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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. "
Will IPV6 fix DNS?
Will it give back that huge class A domain that MIT still has?
Will my cable modem ISP with IPV6 give me more than 1 IP address so I can turn off NAT and DHCP? probably not.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
From what I understand, Linux and Windows NT have had IPv6 support for quite some time now. The bigger barrier to adoption is that router technology for IPv6 is not quite ready for primetime. When Cisco and Nortel get their act in gear, IPv6 should be up and running in the wild in no time.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Who would start the change, since nobody is "in charge" of IP out there. If DNS root server A upgraded, would everyone else follow? So far, everybody is watching everyone else, nobody is making the first move.
How about if AOL made a systemwide change, or ATT, Excite, and MCI all together?
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
We're living in a wired world, and Windows NT provides the computing tools that we need to do ebusiness, as well as iPlay. Remember, Microsoft Windows NT: it doesn't get any better than this!
--
I like to watch.
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."
Why not run the conversion like the 6bone has? That is, start off with virtual IPv6 between IPv6 supporting sites over IPv4 links, and gradually shift to native IPv6 where possible as more and more of the intermediate "link" sites convert to IPv6? At some point, you switch over core routers one by one so that they're running virtual IPv4 over IPv6 transport, and switch out the last of the IPv4 hardware as it becomes obsolete.
Not that this necessarily provides an incentive for IPv4 users to switch, but IMHO, as a person that's not too knowledgeable about IPv6, I don't see why technically a migration has to be too difficult. Maybe you could make the incentive something like rewarding you with more IPv6 addresses as you move out of IPv4 space - that would definitely move big network operators along, at least.
I'm still not sure how to force a more equal global assignment of the dwindling IPv4 address space. It seems like if the IPv4 afficianados aren't careful, China will just switch to IPv6 immediately, and the rest of the world will get dragged along just so we can continue to communicate with that huge percentage of the human race.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Do we want everything connected to the Internet?
Who has pushed for universal connectivity of most things to the Internet and why do they want it that way?
Is the Net reaching a growth limit because of the IP numbers being used for the benefit of the Net and efficiency in the transfer of information, or so New Yuckers can trade stocks on their cellphones?
Consider the NASDAQ, which has sold its soul to technological change. It expands its trading capacity every year. The sellers of trading tools anticipate this expansion, and the traders overload the system again every year, driving a further expansion.
We can get to longer and longer fingerprints for our digital devices, or we can decide to better allocate IPs. This decision is directly related to our decisions about what we eventually want the Internet to be for.
Do we want the Internet to be a marketplace, a teacher, a trainer? I would rather have limited resources allocated to training, skills enrichment, and exposure to art and culture, than to a thousand million Doom-playing boxes and gabby cellphones.
Think about it. Which places in a given city get services such as DSL first? Is that the best social choice, for both the city and the Internet?
Goat sex free since 2001
I can't wait for the book! It'll be filled with commentary equally lacking in technical details, written by a mildly deluded harvard graduate.
"For instance, do people really want a unique address for a refrigerator -- allowing hackers to spy on individual eating habits -- or order you a truckload of milk?"
Do not fear, Consumer/Citizen #238o47234-9. We have taken care of the threat of the evil hackers. We have applied Purchase::Courts in order to prosecute, convict & incarcerate Evil Hacker Units for crimes we think they'll commit in the future, preventing them from ever happening. We call this "time-shifted law enforcement".
Do not fear, Consumer Units. We will prevent Technology::IPV6 from being used to order too much Commodity::Milk.
Everything has been rendered extraordinarily safe.
quoth the article:
great! if we are gonna effectively have two internets anyway, lets have the IPv6-based Net do away with the current DNS monopoly and let anyone register a TLD. .web, .sex, .JoeSchmoe, whatever. Open DNS is the way to go.
all someone would have to do is, write a plugin for a browser that lets it seamlessly navigate IPv6 networks. But at the same time, also allow the user to choose from a open list of DNS servers at the same time. YOU choose your root ! as it was intended to be.
my apologies to JoeSchmoe for any offense. thpbt :P
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
Or checkout the IPv6 project page
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
James Brents
someone was being greedy eh? Comeon folks, time to share..
Seriously though, the article does a good job at least trying to cover all the bases even if some of the arguements are weak. We all know that it's a big change and that it's going to take years to make the transistion from 32 bit addressing to 128 bit addressing, but the people saying "why fix it if we dont have a problem?" had better get their heads out of their asses. It's just like standing in the street and saying "why should I buy a car when my horse and wagon works fine?".
I agree that some ideas are way over the top (tell me again why my toaster should be networked??) but with computers getting smaller and cheaper the number of networked devices will continue to grow. We need a new system that can handle assigning addresses to them all. It's going to take time, effort and money to switch everything over so get started and quit complaining.
Try searching for IPv6, which is the topic at hand.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
"If we don't switch to ipv6 by late 1997, the net will run out of addresses."
-- many many pundits
good IPv6 homepage
IPv6 HOWTO
IPv6 Standards
IPv6 Tutorial (PDF)
And the 6bone
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
James Brents
If you want to have access to 20+ devices in your house while you're away, then giving each one an IP is ridiculous. You get a server for the house, and communicate with each of the devices through the server. The server has an IP address, the devices have names (or the standard internal network addresses, 192.168.0.x). You access the devices by name, using the server as a proxy. I'm sure somebody will come up with some XML based protocol for this if they haven't already.
Also, right now the worlds population is about 6 billion, and 4 billion address are possible with IPv4. Based on everybodies estimates on the adoption rate of internet access, we still have a decade before we're screwed. So, take the time to get it right instead of screwing up everything at once.
So who would be in favor of that? Just the RIAA, MPAA, SPA (Software Publishers' Association), BSA (Business Software Alliance), and every other organization that believes that elimination of peer-to-peer and residential FTP and web servers would reduce piracy. ISPs would love it because servers on residential connections sometimes use an inordinate amount of bandwidth. Law enforcement would be happy because ISPs would have to process the packets, meaning that they had an easy way to monitor which user connected to which IP addresses. And ISPs could more easily perform content filtering if, say, Adobe's lawyers wrote a letter and said "IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx has a downloadable program that decrypts our e-books. Please assure that your users cannot access that IP address."
The hardest part to change will be all of these new embeded devices that use IPv4 at some level. Not to mention all the cable modem and DSL routers and other misc equiptment that does not update easily.
Try explaining to the average AOL user why his new net radio gizmo no longer works. Or why he has to replace his cable modem firewall when it works just fine.
And I am not going to even try and think about what IPv6 will look like once Microsoft gets their hands on it...
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
every win32 system can have IPv6 for months using Trumpet TCP/IP stack, even win98, not "only" nt/2k that have ipv6 support from M$ also.
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Network Address Translation only provides one-way connectivity. It allows a system behind a NAT to establish connections from external sites and retrieve data.
What it *doesn't* allow is anyone out on the internet to go and connect to the machine behind the NAT, which is kinda essential for anything beyond web-browsing.
The internet is not just port 80. Many people treat it as such, and I hope they have fun. But don't delude yourself that you have a full internet connection, because you don't. You've just got a fancy TV with a few more channels.
NAT is a stop-gap measure at best. IPv6 is essential for allowing the internet to scale the way you want it to.
Think about it: it's not outrageous that MIT and similar institutions have class-A networks - it's outrageous that *you* don't. IPv6 can fix that.
Ask your ISP about their plans to upgrade to IPv6 - and what their IP allocation policy will be. If the ISP doesn't intend to give you lots of IPv6 addresses, start looking somewhere else.
Dynamic IP allocation sucks in the same way that NAT does. Many of the peer to peer projects nowadays, in order to keep functioning, have to build their own namespace and addressing structures just to work around it.
I say this article sucked. /. and knew I could vent.
Clueless hype is all that's out there these hot summer days. It's ridiculous. They did concede that IPv6 is inevitable, but they sure spent some time wringing hands over totally irrelevant crap at the same time. I saw that link on CNN earlier in the evening and didn't read it because I knew it would suck and only went back and read it only because I saw the link here on
For those of us old enough to go ahead and got busy organizing networks here and there back when ICANN was getting started and you could just ask for net numbers --as I and many others did-- the problem is all too clear. The beauracratic, financial and legal powers that became involved over the years totally twisted the original premise. If you want a frickin' number you get one. If you want a thousand, you get a thousand. They're just numbers. Deal with it.
But that's not what it turned into at all. Vast portions of those billions of IPv4 numbers don't go anywhere because network routing is a financial issue closely intertwined with a technical issue that few people outside of open source are familiar with.
It's irrelevant though because IPv6 is inevitable and this has already been covered in so many other ways.
And, to top it off, dynamic domain names makes it all meta anyway. Yeah, I'm not crying about the way things are by any means but more numbers is such a rational idea. And why stop at IPv6, next step is get rid of this restricive domain naming stuff. They've already started using Chinese characters at some domain registrars. So let's just name domains like long file names so we can use popular phrases! Shit, you don't think there will be a gold rush on that shit? There's a limited set of English phrases. You take that from an English major.
From what I understand, Linux and Windows NT have had IPv6 support for quite some time now.
The problem appears to be more subtle than that. The routers are mostly compliant, I wouldn't worry about it.
The smooth transition is going to require that everyone on the 'Net start to switch over. Even half-wit Windows-95 AOL-point-and-drool users.
Surely, we can release patches to the operating systems. And users can upgrade to new applications programs which aren't crashing when they request a DNS lookup and get something longer than they expect.
But you know they won't.
As evidence, I submit to you the Code Red worm. You'd have to be living under a rock for the past two months to not know about it. Yet, I still get hit by infected machines. Follow the link on my .sig.
I haven't studied or attempted to deploy IPv6, but it will have to be backwards compatible with IPv4.
In the 1950s, Europe upgraded their TV system to color. The new PAL and SECAM color standards weren't compatible with their old 405/441-line black and white standards, leaving consumers with far too many confusing choices. Arguably, European TV never recovered.
By contrast, RCA came up with an ingenious way of making a color signal ride on top of the existing North American black and white system. Old black and white TV sets were eventually replaced with color, but there was no great format change. You bought a color TV or a black and white set, and you weren't at the mercy of finding out whether or not there was still a black and white station in your area. People transitioned more gently and weren't put off by having their two-year-old oak-cabinet investment turned into a paperweight by moving out of a 405 line service area.
IPv6 will have to be deployed in the same way or adoption rates will wane.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
"An online electronic device only needs one port!"
slashdot://buzban
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
According to the RFC's, even a lowly dialup users will be given more routable addresses than the
entire internet contains at the moment.
For instance, do people really want a unique address for a refrigerator -- allowing hackers to spy on individual eating habits -- or order you a truckload of milk?
Wow, that kinda puts a new spin on the old too much milk problem from my Operating Systems class in school. Brings back bad memories.
(For those of you who don't know/remember this problem, it is an example of resource locking, needed in OS design. I would say all Computer Science/Engineering students take that class, at least the did at my university).
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
...we should educate ourselves about it.
We the Consumers of This Great Nation(tm) are delighted at the news you bring us, Shopper sllort. Indeed, it is gratifying that Crime(tm) was prevented by Our FBI(tm) in such an effecient manner, such that Shopper Bell can be Reformed(tm). While regrettable that Shopper Bell's Consumer Credit(tm) will be limited for a period of ten years due to his incarceration for Unapproved Speech(tm), it is important to the serenety of our Shopper's Paradise(tm) that such potentially dangerous Shoppers be detained and Reformed(tm) early in order to insure their quick return and continued contribution to Our Consumer Economy(tm).
Yours in Consumption,
Shopper FreeUser.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
First off, my toaster,TV,shower,alarm clock, and bed do not need to have an IP address on the internet. 99.995% of all internet users do not need an actual IP address on the internet. Yes, we are getting close to using up all the Class C network numbers. but if many of the messed up ISP's and co-lo farms actually managed IP's better it would, quite possibly, become a self controlling problem. when I Had my server on the internet I was given 8 IP addresses by my ISP. What the heck for? I asked for one, they said, "here! take 8!" so there's 7 Ip addresses that are now unuseable by others.
Now you might have the reason that you need to run dns,smtp,www,pop3,ftp,etc... on different machines... ok, you still dont need more than 1 Internet IP address. that's what your routing equipment is for, to manage IP addresses. They magically route that request from 127.0.0.1:80 to 10.12.1.2:80 and that 127.0.0.1:21 to 10.12.1.3:21
any shortage is because of slipshod management of the IP space.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
For the longest time all devices will require dual addresses (Ip4 and ip6) DHCP is not capable of that feat. so now we either have a techie-guy(tm) deal with the customer or just silently piss-off everyone at once. I.E. switch over from ip4 to ip6 at midnight on XX/xx/xx. Let all your users know this and send them links to the patches/files/wizards. after the switch those that have incompatable hardware are to be told to jump in a lake. those with incompatalbe software are scolded for not upgrading when they were warned.
the switch will piss-off a huge block of users. and that's the price of progress..
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I want an IPV6 address. I'm going to run my internal home network on IPV6 and run a translator to make my IPV4 addresses translate to internal IPV6 ones. Where do I get a number space? I know the lower 8 bytes are suppose to be a MAC address, but what about the upper 8?
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
ditto
more numbers is such a rational idea
agreed
next step is get rid of this restricive domain naming stuff
Well, I think we have been selecting our own domains on the premise that shorter is better. You can't even get a three letter .com domain anymore because they are all taken. Longer is not necessarily better when your customers have to type this.is.my.cool.domain.name.everyone.will.remember .com
If noone can prove that it's unsafe to fly, we fly - - Pre-Challenger NASA mindset.
Doesn't seem to strange when you consider how unbelievably complicated and dangerous something like going into space is. If somone has proof (and a fix) to some deadly problem I can see them stopping, otherwise it's all just theoretical mumbo jumbo and we'd still debating launching our first rocket. Even now space shuttle launches are risky, it's only a matter of time before someone else dies in them.
Jet fighters won't help us win the war, let's move those R&D funds elsewhere - Adolf Hitler, 1942
Almost certainly true. One of Hitler's problems was his belief in superweapons. Germany spent countless R&D dollars on wasted projects during the war that would have (in the end) been better spent on making Panthers more reliable and simply producing more of them. Jet fighters wouldn't be viable for several years after 1942, even if Hitler decided to spend massive R&D dollars on them. By the way, Germany DID build jet powered planes near the end of the war, but their affect was minimal (the war was already pretty much lost by that point).
Mp3? What's that? - RIAA, 1996
Shouldn't that be: MP3? Our existing copyright laws should cover that nicely, but just to be sure, let's go and buy some Congressmen.
I read the internet for the articles.
...is not how IPv6 will deal with the increased addressing range, but how it will handle issues of security, and more importantly, WHO will control that security and will the specifications be OPEN?
The internet as it stands suffers because it is trust-based and there are all too many willing to abuse that trust. Many untrusting-internet ideas have been flown, and most of them involve more identity checking and awareness of the originators of packets. Would this "new" internet (I hate to use such an overused term but it seems appropriate) - would this "new" internet retain any opportunities for anonymity (and thus more secure freedom of speech), or will it be a case of "let's crack down on anonymity online because anyone who doesn't want the totally benign government to know who he is must be a terrorist or a child molestor! Why do you want to be anonymous, do you have something to HIDE?"
A lot can be done towards preventing the latter if the specs for any new internet communications protocols being open or hopefully even GPL'd. Is this likely?
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
MIT's IP scheme has allowed them to build a by-the-books network. They use their IP scheme to make it really easy to figure out where a machine is by IP. For added fun, they don't use firewalls. In fact, MIT discourages firewalling. They recommend using real security, and recommend that you use Kerberos for everything... while not supporting Kerberos (in a useful manner) except on their UNIX machines.
For added fun, MIT gave an entire B-class (well, 1/256th of their A-class, not technically a B, but you understand) to each dormitory and each fraternity. MIT groups aren't starving for IPs, which is nice, but the rest of the Internet is.
You seem to be confused:
The point of having a static address is so that one machine can be found by others. You have to have some fixed address in order to describe who it is your connecting to.
Imagine the havoc that would pass if area codes in telephone numbers could change on moments notice. Take away the phone book too, since you think dns is uneeded. (Works fine for calling out- since in that case you dont care what your number is. but who are you going to call, exactly?)
If there is no way for anyone else to determine what a given servers address is, then there no way anyone else can connect to it.
In reality each "entity" be it a megacorp or a measly dialup user, will be given 80 bits worth of routable address. 16 bits of that they can use for subnets. Only the 48 starting bits are really "fixed". The 128 bit addressing scheme is really an attempt to get everyone tons of "static" routable addresses.
And There will of course be a name-to address mapping similiar to what DNS does now. The simple reason is that noone is going to type in a huge monster address when they want to hit a web page.
You can run thousands of webservers on a single server, single ip address. You use the names. Similarly, this can be extended to other services. (Do a search on /., it was mentioned earlier).
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
I think the approved way to do this is for the client to try to DHCP to a IPv6 server. If it gets an answer from this, then it will get either just an IPv6 address, or both an IPv6 and an IPv4 address. If it does not get an answer, then it should try to DHCP to an IPv4 server, in which case it would get only an IPv4 address. The DHCP server would listen on only IPv4 (If it was an IPv4 version) or both IPv4 and IPv6 (If it was an IPv6 version). This way you get backwards compatability for both old clients, and old servers.
Hey my dick is bigger than yours because I shaved off all my pubic hairs
Heh. And your girlfriend is a pedophile. ;)
even 60Hz isn't acceptable, so now we have tv-sets that digitally enhance the image and give 100HzTrue. You don't see features like that in NTSC sets, though - the 60Hz vertical rate of NTSC means that set mfrs concentrate on other things - like 53" projection sets where the scan lines are 1/4" apart. Ugh.
IMHO American TV suck, and it suck hard, to many comercials and verry bad picture quality, but mind you that was in 1992Too many commercials, I agree. But that's not a technical issue. As for the picture quality, were you watching TV on NYC's cablesystem? [grin]
A good, clean NTSC signal is very nice. It's nothing compared to a VGA monitor, of course, but neither is PAL. I'm a videophile, I've worked as a broadcast technician, and NTSC's picture quality can be amazingly good.
and when is the us going to switch to hdtv ?When Linux conquers the desktop, IIS users keep their webservers patched, and our home 'net connections are fiber optic with IPv6 addresses.
Maybe sooner. [sigh] It's the same chicken or egg issue which slows the IPv6 adoption.
Here in Canada, we're waiting for the US to take the lead. ER is now simulcast in HDTV, but until I point a big UHF Yagi at Buffalo NY and smuggle a receiver across the border, it does me no good.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Well, I'll take this mainly as a troll. Nevertheless...
It appears that you are the one who has not fully grasped the entirety of the situation. I suppose it's not only 100% a matter of rights, but also a matter of ethics. Ever since the advent of VCRs, people have been able to time-shift their viewing in the name of convenience. It's commonplace. As such, most people consider it a fair-use right. Since the government is *supposed* to follow in the interests of the people, it *should* be a right by law. (De facto, I think they call it.)
For broadcasters to take that away from us while masquerading the action as an anti-piracy measure is not right, not ethical, and should be (in many people's minds, not just my own) considered illegal.
man, first of all, TV is FREE to watch because of advertising
As long as we are *forced* to watch the advertisements, TV is not free. The price does not always have to involve money. That aside, I would probably agree to having to watch advertisements if I could time-shift the program. But not if I had a choice.
As well, mandatory advertisement-watching disallowal of time-shifting would not be in the best interests of the industry either. (Take Napster for example. Is it any coincedence that CD sales have skyrockted in the last few years? Maybe. But I doubt it.) I currently record Star Trek episodes during the week on my VCR for viewing on the weekend because I'm typically a rather busy person. So, if the government came along and mandated this new HDTV technology that prohibits time-shifting and skipping over advertisements, I am one of many types of TV viewers who would be severely impacted. I would probably not watch Star Trek any more. That means I would not even have the *chance* to view the very commercials that pay them to run the show.
And I might note that I do not consider time-shifting as "stealing." By your own admission, you apparently do. Who's the "fucking kid" again?
The article said that everybody on the planet could plug in millions of devices. This is somewhat untrue. With 128 bit addressing space, 10 BILLION people could plug in 34028236692093846346337460743.177 IPv6 devices each!
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP