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IPv6: Japan Leads
Incongruity writes: "ZDNet, in an interactive week article examines the progress towards acceptance of the IP version 6. The Japanese government has set a deadline for its information technology sectors to run on IPv6 by 2005. Other than that deadline set by the Japanese government, acceptance and implementation has, according to the article, been less than full steam ahead. This despite the fact that IPv6 have been available for allocation since mid-1999."
Hm. Forgive me, but which IPv6 policy is this from? There are plenty. Most of them are still being worked upon. Haven't heard of this one. Although, I can say that it'd be quite simple to change someone's IPv6 prefix; in ISP-ville, they just send a message to the router, and it does everything necessary without human intervention (gotta love machines taking all our jobs and performing them better than us, eh?). Now, I don't quite think this'd work very fast over all of Japan, nor do I think anyone would reassign Japan's entire IPv6 prefixes...
Anyway, in all my rambling, I still wanna know which spec this is from.
Makes me think it's a customer-driven world we live in.
OS vendors and network hardware vendors are treating IPv6 as experimential, which is why people are not deploying it. People like the network to work with as little work as possible. You are more likely to be pitched about Voice over IP than IPv6 from a vendor salesperson.
Another major concern is hardware compatiblity, people don't want to scrap older routers. IT departments have to watch their budgets these days. Most routers do support IPv6 or can be updated to do so.
IPv6 uses 128 bit (16 byte) addressing.
The minimum allocation is still 1 address of course. /64.
that's 2^64 addresses, or 281474976710656 class B address blocks. In theory, no ISP should ever have less, but clearly there's a market segment that has been ignored - ISP customers, and it will be serviced. I'm guessing that most home networks will get a /96 (4 billion address) but that's just a guess. Every ISP is probably going to do it differently.
The minimum network allocation is a
IPv6 packets have a standard for encryption, which arguably means they will be easier to encrypt than IPv4 packets, but they aren't all encrypted by default. Also, encrypted IPv6 packets can encrypt the source address, making traffic analysis more difficult. However, packets encrypted using the standard encryption are easy to identify as encrypted packets. This would make traffic analysis of encrypted traffic easier.
Although technically no one owns IPv6 address space, it's extremely unlikely that anyone will ever be asked to return address space until we are close to running out. According to the IPv6 specs., renumbering should be a simple task, and it also shouldn't be necessary. I'm not sure I believe either of those statements, but that is what is claimed. The real reason for this clause is to remind ISPs to tell their customers that they can't take their address space with them when they switch ISPs. (I do think it's reasonable to assume this could happen again if it wasn't prevented.)
Some Windows IPv6 support already exists. (I'm using it right now.) the website hs247.com/ has a lot of information, go slashdot them. ;)
FreeBSD and Linux already support IPv6. There are bugs, but then there are bugs in IPv4 too.