPv6 by either supporting it or not.
cpeterso
Maybe there should be some method of atonement introduced.
My karma needs it with these confused moderators who think I am serious when I'm not, and ironically think I'm not serious when I am.
From the same people that brought you this...
AK
Back when 10Mb LANs were the height of networking technology and 386-class machines did the routing, v4 took a lot of effort. Today, I can pump data to the desktop at nearly a Gbps (if I choose to pay for it) and I can have routers that approach Tb speeds. The hardware is there today to support 128bit addressing, IP-level encryption, quality of service and the rest of IPv6 features.
The problem seems to be that the relative cost of all that extra logic makes customers reluctant to buy them, and knowledge of this fact makes manufacturers like Cisco, Bay and the rest reluctant to produce them in quantity. IPv4 is still a "better bargain", and we all know that the Accountants, not the Network Engineers make the purchasing decisions.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
If I remember correctly, it's been speculated by many people that the Windows TCP/IP stacks are BSD-derived (perhaps because the bugs they've suffered from seem similar?). However, Microsoft has always denied that claim and said that their stack is a ground-up implementation of their own.
I haven't been keeping up on IPv6 since it's a long time comming, but I am curious about a few things that maybe the astute /. crowd could answer:
1) I hear IPv6 implements security (packet level encryption?) for end-users, but what about tracing origins over the network? Its hard enough with current 32bit addresses, will it be more or less dificult to trace a 128bit source (possibly even if it gets filtered from those 6-4 routers)?
2) It seems to me that the internet community went through the address space of ipv4 rather quickly due to gross mismanagement - people were given huge blocks of IPs to connect their 5 user LAN... back THEN they didn't believe that we would use up the whole address space... and now... well.. As the article suggests - we could do the same thing by giving IPs for useless reasons. Will there be some sort of control to the assignment of IP addresses? I think they should be treated as if we were running out.
3) How long will this be? I mean, would it be a good idea to start preparing big systems for a change, or wait and see how the technology developes (eg. is this tech really comming?)
Oh well.. l8r.
Verbatim
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
Anyone with a cell-phone will need an IP address soon. Shortly thereafter, anyone with a pager. Then anyone with a car. Then anyone with a major appliance. It doesn't always make sense - is a networked washing machine really necessary? But as soon as there is someone willing to buy it, it will be made available.
Imagine, having a washing machine that can page you when it's done cleansing your tighty-whiteys? Now, unless you expect everyone in the world who wants a piece of this new technology, to set up their own wireless subnet, you'll have to agree that it's going to require a network which will support this sort of flexibility.
Personally, I'm all for a car that can self-diagnose, and wirelessly inform my mechanic/dealer of a problem. I'm all for email that will get routed to wherever I happen to currently be: work, home, cell, car..
The thing here is that v4 is running out of available addresses in a big hurry. A 32 bit address field just doesn't cut it anymore, and subnetting, masking, ghosting, shadowing, blah, blah and all other v4 hacks can only go so far.
v6 has a great deal to offer, but the acceptance curve is pretty steep. Not for technical reasons, but for financial ones. Networking hardware presents a significant investment, and well designed hardware happily continues to run when new technologies become available. It's very hard to justify the purchase of new hardware, if there is nothing 'wrong' with old hardware.
Incidentally, this is why very few offices are using fiberoptics, and so many are still on 10Mbps LANs. Stringing new wires (wires, nevermind routers, just wires) is a very expensive undertaking. Replacing old CAT-3 wires with CAT-5, to make 100Mb to the desktop possible (in an older office, for example) requires the office to be shut down, so workmen could gut the walls. Then you buy the switches and routers; and THEN you buy everyone a new NIC.
It's the COST, not the technical merit of the technology, that is keeping it out of our hands; and we are running out of v4 'tricks' very quickly.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
First off, the real reason for IPv6 is greater address space - everyone who wants them can have all the public addresses they desire. No shortage imposed by limited address space of IPv4.
You can run IPv4 over MPLS and get QoS; IPv6 by itself doesn't get you QoS
IPv4 over MPLS can only get you QoS while you're running over MPLS, which most links aren't. IPv6 carries the flow label in the header, so you can perform QoS end-to-end.
NATs solve a lot of problems.
Unfortunately, NATs create more problems than they solve. Ask any real network engineer whether they wish they could just make NATs go away - you'll get a resounding YES! back. And guess what - with IPv6, NATs can go away.
the former "class A" space 64-126 is still reserved
Someone seems to be unclear on the concept of exponential growth. And remember, most of the world isn't on the Internet yet.
Now the LAST think wireless (land of costly bandwidth) needs is a huge wasteful header overhead!
This is another point in IPv6's favor, actually. The IPv6 header, being simpler than the IPv4 one, compresses better! So it takes less bandwidth to run IPv6.
TUBA was a better proposal, but the IETF dropped it at the last minute
Ah, you're an old TUBA proponent. Your ramblings make more sense in that context. Sore loser, eh?
IPv6 includes a variety of MAC addresses within its address format (though the embedded MAC part can also be set to whatever you want).
The main reason to go to 128 bit addresses is to have a single unique IP address across all the billions (literally) of IP-enabled phones, web tablets, Internet appliances, and so on.
actually IPv6 can be written in Base85
see RFC 1924
this from the RFC :
Why 85?
2^128 is 40282366920938463463374607431768211456. 85^20 is 387595310845143558731231784820556640625, and thus in 20 digits of base 85 representation all possible 2^128 IPv6 addresses can clearly be encoded.
In Theory, Reality & Theory are the same. In Reality, Well that's a different Story.
---
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
That, I think, is one of the biggest road-blocks to stable, reliable, large-scale networks. The topology isn't going to be consistant, moment to moment, and IPv4 has no built-in mechanism for supporting that.
(You can use packet-forwarding, if all the nodes support it, but mangling packets and re-sending them gets messy and lossage is going to be higher.)
The day when it'll be possible to connect your portable via a wireless link when on the move and via a land-line otherwise, without EVER having to lose connectivity at ANY point, is coming.
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)
...whole new internet while we're at it?
BlackNova Traders
I want a stereo, with a simple interface to get songs like a jukebox. Have it networked to my computer so I can add new songs easily. would be sweet.
-- Cheer, Cheer, The Red and the White.
No, really. Wireless is still being developed, whereas landline networking is already established. Get wireless working with IPv6, get any of the remaining bugs out of the protocols and implementations, then get it going with landline. The chicken-and-egg problem will already be solved.
Plus, IPv6 gives all the advantages that wireless requires such as encryption and easier routing.
So, is IPv6 done as a international standard yet? I realize it's in a few of the *nixs, but afaik (which may not be much), it isn't being implemented in a large scale way anywhere ('cept maybe Internet2). If it is a done standard, why not? MS is still beta-testing their implementation for Win2k, but why, if it's backwards compatable, isn't it sticking up all over the place yet?
Does anyone know the reason nobody is doing a mass rollout of IP v6? It was my belief that it was supposed to present a heap more address space; even my web hosting company told me they couldnt give me a real IP for my domain because of "Arin's restrictions" referring there to arin.net. I was told a year ago that v6 was "almost here" however everyone seems reticent to incur a mass rollout... why?
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Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
One of the biggest problems with wireless networks is latency. Dropped packets and so on really screw things up when you're going throw tunnels and behind hills. IPv6 won't fix that. Sure, its a nice way of assigning an identifier, and it'd be groovy to have a similar system on both wired and unwired networks, but the entire IP system was never designed to be robust enough to cope with the crapness of a wireless network. The October issue of Scientic American has a pretty indepth report about wireless networks regarding WAP.. read it online at http://www.sciam.com/2000/10 00i ssue/1000alpert.html
http://twitter.com/onion2k
IBM is planning to add IPv6 to it OS/400, Linux, WebSphere and Tivoli offerings. Hm, Linux already supports IPv6, actually since some time (which version?). Vincent
I don't think the cellular phone companies are planning to use mobile IP; I think they already have optimized mobility protocols.
controversial? huh? There's nothing controversial about IPv6, it just takes time and money for all the major IPv4 hardware to get upgraded.
As does most every other major operating system.
Rather, it's gonna have to happen as a series of foggy-areas gradually coalescing into local showers.
Why? First there's complacency. All of the problems with IPv4 have been patchable, work-aroundable, or otherwise resolvable. There's no screaming need for IPv6 right now. There are theoretical benefits and additional features built in but no absolute pressing need for it today, tomorrow, next quarter or next year.
Second there's the additional cost. Developing, testing, deploying, and supporting IPv6 is gonna cost. Apple & Stanford both did massive IP renumberings a few years ago; they cost millions and that's much less difficult then switching IP stacks and network infrastructure. Anybody that rolls out IPv6 in a big way is gonna have to spend a LOT of money doing so and frankly I know of few budgets with that kind of slosh in them.
Software compatibility. Applications and utilities across the board are hard-coded to use IPv4. From word-processors to chat clients to multi-tier ERP applications they all expect IPv4 and burp & spit-up when fed IPv6. Yes there are work arounds and alternatives and all of that but it quickly turns into a rats-nest of slightly different applications and idiosyncratic configurations and the whole set-up just gums up.
Hardware support isn't there yet either. Few products support IPv6 yet. Fewer still do so well. Of those almost none do so optimally. From NICS to routers to management systems to contracts and manuals the boxes aren't ready yet. Sure for a lab or two, even a floor or two on a research building but the minute you start plugging in the obsolete, the unusual, the critical stuff you start running into problems.
That million-dollar super-printer downstairs? No go. The fancy networked building security system? Locks up solid. The black-box encryption system for routing email to our overseas branches? We don't know what happened but now all of the LEDs glow solid and we can't get it to reset.
IPv6 is deep and untested waters. IS/IT/MIS/etc. is complex enough these days without throwing in a giant wild variable like IPv6.
Furthermore we've been burnt before. Remember when OSI was going to rule the world? Then ATM was gonna take over. Now IPv6 is the heir apparent. Frankly until it's out there and in significant quantities that it's a standard order most folks aren't gonna touch it. Oh there will be the occasional test and we'll have a favored techie bone up on it as a cookie/insurance-policy but nobody is taking it seriously.
Even in the wireless phone world IPv6 is finding it hard to roll-out. The equipment is expensive, tolerances are tight, and the requirements are brutal. These are telephony folks - they still have the old tight-ass conservative Bell-ways trained into them even in the wild-'n-woolly new age of wireless. They want many-9's of reliability, flawless interoperability, and the ability to scale quickly and massively before they'll commit.
IPv6 looks great when you're hacking around on your home box. But when it comes to signing the check for a couple million dollars or more (mebbe much more) for hardware, support, training etc. and you know that this will have significant repercussions on your career it suddenly looks much less appealing. IS/IT/MIS/etc. executives aren't cowards, but to get where they are they have to be survivors. Right now & for the foreseeable future IPv6 doesn't look like a good bet to be making.
Finally - what are Cisco, Nortel, 3Com, etc. using internally? Ipv4? Uh huh. If it's so great why aren't the darn manufacturers "eating their own dogfood"? Perhaps even with all of the support in-house they know it's not worth running yet, even for the bragging rights.
-- Michael
ps On the other hand for students, developers, and the ilk - bone up, design-with-this-in-mind, this could be a sea-change that will make your fortune.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
What about Apple's wireless Airport technology, that has been included with many of their machines for over a year now? From what I understand about it, its "supposed" to provide 11 Mbps, and most of its users have been impressed with it...
Go ahead and laugh at me for mentioning Apple, but as a networking guy, I respect the fact that they developed LocalTalk (which was revolutionary for its time) and that they helped Novell with ODI.
The article is specifically talking about using IP6 to talk to mobile devices. That is what I was discussing. I said "phones" because those are the most common mobile device, and I can't imagine that there will never ever be a mobile phone with an IP stack of some sort. In fact I would be surprised if at least one doesn't already exist. But if not, just substitute for "phone" whatever sort of mobile device _you_ think the article was talking about, and the point stands.
IPv6 already works on linux, {free,net,open}BSD, solaris 8 and some other systems. (among others, cisco-routers, from as-low as 1600, 25xx, ...)
Just give it a try:
End-users: http://www.freenet6.net/
ISPs: http://www.6bone.net
Cheerio! Kr. Bonne
it's a 128 bit address space, so let's pretend the entire thing is used. 2^128 is...damn, cheap calculator overflowed. Where's my TI-89...okay, 2^128 is...5 6 address.
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,4
That's...I don't know the word. One past dectillion.
That gives us each...79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,336 addresses. That's seventy-nine octillion addresses each. Now, even assuming we waste a quadrillion for each address we give out and we each use a quadrillion devices with our own IP, we'll be fine unless we manage to cram 80 people on this planet for every existing person. And I have no idea where I'm supposed to fit my quadrillion cell phones if we do that. Acutally, I doubt I could fit a million cell phones in this dorm room. ;)
Yeah, that's rather silly, so just believe people when they say we'll never run out. :)
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
FreeBSD supports IPv6 right now.
Your home stereo as anything of the sort can
live on its own private network. There is no
need for your home stereo to talk directly
to anything beyound your home.
When it really has to it will go out on the
same IP address everything else in your home has -
the samoe old IPv4 to which it and every other
device - and your porn download should be translated.
IPv6 is not to be..just get used to it.
To be reliable on mobile devices, IP6 would need built in support for informing the other side of each connection when your location changes. This is in an RFC which I dug up here, but does anyone know whether that is commonly implemented in IP6 stacks? Or how usable the tunnelling thing would (or wouldn't) be once everyone and his dog has an internet enabled mobile phone?
It's a /24 for your stereo. Good god, man.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
You should check this program out. I'm feeling lazy so I'm not going to post a link but I'm sure you can find it on freshmeat. I wanna use it as soon as I have an extra machine laying around. Of course the next extra machine I have is going to be a firewall so the second extra machine I get is going to be a networked stereo. :) Well, if you can call a box with mp3s connected to a stereo, a stereo. Sure why not its only another component like a cd player.
I don't have a lot of details about IPv6 but in my experience adding more feature (more IPs, more Security, whathaveyou) usually increases the network overhead. Just by switching to 128 bit they add 12 more bytes to the address field. Though this doesn't seem like much it adds up.
Time is Change.