Slashdot Mirror
IPv4 vs IPv6: The Road Ahead
jeffy124 writes "With the world moving towards having every device under the sun being Internet-connected, is the Internet going to be too large? This article off CNN.com examines this potential situation. They look into the problems of switching networks from IPv4 to IPv6, and the inclusion of inter-operability between the two. Benefits of moving to IPv6 are looked at, but so are the critics of it who point out that if we don't have a problem now, why fix it? While low of technical details, the story points out that not many systems out there currently support IPv6. "
if we don't have a problem now, why fix it?
(ahem)
"640 kB should be enough for everybody"
"I see a worldwide market for 5, maybe 6 computers"
and one that I can only assume:
"yeah, use 2 digits for the year. Bah, the year 2000 is 20 years away, nobody will be using this stuff then anyways"
And besides, if you wait until the problem is upon us, it'll be too late to fix it.
If God gave us curiosity
A group migration to IPv6 may never be necessary. With NAT now being pervasive, There only needs to be one or very few IP addresses per company.
The original quote (around 1989) was: "My god! At this rate, we'll be out of addresses by [1992]"
That obviously hasn't happened now, has it?
When ALL of an ISP's web clients can function on a single IP address at port 80 using header redirection, I don't thenk we're going to need the additional address space for a long time.
(IP addressing by latitude and longitude, while a cool idea, always seemed to be a solution looking for a problem.)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Will it give back that huge class A domain that MIT still has?
A class A is 1/20,282,409,603,651,670,423,947,251,286,016th of the total IP6 namespace. Why not let them keep it?
A reward that would definitely make a big impact would be to offer Microsoft the first publicly available Class A block in IPv6. they would switch in about 3 seconds, and drag everyone else kicking and screaming along with. The whole of MSN would be on it, including Hotmail, and the .Net side of MS.
But the Chinese government might not really care about this, since they don't want their people to access the Net anyway, with all the political stuff and all.
I have to stop wasting so much time reading Slashdot. It's interfering with my crystal meth addiction.
According to the RFC's, even a lowly dialup users will be given more routable addresses than the
entire internet contains at the moment.
How about a killer app? The problem is that right now if you start using ipv6 you are pretty much alone. Actually you might as well unplug your network cable, since you won't be able to do much useful stuff with it.
What is needed is ipv6 only services (e.g. mp3 peer2peer filesharing) AND an easy way to get an ipv6 number for your clients/servers that can coexist with your current ipv4 number (i.e. your computer has both an ipv4 and ipv6 number). The easy part is essential because that prevents that people start creating ipv4 gateways to such services (thus removing the need for getting an ipv6 number). There are plenty of ipv6 numbers available so getting and registering one should be made as easy as possible (something like a distributed, global dhcp server that would automatically get you one based on your mac address would come in handy). Come to think of it, why not just automatically convert those mac addresses into ipv6 numbers (mac addresses are supposed to be unique anyway but I'm not entirely sure this is a great idea)
As I understand it, ipv6 can be tunneled over existing ipv4 networks, so it shouldn't be a problem if some routers inbetween ipv6 hosts are ipv4 only.
This would cause the amount of client pc's with ipv6 numbers to gradually grow. Also since lots of PCs don't have static ipv4 numbers, the amount of servers on ipv6 would also grow. Eventually, there will be a critical mass of ipv6 servers and clients and the switch can be made.
Currently there are a lot of p2p applications in development. I imagine, implementing such stuff would be a lot easier using ipv6 with its improved features. Another killerapp could be streaming multimedia (you want to see this great movie, get yourself an ipv6 number now!!).
Jilles
Whenever I've thought about IPv6 and its "suggested applications", this is the first thought that's come to mind. The answer is clearly "no, I don't want the entire world to be able to connect to my fridge." But don't you imply that level of connectivity when you assign your fridge an IP address? Not necessarily. What we should see with the switch to IPv6 is a shift of focus from "addresses" to "routes". Let me explain:
Right now, particularly in the ISP world, packet destinations are very address-centric; each customer has one or two IP addresses, and if a packet arrives at those addresses, it is delivered to the customer, either directly or through a hub.
With the number of IP addresses available in IPv6, it would be silly for an ISP to only give you a few addresses, or even a few hundred addresses. Instead, they will give out entire class B networks, and (here's the key), simply route any packet addressed to that network over the customer's connection. Since you can't just stick several thousand devices on a lan, having a full-featured router in your home will be a requirement to sort out all the incoming packets.
Once there's a router in everyone's home, it's trivial to set them up as firewalls so that someone can't hack your fridge from the outside. Sure, your fridge can still initiate a connection to the supermarket and order more milk, and everything works with no NAT hackery, since the fridge has its own IP address within your subnet. Or, you could require authentication when connecting to the fridge from outside, but still be able to address it by its unique IP from anywhere.
So, the bottom line is: more IP addresses leads to required home routers, which are trivially set up as firewalls.
-- Brett