Free IPv6 Subnets Are Going Away

ar32h writes "The 6bone is going to be phased out soon. This means all of us who have IP addresses or subnets beginning with 3ffe from tunnel brokers like Freenet6 are going to be sorry out of luck." According to the linked phaseout plan, "It is anticipated that under this phaseout plan the 6bone will cease to operate by July 1, 2006, with all 6bone prefixes fully reclaimed by the IANA," but there are a number of sub-deadlines along the way.

Comments

haha

[Anonymous Coward]

sucks to be the people that use freenet! ha ha. . . oh wait.. that includes me. SHIT! =(

I don't

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no idea what this even means. IPv6 seems like a promised land that will never happen in my neck of the woods....

Re:I don't

[Peterus7]

Haha, I just can't wait till IPv7... According to Serial Experiment Lain, that will lead to a socially inept script kiddie/h4x0r-g0d ctr-alt-deleting reality.

Re:I don't

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean IPv8. Sjees don't you people read RFC's? Ow wait this is slashdot, the biggest DDoS-community on the net.

Re:I don't

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are we even going to 6? why not just skip straight to 8? Is there some technical limitation that's preventing it?

And no, IPv8 isn't overkill. People used to say IPv4 was good nuff, then the web-enabled toasters started showing up.

Re:I don't

[mr. methane]

IPv6's biggest driver was the rapidly-dwindling address space pool. But that problem is virtually gone due to the availability of NAT, and the way that web servers have cleanly implemented name-based hosting services.

Unless there's some new service that's only available on '6, or some other reason for people to learn a complex new technology... I just don't think v6 will ever be widely implemented.

Free IPv6 Subnets Are Going Away

[Beliskner]

Yeaahhhhhhh, the unstoppable march forward of technology, first the linux 2.4 kernel then this!

Oh wait...

Re:Free IPv6 Subnets Are Going Away

[ischorr]

The 2.4 kernel is being revoked by IANA? They're taking this whole "complete control" thing a little too far..

Does anyone use 3ffe::/96 any more?

[c_g_hills]

I used a 3ffe prefix a few years ago to get acquainted with IPv6. These days, my JANET provided tunnel serves me well. Performance to a lot of 6bone networks has been deteriorating with all the free subnets they have been allocating.

Re:Does anyone use 3ffe::/96 any more?

[pldms]

I've been using 2001::/96 thanks to ipng.org.uk. I found it very easy to get going, given that we already had an OpenBSD router sat between us and the world.

I assume there are equivalents in every country. Free ipv6 subnets aren't going away, afaict.

Re:Does anyone use 3ffe::/96 any more?

[geniusj]

/96? Nope.. But how about /16? :)

2003? what about NOW?

[RobertTaylor]

"...by July 1, 2006, with all 6bone prefixes fully reclaimed by the IANA," but there are a number of sub-deadlines along the way."

would it not be more useful to name the closest deadline, not one three years away!?

mmmm pissed @ boathouse chester.

Re:2003? what about NOW?

[Anonymous Coward]

New addresses can be allocated until July 1, 2004.
Existing addresses can be used until July 1, 2006.

Re:2003? what about NOW?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, you must configure your calendar with the datemap dff9-f8-fe.

Cutting off their nose to spite their face?

[00_NOP]

Strikes me that IPv6 was about to make some progress amongst the early adopters (ie unix/linux users - or at least me) and now it's gonna cost, so what's the point?

Re:Cutting off their nose to spite their face?

[IAR80]

Lots of $ for them to spend. And unfortunatelly the early days of free and open internet are gone. Wellcome to the comercial era of internet where everything costs a lot.

Re:Cutting off their nose to spite their face?

[Skapare]

So IPv6 will cost $. So what's the incentive to deploy IPv6 if it costs $ and doesn't return any? Welcome to the capitalist world where everyone expects a return on investment. The only incentive to do IPv6 is the "geek factor" and 6bone is about to eliminate that.

Re:Cutting off their nose to spite their face?

[IAR80]

Instead of return of investment maybe people will do it because they just run out of IPv4 addresses.

Re:Cutting off their nose to spite their face?

[Skapare]

There's plenty of address space remaining in IPv4 right now. Sure, it will eventually run out if nothing replaces it. That was originally projected to happen even before 2000. Now it looks like it won't be until after 2012 or 2015 or so. In the mean time, no incentive to switch to IPv6. But there is time to go back to the drawing table and redo the architecture right this time and include a scalable routing system. And yes, I have already thought out a way to do it (but I'm not in the elite circle of RFC writers, so they will just have to figure it out on their own, if they can).

Re:Cutting off their nose to spite their face?

[Pii]

"(but I'm not in the elite circle of RFC writers, so they will just have to figure it out on their own, if they can)

Anyone can author an RFC... You need not be part of some exclusive club or organization.

I'm a router geek, so I'd be curious to hear your idea.

a bit like ICANN

[more fool you]

the IANA giveth, the IANA taketh away. Are they running out of addresses already?

Re:a bit like ICANN

[IAR80]

128 bits. Hard to belive they are running out considering how few people are running ipv6.

Re:a bit like ICANN

[Sgs-Cruz]

Umm, yeah. Hard to believe they could ever run out since there's more IPv6 addresses than there are atoms in the universe :)

Re:a bit like ICANN

[TobiasSodergren]

With the gadgets getting smaller and more communicative, maybye we're asymptotically getting there eventually? ;)

step forward or backward

[IAR80]

The closing of the 6bone is a step backward, but the claiming of the address space maybe a step forward in a large scale implementation of ipv6. Till then I am still going to run my experimantal private backbone on ipv6 even if IANNA wants it or not, or care for that matter. :)

Re:step forward or backward

[rabidcow]

refer to RFC 2471, which established the current address allocation: "These addresses are temporary and will be reclaimed in the future."

And why are they closing the 6bone? "As IPv6 is beginning its production deployment it is appropriate to plan for the phaseout of the 6bone."

They're just cleaning up from the testing phase so they can move into official use. It's only a step backwards if you consider the end of a beta test a step backwards.

Re:step forward or backward

[kasperd]

It's only a step backwards if you consider the end of a beta test a step backwards.

If you can go from IPv6 tunneled over IPv4 to a pure IPv6 network, it is a step forwards. But if you are loosing your only way to get IPv6 access and are forced to go back to IPv4 it is a step backwards. Do you believe IPv6 will be widespread enough by the time they start closing the temporary solutions?

Re:step forward or backward

[amorsen]

If you happen to have at one IPv4 address, you are automatically allocated a /48 subnet on IPv6 with 6to4. For free. Good luck trying to run out of addresses (for the non-initiated, a /48 contains 2^80 addresses).

This article is unnecessarily alarming, but then again, who would bother reading an article with this headline: "6bone users have to change addresses in three years"?.

Re:step forward or backward

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but none of these geeks seem to understand, thats why they still live at mum&dads!

Re:step forward or backward

[Skapare]

Do you believe IPv6 will be widespread enough by the time they start closing the temporary solutions?

I seriously doubt it. It's a chickend and egg problem. Most companies are avoiding upgrades, patches, and service packs on just about everything. And you expect them to suddenly embrace IPv6 for no reason (what can they do that IPv4 can't do?)? Will there be anyone who will be running reachable only via IPv6? Well, a few geek sites will be there, but nothing for real world business and the average consumer. So no need for IPv6 and no desire for IPv6-only. It's DOA.

Re:step forward or backward

[Anonymous Coward]

IANNA

I Am Not a Number, Anymore

In 2006 eh?

[CoolVibe]

Ah, allright... I just hope I moved by then. I hope my tunnel broker does too.

6bone has been replaced by 6to4

[Wesley Felter]

You can get free IPv6 subnets using the much more efficient 6to4. 6bone isn't needed any more; that's why it's being phased out.

Re:6bone has been replaced by 6to4

[Michael Hunt]

For those wondering what the hell 6to4 is when it's at home, here's a brief explanation.

the /16 prefix 0x2002:: is reserved for 6to4 tunnelling (so it's not something that IANA is going to reclaim any time soon, any more than they're going to reclaim 172.16/12...). A 6to4 TLA is 48 bits in length, and comprises 2002:(your gateway IPv4 address in hex.) For instance, the 6to4 prefix at work, when I was playing with it, was 2002:CB53:9C82: (as the IP I was using was 203.94.156.130.)

For those unfamiliar with how IPv6 addressing works, under a /48, you have a network space the size of a /16, each of which is its own /64. ie, under 2002:CB53:9C82::, the subnets would be 2002:CB53:9C82::/64 through 2002:CB53:9C82:FFFF/64.

Each subnet can host up to a /48 of machines, the other half of the address is the Layer 2 address of the endpoint machine passed through an algorithm to convert it to 64 bits in length (forget the RFC which specifies this.)

The advantage of this setup is that ingress traffic doesn't need to pass through a series of tunnelled networks, as the endpoint address is encoded in the prefix.

Outbound traffic still passes through a gateway of some nature, which will then figure out how to dispatch the traffic (eg it could be connected to the 6bone, some native 6nets, or the destination address could be another 6to4 address.)

FreeBSD has a good 6to4 implementation called stf(4). I recommend checking it out if you're curious :)

Re:6bone has been replaced by 6to4

[kju]

Another example of a mis-scored clueless comment on slashdot. 2002:: (aka 6to4) is not an replacement for 3ffe::, for two simple reasons: 6to4 needs an underlying IPv4 address, and of course this address can't be dynamic to host servers etc (because the 6to4-Address would change every time you get a new IPv4-Address). And no reverse lookup for 2002::...

So get a clue. 3ffe:: is replaced by production blocks assigned in the 2001:: range. Just as you got a block in 3ffe:: you can get a block in 2001:: from a provider/tunnel broker/whatever. And most of 2001:: is still transported by the means of tunnels - what is what 6bone is/was. So some kind of 6bone is still needed, though it isn't called by this name anymore.

Re:6bone has been replaced by 6to4

[WoofLu]

finally someone with a clue!

Mods, please spend some points on parent (:

Re:6bone has been replaced by 6to4

[fuzzel]

There is reverse DNS for 6to4.
But just like 6bone space only under ip6.int and not (yet) under ip6.arpa.

2.0.0.2.ip6.int. 86400 IN NS flag.ep.net.
2.0.0.2.ip6.int. 86400 IN NS z.ip6.int.
2.0.0.2.ip6.int. 86400 IN NS dot.ep.net.

You will have to mail hostmaster@ep.net to get a delegation under this and prove that you 'own' that IP address allong with some other formalities.

If they want us to upgrade to IPv6...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would ARIN do this? Damn greedy bastards. I just had to write a $2,500 check to them last month for my small block of addresses. They make more to let me use an IP address than I do working 60 hours a week for an entire month.

Re:If they want us to upgrade to IPv6...

[thogard]

ARIN is the reason there are no more IP addresses. Their polices don't allow small compaines any way to dual home and their stupidity results in lots of compaines getting far more addresses than they need. Did you need more than a /24? I know you got more because they can't dish out any less than /22 or so now.

I think that ARIN should start a policy that for any new allocation, 1/16 must be dual homeable. These addresses would be dual allocated to two ISPs at the same time and that any large ISP that needs more address space must set up agreements with other ISPs. This would force them to change from the model they use now to one with more cooperation.

Right now I need 16 address that can be routed via either NTT or Telstra but to get 16 with ARINs model, I have to pay then too much and then they give me far more addresses that I will ever use.

Re:If they want us to upgrade to IPv6...

[dissy]

You do realize that you can get a block of IPs from one of your ISPs, and if they are willing, they will SWIP it to you, assign you an ASN, and you can do BGP between the main ISP (that the IPs belong to) and any other ISP that will do BGP with you.
Even if your link to the main ISP goes away, your IPs that belong to them will still route through the other ISPs you have connections to.

This is how you are suppost to get IP space and multihome for small blocks of IPs. (Small being under a /20 as of 1998 i believe it was)

If you need a /20 or more, you are suppost to buy the block from ARIN directly.
In their contract, it actually states you have a years time to renumber your networks and give the ISPs IP space back to them, and use only your ARIN space. If you dont give the ISPs space back, you are in voilation of your contract.
But the whole reason that is there is because getting an ARIN block of IPs is an upgrade path from your large block of ISP IPs.
Both can still do BGP just the same.

Also to get an ARIN block, you must be multihomed already. That in itself should tell you you can multihome without their help :)

The main problem is, alot of routers are configured to ignore routes smaller than a C class (/24) so if you got less than that, they cant garentee all backbones over the world will have routing table entrys for their customers/transiant trafic to find your network.
Any backbone that used such filters would never route traffic to you, either from their customers, or from anyone that has to route packets through them.

Backbones do this because they do not want to buy memory for lots of routers. This has nothing to do with ARIN.

Some nicer ISPs will still do BGP with you on very small blocks of IPs, but as a large chunk of the net wont see you.

The only way to solve this is for the main ISP to mark a whole /24 of theirs on its own ASN, and tell the other ISPs you use to route over the whole block.
If you want to subnet just a /28 out of that, your more than welcome to.
But as the ISP cant use any of the other IPs in that /24, it would be more wasteful to leave them unused than to simply route them to you in the first place.

Re:If they want us to upgrade to IPv6...

[Anonymous Coward]

dude, you really need to get laid

Re:If they want us to upgrade to IPv6...

[Jellybob]

/me watches everything said splat onto the wall behind his head.

Never understood subnetting. Never will. Hope I don't need to ;)

Re:If they want us to upgrade to IPv6...

[Michael Hunt]

What you are suggesting here is a very bad idea.

The whole reason that provider-based IP space is advocated over each multi-homing customer obtaining their own space off the RIR is because of the mess of really long prefixes that the latter causes in BGP.

Advertising part of a larger allocation is frowned upon, as it causes the same problem. Additionally, the majority of tier 1 providers in the US (and, I presume, elsewhere) will not pass on the advertisement of anything longer than about a /19, with exceptions in their filters for the majority of /24s and /23s allocated by the old registries in the days before the 4 RIRs (192...., parts of 203, etc.)

Additionally, if you advertise part of an ISP's TLA to another provider, and the ISP who owns the block hasn't put a hole in their aggregation filter, ALL your traffic will flow through the second ISP (the one who doesn't own the block.) This is due to longest-match routing, where the most specific match wins. Routers will have entries for, say, 203.94.128.0/19 (aggregate from the ISP,) and 203.94.156.0/23 ('your' network which is being advertised through the OTHER ISP.) the /23 will always win because it's more specific.

Re:If they want us to upgrade to IPv6...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent down. Parent claims you can take an allocation from your ISP, have them SWIP it, and then advertise it to the world yourself with your own ASN. And you can. The trouble is, nobody will listen. Unless you have legacy swamp addresses (if you have to ask, you don't), backbones will filter out your advertisement because it will be less than a /19. Back to the drawing board.

Re:If they want us to upgrade to IPv6...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you ask me, the expression, "dual homeable" should apply to as many things in life as possible. Not because I even know what it means, but it sounds pretty cool.

Re:If they want us to upgrade to IPv6...

[Der_Yak]

The reason many end-users consider dual-homing is to make sure that their services are available in the event of a failure of one of their Internet connections and under IPv4, BGP is among the least expensive ways to achieve that end.

IPv6 anycast fixes that problem and others without BGP or an AS number. Anycast works similarly to multicast under v4, except that when you address a packet to an anycast address, it is delivered ONLY to the closest host with that address. Because of that, you can have a collection of geographically diverse (for example) web servers on different subnets answering a certain anycast address, each of which will automatically take over for any of the others in the event of the failure of either a network or a host.

As for host-orginated traffic, IPv6 hosts handle multiple IP addresses and gateways very cleanly, so you can literally just bring in some T1's from a couple ISP's and let the hosts discover and use them for outbound connections.

2006?

[RobertTaylor]

2006? Who cares, we will all have jet cars by then...

Re:2006?

[Yebyen]

And they'll all have their own IPV6 addresses...

Re:2006?

[spinlocked]

2006? Who cares, we will all have jet cars by then...

We'll be able to deliver the packets by hand! How retrograde :)

Re:2006?

[Anonymous Coward]

What? You don't have a jet car yet!

3ffe may be gone, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I'll still use 1337 anyway. Let's see 'em try to stop me.

IANA

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who reads IANA as "I am not a?"

Re:IANA

[Tellarin]

first time i read it as "I am not anal"

then i went "what?!"

ad the i realized the correct meaning :)

Re:IANA

[Jugalator]

first time i read it as "I am not anal"

Or, if you're a sci-fi nerd liking Isaac Asimov, you'd read IANAL as "I, Anal". ;-)

Re:IANA

[Anonymous Coward]

So you think Asimov likes nerds?

Re:IANA

[Tomble]

I'd agree with you, except I think you're confusing the organisation IANA with the disclaimer IANAL. I never misread IANA, but it took a while for me to grok just what IANAL actually meant, and until then, "I am not anal" was the best answer I could come up with too :-/

Hold it! This isn't all that funny. Yours was, tho. Never mind.

Hurricane Electric

[SiMac]

Hurricane Electric also provides free IPv6 tunnels...I used one to play around with IPv6, but tunnels seem to have fairly high latency.

Re:Hurricane Electric

[crimsun]

I've used Freenet6 and Hurricane Electric's tunnels; I must say that he.net's tunnels have had much lower latency [and have been much more reliable] than Freenet6's. That said, Freenet6 was incredibly straight-forward for a lot of users (Debian even does all the bally-hoo for you after your register, but it's nothing a simple self-made script won't accomplish) and certainly should be lauded for their simplicity.

Re:Hurricane Electric

[derF024]

I've got a Hurricane Electric tunnel, and i'm pretty happy with it as well. i've had connections running through it for a few weeks with no disconnections. the one thing that i really like about Hurricane electric is that once your tunnel is approved, they give you a cut and pasteable set of commands to get your tunnel running with all your IP and subnet information already in it. the freenet6 setup is fairly complicated compared to he.net

No surprise.

[AftanGustur]

IPv6 was a bastard protocol from the start. Not only were promises about no-fragmentation broken, but the IPv6 'options' are 'chained' so every router has to re-assemble look at the options, act on the options, and then re-fragment the packet exactly as it was.

And that's not even half of the problems it has.

Don't hold your breath for everybody to implement IPv6, IETF is already planning the next generation of IP without (hopefully) all the problems.

Re:No surprise.

[IAR80]

The problem is till IETF gets the next protocol going we will be without IPv4 addresses and your isp is going to sell you a nated connection.

Re:No surprise.

[Wesley Felter]

Don't hold your breath for everybody to implement IPv6, IETF is already planning the next generation of IP without (hopefully) all the problems.

What's the working group called?

Re:No surprise.

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the main problems with it is security. What firewall admin in their right mind would allow users to do end-to-end encryption through a firewall without being able to control the traffic?? IPV6 will NEVER take off. Besides, there's no shortage of IP addresses if IANA would get off their ass and allocate them. There are huge class A network yet to be touched and more and more businesses are just finding NAT'ing is easier and more secure anyway. Why pay ARIN for address space when you can NAT several thousand people to one or two IP addresses?

Re:No surprise.

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

What firewall admin in their right mind would allow users to do end-to-end encryption through a firewall without being able to control the traffic??

Have you ever heard of SSH or SSL?

Re:No surprise.

[Brandon Hume]

I don't think you know what you're talking about.

The IPv6 protocol declares that extension options are end-to-end, meaning that in-between nodes do NOT look at any of the options headers. The ONLY exceptions are the Hop-by-Hop option header, the Routing header, and the Destination options header.

Packet fragmentation and reassembly are ONLY done by the source and destination nodes. (Yes, the underlying link may do fragmentation, but that is entirely the problem of the layer below, IPv6 does not care...) The IPv6 header area - which includes the Hop-by-Hop header, Destination options, and Routing headers, if present - is considered UNFRAGMENTABLE.

You need to re-read RFC 2460.

Re:No surprise.

[Minna Kirai]

And already, some corporate firewalls are starting to forbid them...

Re:No surprise.

[0x0d0a]

One of the main problems with it is security.

This should be good.

What firewall admin in their right mind would allow users to do end-to-end encryption through a firewall without being able to control the traffic??

Never heard of VPNs?

Besides, you can set up IPSec on IPv4 if you want.

Besides, there's no shortage of IP addresses if IANA would get off their ass and allocate them.

Routing tables are finitely-sized. You can't just run around slicing everything up finely and handing out three addresses here, seven there. Having a routable address with not-hideously-expensive routers means some address space waste.

There are huge class A network yet to be touched and more and more businesses are just finding NAT'ing is easier and more secure anyway.

NAT *easier*? That's a new one.

As for more secure, you can get the same degree of impaired functionality by simply telling your organization firewall "no inbound connections".

Why pay ARIN for address space when you can NAT several thousand people to one or two IP addresses?

Because NAT is a PITA and an utter hack?

Re:No surprise.

[ae]

There are huge class A network yet to be touched and more and more businesses are just finding NAT'ing is easier and more secure anyway.

NAT breaks end-to-end connectivity, which is the way the Internet is supposed to work. Every host should be reachable by every other host. Additionally, NAT by itself does not make a network more or less secure, though it may cause lazy sysadmins to believe they don't need to secure individual hosts because they are not on a publicly routed network. Remember that most attacks come from within your network!

Re:No surprise.

[squiggleslash]

In fairness, I'd assume that if most attacks do come from within the attacker's network, it would be because people use strong firewalls and other forms of security to prevent outside attacks.

If you were to remove the firewalls and simply attempt to "secure" every individual node on the Internet (a difficult task, one might suggest an impossible one), you can bet there'd be a hell of a lot more attacks than there are today.

Firewalls, NAT routing, and other security measures, no matter how half arsed, are certainly cutting down on the number of targets of opportunity on the Internet, and that's a good thing. That said, I'm probably going to try the 6on4 route myself at some point. I hope Slackware and Mac OS X are both reasonably secure, and it'll be an interesting experience reorganizing my network to work in an environment where I can't just assume that only my own machines will have access to the services they offer each other.

Re:No surprise.

[davew]

Let me put it this way.

A long time ago, we had a network. It was quite good. It was the phone network. It was great, but it carried voice traffic, and not a whole pile else.

Some bright spark had this notion of packet switching, and it caught on. It's like this - once you deploy the packet switching network, the telco is no longer the arbiter of what applications are run on it. You are. You can run a mail server, I can run NNTP, and some maniac over there is writing something called a Web Browser.

The innovation that made the internet what we know today came from the fact that any idiot could develop a protocol, not just a telco engineer.

Now, cut forward. We have an internet, but we're kind of short of address space, so we use a lot of NATs to conserve them. What's going on here? Well, I can use a sensible TCP application, but that's about it. If I want to run some crazy app that needs Multicast, or an instant messenger, or something that just doesn't get on with the TCP congestion algorithm - well, not only do I need the permission of my network security team (which is good and proper) - but I need support from the NAT box.

The NAT box needs to support my protocol, which might not even exist yet. You want to talk about chicken and egg?

And innovation stops. There's a lot of talk of the end-to-end principle and handwaving and that, but that's the meaning - there's no more innovation.

NAT is not a security policy. It's a means to conserve addresses. It has an added feature that prevents you connecting directly inward to hosts on the network - but so does a stateful firewall. The point of compromise is exactly the same. It's rude to use global IP space behind a firewall like that in IPv4 land, but only for purposes of conservation. In IPv6, that doesn't apply.

I'm not claiming that IPv6 is going to solve all these ills - but NAT is a bigger hassle than you give it credit for. A prerequisite for solving this is having mnore address space. We'll tackle the rest in good time. :)

Re:No surprise.

[geekoid]

I suspect the 're' in re-read was not needed. ;)

Re:No surprise.

[amorsen]

One of the big problems with IPv4 is that worms can trivially scan the complete address space. With IPv6 that is not practical. This means that worms would have to use other methods, such as guessing dns names and resolving them to IPv6 addresses. This would slow them down tremendously and cause them to fail to hit most of the vulnerable machines. In contrast, Code Red managed to get behind firewalls in many companies. To me it looks like the IPv6 scenario is safer to a naive user (the kind who thinks that NAT protects them), and any security policy that is applied to IPv4 can be applied equally well to IPv6.

Re:No surprise.

[Bangback]

One of the largest worldwide networks (government-related) is moving to "cracking" all incoming SSL connections (mainly by acting as an intermediary). Works great but high latency. Connections initiated from inside the network are still allowed encrypted. Their policy is without content scanning, there will be no connections from outside the network.

Re:No surprise.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your argument doesn't follow. If a host is less "reachable", it is automatically more secure by definition. (Note more secure != secure).

Re:No surprise.

[Synic]

IRECTAL

Re:No surprise.

[karuna]

The problems with NAT in many cases are overestimated. I was working for one mom & pom ISP which provided over 100 business clients in Riga, Latvia with internet, mainly over wireless links to areas where DSL or cable were not available. I was responsible to implement all this system, and what I did was put a Linux router on the roof on one high building installed antennas and started to figure out how do the routing considering that we were connected to two different uplink ISP but they asked some fee for every block of 16 IPs.

Besides, we were too small to install BGP4 or anything, so we just bought only 16 addresses and used NAT for all clients. Plus one ip for SMTP, POP3, DNS and web servers we were hostings for the clients. We routed the "real" ip address only to a few geeky clients who asked for them. They were only 5 or 6 cases. Majority of clients saw no problem with NAT. They simply used internet for web browsing, e-mail, banking and chatting.

NAT helped to keep our network more or less secure. The clients don't know anything about security. Hey, while creating POP3 account for them I even had to tell them: "No sir, you cannot have an e-mail account without a password." They windows boxes are never patched but we never had Code Red or other worms.

Of course, NAT breaks many things and sometimes I wished we had not used it. When we started to connect residential clients it turned out that they were much more demanding regarding bandwith, realiability etc. including routable ip addresses than businesses, although they were ready to pay much less. However, from the business point of view I cannot see much profit from using IPv6 instead of IPv4 combined with NAT.

Re:No surprise.

[flonker]

SSL is secured against man in the middle attacks.

Basically, Trent, (ie, Verisign, Thawte or others) signs a certificate for Bob indicating his domain. Alice sends Bob a request for the certificate, Bob sends Alice the certificate. Alice verifies that the certificate is properly signed. Alice then uses that certificate to encrypt all communication with Bob.

Yes, I glossed over LOTS of details, like what the certificate is, but that's the portion of the algo that stops man in the middle attacks.

The only way to perpetrate a man in the middle attack is to get Trent's keys, so you can sign your own certificate as Bob, or to get Bob's key, or to compromise Alice's or Bob's machine.

Re:No surprise.

[0x0d0a]

NAT helped to keep our network more or less secure.

My argument is that the "security benefits" of NAT that the AC was claiming can be easily reproduced without NAT...but you also have the flexibility to chose not to use NAT.

Granted, I don't know whether IPv6 blocks will be cheaper than IPv4 blocks. I would certainly hope so, but I suppose that if they cost the same (despite the larger supply), NAT would be worthwhile in those cases.

Re:No surprise.

[quantum bit]

SSL is secured against man in the middle attacks.

Basically, Trent, (ie, Verisign, Thawte or others) signs a certificate for Bob indicating his domain. Alice sends Bob a request for the certificate, Bob sends Alice the certificate. Alice verifies that the certificate is properly signed. Alice then uses that certificate to encrypt all communication with Bob.

If you control both the gateway and the client machine (as in a corporate / govt. network), you can MITM SSL fairly easily.

Let's say that Vader is the big bad imperial gateway, it works like this:

Alice sends Bob a request for the certificate, which is intercepted by Vader because he is a transparent proxy. Vader proxies the request and gets the domain name from Bob. Vader creates a new certificate with Bob's domain name and signs it with Vader's key. The new cert is passed on to Alice, who has Vader's public key in her trusted CA list (as per company policy). So Alice encrypts data with Vader's key, who then decrypts it, scans the content, and re-encrypts it using a different key to send on to Bob. Higher latency, but it works.

So combine that with blocking any outbound traffic that can't be scanned (somebody brought a laptop from home, sorry, too bad, against company policy) and you're all set.

Pigs flying, hell freezing over, IPv6 being adopte

[fader]

So from reading the memo, I get the impression that this is the first step in phasing in IPv6 as the Real Deal... am I way off base here, or are we finally gonna be able to get rid of IPv4 once and for all?[1]

[1] Yeah, I know... backwards compatibility and everything, we'll never *totally* get rid of IPv4, but I'm just so damned tired of the hassles of NAT...

Oh, darn

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess I can remove that !*@*:* ban from my irc channels soon to keep those spoofy ipv6 people out.

Re:Oh, darn

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the hell would you use such a lame mask to begin with?!? Try *!*@*

Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

Are they afraid they're gonna run out of IPs or something?

Did you idiots read the article?

[Wakko Warner]

the 6bone network was a TEST NETWORK, if you didn't fully expect this TEST NETWORK to go away after a while, you are just plain delusional.

Here's the relevant text, snipped from the TOP of the memo (i.e. you didn't even have to read MUCH of it.)

The 6bone was established in 1996 by the IETF as an IPv6 Testbed network to enable various IPv6 testing as well as to assist in the transitioning of IPv6 into the Internet. It operates under the IPv6 address allocation 3FFE::/16 from RFC 2471. As IPv6 is beginning its production deployment it is appropriate to plan for the phaseout of the 6bone.

So, please, please, PLEASE stop complaining about something that was supposed to be going away from the very beginning!!!

- A.P.

Re:Did you idiots read the article?

[0x0d0a]

So, please, please, PLEASE stop complaining about something that was supposed to be going away from the very beginning!!!

Wakko, we're all dying. Sooner or later, I'm going to be dead, and you're going to be dead.

So what say I just blow your head off right now?

No? You don't like that? You don't like the precise timing, even though you *knew* that sooner or later, you had to die?

Maybe you can understand the viewpoint of the people complaining.

IPv4 won't be around forever. IPv6 probably won't be around forever either -- IP doesn't natively provide for some things like bandwidth allocation or ad hoc networks. The web browser, the operating system you're using...they're all going to be gone, unsupported, decaying, unused and finally forgotten before too long. That doesn't mean you want to say goodbye just yet.

Re:Did you idiots read the article?

[GreyWolf3000]

Yes, but some things will be dead in the distant future, and some things are breathing their last breath now (ever checked Netcraft? BSD is dying!)

Re:Did you idiots read the article?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly.

For much the same reason, I've started switching all of my Linux systems to Gentoo. It's been clear for a while that a source based OS is the obvious future of an operating system built on the open source model and designed for multiple processors, of which even the most compatable vary wildly in what constitutes "optimal" code. The writing's on the wall: RedHat will be changing, Debian will be changing, and the only way to hasten this move and make it as smooth as possible is to switch to Gentoo.

As an aside, one of the things I liked best about Gentoo was that it was IPv6 capable out of the box (or rather, out of the tgz!) Just plug it all in, install it, and next time you boot up you already have an IPv6 address based on the MAC address of your Ethernet card. Woo woo! I spent a happy afternoon playing with Gentoo's IPv6 tools, both those built in and the various special IPv6 tools on the Internet. The great thing is that all of these tools have been compiled optimally for IPv6. If you're not using an IPv4 network, there's just no reason to have to cater for that lowest common denominator. Gentoo compiles each and every application to use the options you have, and as a result I have tools like telnet, ftp, and Mozilla without the overheads of IPv4 support. Let the proxy deal with all that I say! IPv6 is the future, no reason to slow down my nice, optimal, Gentoo box with older designs.

I recommend Gentoo to anyone trying out IPv6. It's awesome!

Re:Did you idiots read the article?

[Evil Adrian]

I can't understand anybody complaining when they've got three years notice...

Re:Did you idiots read the article?

[0x0d0a]

I can't understand anybody complaining when they've got three years notice...

Grr...okay, let's extend the analogy.

"Evil Adrian, I will blow your head off in three years."

See?

Re:Did you idiots read the article?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wakko, we're all dying. Sooner or later, I'm going to be dead, and you're going to be dead.

So what say I just blow your head off right now?

You are a delusional nutcase. Your arguments have no merit. I think the world would be a much better place if you were to blow your own head off.

Re:Did you idiots read the article?

[Evil Adrian]

My head is not a test head.

The network being decommissioned was a test network.

Test systems do not last forever.

End of story.

See?

Re:Did you idiots read the article?

[Anonymous Coward]

My head is not a test head.

I never thought I'd say this but... LOL! Good one.

Re:Did you idiots read the article?

[0x0d0a]

If you remember my original comment, it was that "everyone dies eventually". Your head does not last forever. We know this. We also knew that eventually the 6bone would go away.

So?

Re:Did you idiots read the article?

[Evil Adrian]

So? It is going away, with plenty of notice.

Therefore, all must follow the 10th commandment of beta testing:

"Thou Shalt Not Bitch."

Re:Did you idiots read the article?

[0x0d0a]

And in my analogy, I gave plenty of notice.

Re:Did you idiots read the article?

[Evil Adrian]

So what say I just blow your head off right now?

No? You don't like that? You don't like the precise timing, even though you *knew* that sooner or later, you had to die?

How is that plenty of notice? Your argument is stupid. A beta test network is completely different from human life, and rather than concede that you are wrong (even though my posts clearly defeat yours), you've decided to try to turn this into a last-word pissing contest.

Enjoy yourself.

eh?

[Gantic]

6bone? Oh my, i've slipped onto one of those sites again! /me closes before mum walks in

Some people just don't get it...

[AndroSyn]

Yes 6bone itself is going away, which means the 3ffe::/16 address allocation is going to be reclaimed down the road. What this means is tunnel brokers like freenet6 are just going to need to get a new address allocation. There are a number of tunnel brokers already using other addresses, mainly under 2001::/16. So for all the posters who are going all doom and gloom, get a clue, wait, this is slashdot.

I wish people would *read* the articles first and *understand* what they mean before blathering on about them.

-AS

Re:Some people just don't get it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tonight, on a very special episode of Slashdot...

But I can't read!

reclaimed by the IANA...?!

[lawpoop]

What? You are not a what?!

what is ipv6?

[alienhazard]

i have heard of ipv6 and have a vague idea of what it is, but could someone elaberate? why arent we already using it as de facto, and what are the ups and downs to it?

Re:what is ipv6?

[Anonymous Coward]

We arent using it defacto because every router and computer on the 'net isn't going to replace itself overnight.

As to ups and downs... More addresses, and a bunch of performance and security enhancements.

The security enhancements in themselves are interesting. I wonder why the hooplah over paladium but not over tracable and unspoofable IP addresses. Oh yeah, this is slashdot.

Re:what is ipv6?

[andrewm]

Currently the internet uses IP protocal version 4. Version 6 is supposed to fix some of the problems of ipv4. Notable among these is the larger address space (128 bits instead of 32... actually I seem to recall that this may also have changed in the spec to an expandable scheme(?)), and things like QoS.

The biggest problem is that none of the primary routers support it. Network providers aren't interested in the expense and difficulty of upgrading, and hence aren't buying the new equipment and software required. Others are waiting for the equipment and software to become more common. In turn, product and software manufacturers aren't terribly interested in it until they get orders. Others are waiting for everyone else to use it (and be the Guinea pigs).

A "chicken and egg" situation.

The Internet has some serious problems that need fixing, but it also has way too much inertia to allow change to occur.

Re:what is ipv6?

[davew]

The biggest problem is that none of the primary routers support it.

Sources please!

*cough* two core routers dual-stacked where I work, one scheduled for next wednesday, the rest to follow in the weeks following. Abilene supports IPv6 natively. CA*net supports IPv6 natively. SURFnet supports IPv6 natively. IPv6 traffic exchanged at LINX and AMSIX. NTT Europe launched commercial IPv6 service in Europe on 19th February.

Btw. Any chance you could ask your ISP for IPv6 connectivity? From your post it sounds like they could do with some customer demand. :)

Re:what is ipv6?

[0x0d0a]

i have heard of ipv6 and have a vague idea of what it is, but could someone elaberate?

A revision of IPv4. The big things it adds (well, that I care about) are:

* More QoS stuff. No one used the IPv4 stuff that was already there, but maybe someone will change their mind, and we'll have tiered bandwidth packages someday ("I want 50 megs of high-prio data/week, 5 gigs of regular/week, and 50 gigs of low-prio data/week...if I exhaust my quota, just kick the packets down to the next prio level")
* IPSec built in. All connections can be encrypted, if both hosts feel like it.
* Bigger address space. This lets organizations get rid of stupid shit like DHCP/bootp with non-static IPs and NAT. Basically, everyone who wants one can have a static address.

We aren't using it all over because Cisco routers are overpriced, and companies that spent lots of money on an IPv4 router don't want to do the same for an IPv6 router. It is not used much in the US, because of the huge address space allocated to the US. IPv6 is more commonly used in Japan. There are also a number of people tunneling networks of IPv6 machines together over IPv6, which is what things like the 6bone were designed to do.

There aren't really any downs to IPv6 other than the replacement costs. Possibly privacy issues -- there's been interest in using your MAC address as the last bits of your IPv6 address, which seems incredibly stupid to me -- like one huge, protocol-independent, world-readable cookie, but whatever.

Re:what is ipv6?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the idea is for the last few bits of the IP address space to be automatically allocated. Rather than having static everything, the idea is to DHCP-ize everything.

This is supposed to be better for technical reasons which I can't remember. But I think the idea is you're supposed to just be able to plug your computer into the wall and go. I mean, do you really want to manually assign a 128-bit address to every device you own, as you roam around the world?

Re:what is ipv6?

[amorsen]

Basically, everyone who wants one can have a static address.

...

There aren't really any downs to IPv6 other than the replacement costs. Possibly privacy issues -- there's been interest in using your MAC address as the last bits of your IPv6 address, which seems incredibly stupid to me -- like one huge, protocol-independent, world-readable cookie, but whatever.

In which way is a static address not a huge, protocol-independent, world-readable cookie? In Denmark, cable modem users get mostly static addresses; the DHCP server will keep handing out the same address to the same MAC (The address will only change when the provider renumbers. It happens, but rarely.). I must admit it does not disturb my sleep that I have this number fixed to my brow, err, my Internet traffic. Of course there are ways to get a new address from DHCP, most obviously changing the MAC address. Guess what that will do to an IPv6 address derived from the MAC...

Besides, you can just go through a proxy, and the "cookie" will disappear. (Oh by the way, I run 6to4 on the gateway and stateless autoconfiguration on the other machines, so my IPv6 traffic can be identified both by my static IPv4 address and the MAC addresses of my various machines. The horror.)

Re:what is ipv6?

[tqbf]

Which of the commercial tier-1 service providers in North America have IPv6 enabled in their core?

If it was a zero-cost, zero-risk operation, it would be enabled. Like IP multicast, it's not zero-cost, and isn't enabled.

Re:what is ipv6?

[0x0d0a]

In which way is a static address not a huge, protocol-independent, world-readable cookie?

It is. But it provides some benefit (a static place to contact me). Using my MAC as the bottom portion of my IP doesn't benefit me at all, and is a drawback.

It also tells the world what type of system you're running (router, Mac, x86 box, SPARC, etc).

Unlike an IP, the MAC bits stay the same from provider to provider and from location to location (admittedly, mostly an issue to laptop owners). This is particularly nasty for laptops that travel from home to secure business locations -- and yes, this is not abnormal in the business world.

It hands out the MAC to anyone on the Internet, which can be nice for MAC-related attacks if a hacker can compromise a nearby system...

As a non-privacy-related but nasty issue, my IP changes if my Ethernet card breaks and I get a new one. People running a server will love that (and "IP numbers unassociated with MACs" become a premium item to sell to business accounts).

Finally, I can *get* a new IP number if I want one today. If my ISP has a policy (and has routers that depend on) my IP ending in my MAC, I'm stuck with it.

The horror.

Heh. I just watched Apocolypse Now for the first time.

Of course there are ways to get a new address from DHCP, most obviously changing the MAC address.

You can't do that on any card that I'm familiar with, though I'm sure there are some that you can finagle into pulling that off on. The Linux approach of "changing the MAC" just kicks the card into promisc mode and then does software filtering when listening for frames with the right MAC. It wastes CPU time.

Re:what is ipv6?

[Anonymous Coward]

there are several 3com cards that let you change the mac address.

while mac address's are supposed to be 'unique', they are not. So the cards usually come with a DOS util that lets you play with the number. You usally will never run into the problem because the chances of you getting the two cards with the same mac address is quite small. But it can happen.

Re:what is ipv6?

[amorsen]

It also tells the world what type of system you're running (router, Mac, x86 box, SPARC, etc)

Right, I browse the WWW from my router all the time. Sun has a MAC range, but the addresses are easily changeable. Whether Apple has one or uses it I do not know, but plug any random PCI ethernet NIC into it, and suddenly your Mac becomes a PC.

It hands out the MAC to anyone on the Internet, which can be nice for MAC-related attacks if a hacker can compromise a nearby system...

If the hacker can compromise a nearby system, he can just hang around on it until he sees an arp request fly by. Or, with IPv4, simply scan whatever pitiful subnet the two machines are on.

As a non-privacy-related but nasty issue, my IP changes if my Ethernet card breaks and I get a new one. People running a server will love that (and "IP numbers unassociated with MACs" become a premium item to sell to business accounts).

Finally, I can *get* a new IP number if I want one today. If my ISP has a policy (and has routers that depend on) my IP ending in my MAC, I'm stuck with it.

You seem to be holding on to this notion of "my IP". "My IP" only applies to end user devices, like when you bring your laptop to work and it gets an IPv6 address. Whenever you are actually connecting to an ISP and not just borrowing someones network, you get your very own /48. If you prefer to allocate addresses the RFC 2322 way, feel free.

You can't do that on any card that I'm familiar with, though I'm sure there are some that you can finagle into pulling that off on. The Linux approach of "changing the MAC" just kicks the card into promisc mode and then does software filtering when listening for frames with the right MAC. It wastes CPU time.

I have no idea what makes you think that Linux cannot do hardware filtering of MACs for software assigned addresses. A reference for that claim would be nice. Not that hardware filtering makes any sense these days - when did your NIC last receive a packet that was not addressed to you or a broadcast packet?

Anyway, many drivers for Windows allow you to change the MAC address. If yours does not, try this

Re:what is ipv6?

[Anonymous Coward]

Andrews and Arnold provide IPv6 service in the uk...

www.aaisp.net

Re:what is ipv6?

[davew]

Hang on a second, I'm sure those goalposts were over here a minute ago. :-)

You're right, there are barriers to deployment of IPv6 (film at 11). That's why you're seeing the most take-up at the moment in the academic networks, at least in the western world (as noted elsewhere, the far east are WAY ahead of the rest of us in IPv6 deployment). We're working out the bugs and creating the initial installed base in advance of people going commercial with it and actually making money out of it.

This is proper order - if the commercial guys were in first, wouldn't you wonder what the hell the research networks were for, anyway? Give it time. (Oh, and creating customer demand wouldn't hurt, people, thanks! :) ).

Dave

Re:what is ipv6?

[IamTheRealMike]

Btw. Any chance you could ask your ISP for IPv6 connectivity? From your post it sounds like they could do with some customer demand. :)

I did, about a month or two ago. They said they had no plans at this time. (sigh)

Re:what is ipv6?

[sjames]

The security enhancements in themselves are interesting. I wonder why the hooplah over paladium but not over tracable and unspoofable IP addresses. Oh yeah, this is slashdot.

Probably because you can very easily change your MAC address. On many cards, you can set it in EEPROM to make it semi-perminant.

Re:what is ipv6?

[yehim1]

IPv6 does _not_ have IPSEC built-in. It just allocates space for IPSEC headers to reside in. There is really no big difference between IPSEC implementation in IPv4 or IPv6.

The Security Association between hosts or routers can be fairly setup as long as both of the hosts have visibility of each other, regardless whether they are using IPv4 or Ipv6.

One thing that you have missed out is the autoconfiguration of the hosts and/or routers. For every network, there is a network address and a prefix. For example, 3ffe:1800:2030:1080::/64 has the first 64 bits for the network, and the next 64 for the host, just like IPv4.

But the difference is that with IPv6, all the hosts would add their MAC address (in the case for Ethernet hosts) as their host ID, and thus alleviating the need for a DHCP for configuration of hosts addresses. This way, hosts are sure to have a unique address (since it's based on their MAC address) in the network.

Hosts can also roam between networks, with just a change in the Network ID! The host ID is always the same (again, since it's based on the Ethernet address). This coupled, with DNS, can locate your host uniquely even when it is roaming between many networks.

Ideally, Ethernet hosts can be uniquely identified anywhere in the whole world! :)

Re:what is ipv6?

[Strog]

Unlike an IP, the MAC bits stay the same from provider to provider and from location to location (admittedly, mostly an issue to laptop owners). This is particularly nasty for laptops that travel from home to secure business locations -- and yes, this is not abnormal in the business world.

True but the prefix changes so there shouldn't be an issue there. That's what subnets are all about.

Re:what is ipv6?

[0x0d0a]

If you use the suffix as the identifier, it's still an issue.

huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

does anyone know what in the hell this story is about?

Don't bitch... thank!

[rice_burners_suck]

Yeah... SO WHAT? They told us this was going to happen back in '96 or '97 or whenever this thing was established. The 6bone was nothing more than a test (though a long one, considering it has become an established part of the landscape in the 6 or 7 years since its inception) for IPv6, and free IPv6 networks exist for the sole purpose of giving folks and organizations some incentive to spend time and money to test something that really doesn't directly benefit them (although it will in the future, but who cares about that when you've got your next quarter's bottom line to lose sleep over).

ON TOPIC: It reminds me when I was a kid and our neighborhood was being built over a period of several years. It wasn't one of those circuit neighborhoods where they develop three floor plans and build 1000 identical homes. This was a neighborhood where you bought the land and were then responsible for buying your own floorplan and/or hiring an architect to design or modify one for you. We had lived there for a number of years, and during that time, my friends and I had turned some abandoned lots, still covered with trees "in the wild", into our "clubhouse." It was really cool. We had put together these cheezy, sloppy little shacks with all kinds of construction leftovers from other parts of the neighborhood, like 2x4s and pieces of thrown away plywood. It was probably dangerous--these things could have toppled over on our heads because they certainly weren't nailed in place. But we were kids, so who cared? There was even a small crater where a four-seater airplane crashed some years before, and that was our "punishment hole." If all the kids voted that one of the kids was a troublemaker or a bully or something, then when that kid came outside to play, he had to sit in that pit all day without being allowed to play with the rest of us, and this had to go on for a specified number of days. (Nobody ever got sentenced to that punishment though.) It was really cool, and this went on for a number of years. One day, we go to our "clubhouse" to find that all our stuff was taken down and there was a big bulldozer knocking over all the wild foliage. They had already taken down a few of the trees and were in the process of clearing the rest of the land to begin construction of a house. Of course, I was a kid and didn't understand these concepts, so I remember running home to my parents and yelling that someone was tearing down our clubhouse! They explained that this land had belonged to someone throughout all the years that we had used it as a clubhouse but they just now got around to developing it. So how come we were being kicked out, I asked... My parents said, "You should be happy that they let you use that land for all this time, instead of complaining that you're being kicked out!"

That's what I have to say about this 6bone. Don't bitch about getting kicked off. Be grateful that you had the 6bone at your disposal for about six years. And then drink Negra Modelo, get drunk, and feel no pain.

IPv6 Tunnel Provider

[Anonymous Coward]

By far the best tunnel provider I've used is IPNG-UK. I can whole-heartedly recommend it to anybody wanting to use IPv6 now!

Re:IPv6 Tunnel Provider

[Anonymous Coward]

Which moron modded this as funny?

It's true... IPNG-UK *is* good.

And their address allocation isn't in the 3ffe::/16 6BONE range, but in the 2001::/16 range, which are production addresses and aren't going away.

Re:Pigs flying, hell freezing over, IPv6 being ado

[Arethan]

why do you think that ip6 is going to remove the necessity of NAT? I've seen several network installations that use 1-to-1 NAT. This configuration does not cause anywhere near the number of problems that you are thinking of. I can even think of one site that used 1-to-1 NAT twice on the same network block. Once to go from public IP to a private range, and then on the other side of the network another router did 1-to-1 NAT back to the packets' original IP.

Not to mention that many users of consumer level NATing devices (Cable/DSL routers) do so for financial reasons, not out of necessity. Why pay your ISP for another IP address when you can run upwards of 200 machines on the one you already have.

My spouse works for the cable co, so I get free cable modem service, but I only have 1 IP because I'd rather not play the dhcp game with every machine on my home network, praying that they stay within the same subnet so they can talk to eachother directly. Plus, I don't like the idea of all of my local traffic being bridged to the NOC just because the modem firmware doesn't know any better.

Pardon my irritation...

[davew]

...but this story is crud on so many levels.

• 3FFE::/16 is the experimental 6bone space, where you try out allocation policies before settling on a real one. They've settled on a real one. Even better, it's the same in all three (er, four) regions. The 6bone's purpose is fulfilled , we're in production mode and, as was always intended, it's time to think about retiring it.
• How many times: IP address don't cost money. Sure, the RIRs charge for the service of allocation, and your ISP is entitled to charge for the services around them. They do their job pretty well, and with consensus of the community (a rarity in this day and age). Great as Bob Fink is, do you really want to continue trusting address allocation to one guy as a volunteer project?
• You get addresses from your ISP.
• You get addresses from your ISP.
• You get addresses from your ISP. There are loads of them. If you need them, you can have them. The expense is not in getting the damn addresses. "Experimental" does not mean "free". "Production" does not mean "business".
• AftanGustur: IPv6 is not a bastard protocol, routers don't need to fragment anymore, and the IETF is not working on a new damn protocol. You don't cite any sources, so I can't refute it. Please do.

Guys, there are a lot of misconceptions about IPv6. I appreciate this - it's not an intuitive subject, and it's possible to believe you know a lot more about it than you actually do. But, the details are there. Please do the reading and start asking your ISP for connectivity. No, your real ISP. There are people out there who want to deploy this, now, and we're waiting for customer demand. Go nuts!

Dave

Re:Pardon my irritation...

[jbailey999]

I wish that the ISPs showed signs of waiting for the customers to ask for this. I have asked my cable ISP a number of times and normally just get a tech support manager who clearly doesn't understand the question. When I ask my office's upstream ISP (which is a fairly major one in Toronto), I simply get told "noone wants that".

Re:Pardon my irritation...

[CvD]

My awesome ISP took their own initiative and set up various scripts and pages where you can figure out how to set up your own 6in4 tunnel and network. They even have some CGI scripts which generate settings for your flavour of OS which you can type in and it'll just work. (sorry, the scripts are behind a login, so I can't link to them).

Also how to set up the machine you have your tunnel endpoint as being a router for the rest of your internal network (with radvd, etc). Very cool. XS4ALL rocks! THE Geek/nerd friendly ISP. :-)

Cheers,

Costyn.

1 IPv4 address = a /48 of IPv6 address space

[hpa]

Note that any single IPv4 address can be used to claim a /48 -- that's 80 bits of address space -- of IPv6 address space by sticking 2002: in front of it, e.g. 192.0.2.69 -> 2002:c000:0245::/48. This is called 6to4; see RFC 3056.

Re:1 IPv4 address = a /48 of IPv6 address space

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

I hereby claim 2002:7F00:0001::/48

Re:1 IPv4 address = a /48 of IPv6 address space

[fuzzel]

:)

Will probably not work with most implementations as they nullroute RFC1918, multicast and ofcourse your beloved localhost /8 when being fed through 6to4.

But you can have it, it just won't route ;)

In other news LainOS preps for new IP rollout.

[LaminatorX]

The impact of this story was felt nowhere more than bt the development team for LainOS .

While previous coverage of the OS mostly centered on technical issues, this revelation about the future of the global network will hopefully involve an upswing in LainOS development,

Lead developer Neoevangelist , last reported looking for some good Open Source spech recognition libraries, was unavailable for comment.

Re:In other news LainOS preps for new IP rollout.

[Synic]

that is just so sad...

Re:In other news LainOS preps for new IP rollout.

[fuzzel]

I think you all might be interrested in Operating System Concepts instead of just 'moving X into the kernel which automatically makes it more stable and faster'...

Keeping ontopic; the 'base' freebsd does sport a very nice KAME stack for doing IPv6.

Re:Pigs flying, hell freezing over, IPv6 being ado

[rcw-home]

Your "necessity of NAT" argument is a red-herring because your example clearly shows you have a NAT fetish. It will, most likely, always be necessary to you. Seek help.

Why pay your ISP for another IP address when they'll give you a /48?

Why play the DHCP game when IPv6 completely obsoletes DHCP?

Why worry about whether the computers get stuck on different subnets when IPv6 stacks all cleanly handle being on more than one subnet? (one of which need not be your ISP's)

Another one..;.

[cuban321]

in soviet russia, subnets take you away!

does anyone know

[Anonymous Coward]

some ISPs in California that use IPv6 natively

IPv6 address allocations?

[Anonymous Coward]

How are IPv6 addresses going to be allocated? Will everyone have to pay a sum of money to the IANA? If so, perhaps now is the time to grab a slice of address space for the people of planet earth?

Given that there are 2^128 (= 3.4*10^38) addresses available, how about a group unilaterally grabs around 10^30, a very small (negligible?) portion, for free distribution? Each person on earth gets allocated around 10^20 addresses for their personal use. Allocation could be done by setting up a web site and having a script that keeps track of enough details to uniquely identify a person and allocating them an address block. It will be up to each person to honour others' address allocations and keep to their own turf. Given that each person can easily get 10^20 addresses of their own, hopefully the incentive to invade other people's address space will be small. As new people are born, parents can divide their family pool among their children. 10^20 addresses should see even the most active couple out for quite a few generations.

IANA can have fun assigning the rest of the (10^38-10^30 = a big number) addresses.

If IANA don't like this, they can go and make a running jump. As long as enough people participate in the scheme (and the network is decentralised enough) it will work.

NOW is the time to do this! One does not need the network to be implemented to allocate addresses!. If by the time IPv6 hit the streets a few tens of millions of people have personal address spaces allocated, it will be difficult to demand that IANA be the sole issuing authority. If enough people have allocations, and someone tries to take them away, the ballot box might even come into play.

The above is just an idea.

Re:IPv6 address allocations?

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds nice if everyone plays nice together. But did you go to highschool? Did everyone play nice together? No they did not. Ever live in a neighborhood where there is just one prick who likes to be the goofball and be a jerk.

This is the problem MOST people would go along with it. But there would be 1 duffas that just has to be a pain. Not because he has a beef with everyone. He just does it just because he can.

You will see all sorts of ip stealing and that sort of thing if there is NO one in charge. The current group in charge is WAY overcharging for what they do though... But then what do you expect out of agency that was once a goverment agency. They belive that money and growth is their god given right. Snorking that address space would need, no MUST have someone in charge of it. That sort of thing cost money unfortunatly.

Re:IPv6 address allocations?

[mollusk]

Ouch. I'm sure that somewhere out there, a Cisco engineer started to cry.

It sounds nice and all, now we just need to develop a router that can handle 6+ billion routes. When little Timmy grows up and goes to college, does his block range go with him? Great, another routing table entry. Giving addresses out with no regard to geographical proximity was one of the biggest mistakes during the allocation of IPv4. Strain on the core routers is more of a problem now than insufficient address space. The switch to IPv6 was seen as a chance to correct that mistake, not compound it exponentionally.

Re:IPv6 address allocations?

[snowtigger]

It sounds nice and all, now we just need to develop a router that can handle 6+ billion routes.

You have obviously missed the whole purpose of only allocating /32 to big ISPs.

Today, the internet routing table has about 140'000 bgp routes to approximately 15000 ASs (Autonomous Systems). Since IPv6 is more hiercal than IPv4 is, only huge ISPs can get allocated addresses, which are further distributed to smaller ISPs. Thus only the big ISPs need to be in the routing tables.

So assuming that you give a /32 to all current ASs, this will give a routing table of 15'000 entries, 1/10 of today's size.

Of course, the drawback of this system is that it will be more difficult to do load balancing and redundance, but that is another problem ...

Re:IPv6 address allocations?

[mollusk]

You have obviously missed that the whole point of my statement was in regards to the original poster's proposal to allocate a single block of address space and distribute it to everybody on earth.

So rather than enforcing a uniform heirarchy with delegations to large providers, who then subdelegate to individual ISPs, each person would be assigned their own personal address range without regard to their provider or physical location. So each backbone provider would have to advertise which portions of this shared space they served. Since those blocks are not likely to remain contiguous, potentially, each indivudual personal assignment would need to be broadcast to ensure routing. A far worse situtation than we have now

I agree that the planned structure of the address space makes sense, I was merely pointing out that the original poster's plan contained a rather large hole.

IPv6 is NOT going away

[MrChuck]

There are a bunch of responses here from apparent idiots (sort of par).
These ones think it means a withdrawal of IPv6.

Far from it. The 6bone was established when nobody had IPv6 stacks really, nobody really used it. It was a playground to try it out. And we have been.
Now, Sun has IPv6, Cisco has it ready and waiting, the BSD's all have, Linux has it, AIX, HPUX, MacOS X. Hell even Windows has it. (I await MS's announcement of its invention soon).

IPv6 is here and ready and tested.

The notion of closing the 6bone (discussed for months on the 6bone lists), is that in 3 years you SHOULD be able to get IPv6. Not tunneled, no long hops.

Me? I call my cable modem people (dsl before I moved) and would get the second level tech support people and ask for IPv6 support. Try to get it on their radar. Wouldn't you love your cell phone to have an IP address? Hell, wouldn't you love a (firewalled) IPv6 aware electrical outlet? (x10 is getting old and lame).

So you have 3 years to convince your ISP that they should have IPv6.

This isn't the place to go into details, but it's designed and planned to run concurrently with IPv4. This isn't like the NCP/TCP change over where there was a huge redflag day for all 200 hosts on the Arpa net.
Everything in my house speaks IPv6 except a printer and a terminal server (you do all have terminal servers for those serial toys, yes?). Those will never be upgraded - too old. When I ssh, mail or browse, if they have a 6 address and I can reach it, it gets used. Otherwise it falls back to IPv4.

At work, if you have a subnet with all IPv6, you can turn off IPv4 and let your edge gateway it. But you may not be turning off all the IPv4 until that last printer dies. Do it subnet by subnet and leave IPv4, but just watch it not be used.

Bonuses?
No more need for NAT (I have 65 thousand INTERNETS of addresses here).
IPv6 stacks are looking faster than IPv4 (not based on a presumption of 16 bit PDP-11 processors).

So where the hell is www.slashdot.org?
nslookup -q=aaaa www.slashdot.org
Can't find www.slashdot.org: Non-existent host/domain

Re:IPv6 is NOT going away

[MeanMF]

Hell even Windows has it. (I await MS's announcement of its invention soon).

I thought Al Gore was on Apple's board of directors...

Re:IPv6 is NOT going away

[Skapare]

So where the hell is www.slashdot.org?
nslookup -q=aaaa www.slashdot.org
Can't find www.slashdot.org: Non-existent host/domain

Why do they need to be on IPv6? Hell, even Slashdot won't qualify for permanent IPv6 address space. One reason is that everyone has IPv4. When there are finally some people who are on IPv6-only, then it will be time to get Slashdot and other places on IPv6 (in addition to staying on IPv4).

It's not about whether IPv6 is going away or not. Obviously it's here to stay. But unless the IPv6 folks get their heads out of the sand, it will stay ... dormant. Give me a reason to be an early (e.g. before there are IPv6-only users) deployer of IPv6. And no, I don't mean on some limited tunnel network; I mean real natively routed IPv6 with my very own IPv6 address space (there's plenty of it to go around now in case you haven't noticed, although it sure seems a lot of people haven't).

Re:IPv6 is NOT going away

[MrChuck]

Why do you need it?

Ever deal with NAT?

That's why (and no, NAT is not a firewall, it's not close to a firewall, it's the wrong answer). I'm tired of wacking a NAT, and dealing with redirecting stuff to this address over to that NATd machine. I'm tires of wierd hack to get IPSec to remotely work. I"m tires of no QOS, I'm tired of DHCP. I'm tired of dealing with two companies who both use 10/8 addresses who merge. I'm tired of ISP's with their heads in the sand no even looking at this during a 8 years of testing so far (1996-current).

Re:IPv6 is NOT going away

[Skapare]

Yes I have dealt with NAT. And no, it isn't easy. And yes, having IPv6 would make things easier.

But put blame where blame is due, on the IPv6 development and deployment. There are two fundamental problems. One is the routing architecture development didn't keep up, and two, there is no incentive being created to migrate to IPv6. Don't expect most ISPs to care to do anything within IPv6 until there is a real incentive. Of course the biggest incentive would be a return on investment. Other incentives would be to make it free. For example, give away free, permanent, and portable IPv6 space to just enough early adopters (who will be required to deploy it within a fixed time frame to keep it, such as 3 months, and tunneling OK until their upstream deploys direct IPv6 routing) to create enough critical mass to bring everyone else on board. And don't whine about the routing not being scalable enough to handle this because I am not proposing that everyone get this free, permanent, and portable space ... just the early adopters ... just enough to create the critical mass. Then at some point no more freebies will be available (it then goes back to justfied need).

Why should I bother to deploy IPv6 when I can't get portable space? That's the biggest thing I need right now. And it's NOT an issue of renumbering machines when I change upstream providers. Instead, it's an issue of dealing with all the references to fixed address references in other deployed systems, documentation, distributed material, etc, where the benefit of LAN prefixing isn't there. I do wish domain names covered everything, but unfortunately that simply isn't the case (try putting domain names in place of IP addresses in your /etc/resolv.conf file, for example, especially on a system burned into a CD-ROM).

It's the IPv6 promoters that need to get their heads out of the sand.

Slow Down Cowboy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.

It's been -441 seconds since you last successfully posted a comment

Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator.

Linksys and IPv6

[jbailey999]

Anyone know if there's a way to connect to IPv6 yet from a GNU/Linux box through a Linksys router? I've got NAT on the router so that I don't have to pay for multiple IP addresses, but that seems to kill most tunnel software.

Re:Linksys and IPv6

[Anonymous Coward]

Get rid of that Linksys garbage and use your Linux box as your router.

I can't wait until someone builds

[Anonymous Coward]

an IPV6 NAT router.

Wow...

[Aknaton]

I am totally underwhemled by this turn of events.

IPv6 is DOA

[Skapare]

Given that IPv4 space is no longer at risk of being exhausted, there is virtually no real incentive to switching to IPv6. The only one that exists right now is the "geek factor", a measure of "coolness" recognized only by other geeks (and then, most of those are now considering it to be boring).

Had the IPv6 proponents really wanted to get more people to switch to IPv6, they would have wised up and offered something substantial. Free IPv6 addresses in the 6bone that were never intended to be permanent simply brought out just a small limited response. But if they had offered real permanent addresses, maybe a lot more people would have responded.

Although IPv4 space is no longer at risk of running out, it does have limitations that prevent any substantial portable address space from being allocated to all who want it. IPv6 has that space. There is no excuse for not doing so. But the IPv6 people are trying to make using IPv6 hard by their absurd policies. They have no one to blame but themselves why so many are not migrating to IPv6.

I do have IPv4 space. For places potentially running only IPv6, there will be the IPv4 equivalency range of IPv6 which I can use. But I won't have any reason to deploy that until after there are a substantial number of IPv6-only locations. Of course, no one will want to have only IPv6 until enough reachability exists in IPv6. Chicken. Egg.

Re:IPv6 is DOA

[Cid Highwind]

Given that IPv4 space is no longer at risk of being exhausted...
That's not really a given, you ought to prove it.
Barring genocide or a complete halt to the current trend in internet access growth, I don't think IPv4 is going to last forever.

Re:IPv6 is DOA

[jroysdon]

Plenty of production networks are already using IPv6 in specialized markets. How do you think cell companies are assigning addresses to all those cell phones that can send SMS messages and surf the web? IPv6.

IPv6 will continue to be used by companies that need large address space.

IP Phones are yet another specialized market that will benefit from widespread IPv6 adoption and clean up using VPNs and NAT.

Re:IPv6 is DOA

[Skapare]

No, IPv4 won't last forever. But things like NAT and private addresses have definitely extended its life. Maybe even long enough to get a decent new IP architecture with scalable routing.

Cost of IPv6 Addresses

[sourcehunter]

I have a question - Why do IPv6 addresses cost so darned much if you want your own block direct from ARIN (or another RIR)? For a /32, they are charging $2500/year. Is that just to keep people from applying for their own "personal" /32 address space?

I mean, I understood why IPv4 addresses cost so damned much - there was a really limited supply. (Having taken econ in high school and college, I'd like to think I understand the basics of supply and demand.)

I thought the point of ipv6 was that there was so huge a supply that it really didn't matter. So - then - WHY do they charge so much for blocks? $2500/year is a lot! Yeah, I know, on a PER ADDRESS basis it is nil, but still!

Anyone have an answer?

Or is it "because they can?"

Re:Cost of IPv6 Addresses

[Wesley Felter]

Is that just to keep people from applying for their own "personal" /32 address space?

I think you got it right there. The policy for IPv6 is that huge ISPs get space from the RIRs and sublet it to their customers. For a huge ISP, $2500/year is not a big deal. If the address blocks were free they'd have to wade through zillions of invalid requests from mom-and-pop ISPs.

Re:Cost of IPv6 Addresses

[sylencer]

A /32 net is a really big chunk that is intended for providers, not users. You should get a /48 from your provider without problems, which leaves you with 2^16 local subnets and 2^64 hosts per subnet.

Re:Cost of IPv6 Addresses

[Skapare]

Part of the problem goes all the way back to the flaws in the original requirements for IPv6. The flaw is that IPv6 was intended only to add address space, and not deal with the more serious scaling issue of routing. Unfortunately, routing is a complex problem which just doesn't readily fit into the kinds of address space technology both IPv4 and IPv6 are based on. The problem with routing the way it is done now is that every autonomous system has to be represented with the prefix of their address space in the routing table of every backbone router. So now we take routers which are expected to handle millions of packets a second and require them to store millions of route entries (this would be the case if everyone gets their own portable address space). Even though IPv6 has enough address space to give everyone in the world billions of addresses, they have no intent to ever do this on a permanent basis because they didn't think about the routing scaling issues before they jumped the gun and made yet another flat address model.

Re:Cost of IPv6 Addresses

[Skapare]

But that address space won't work when I switch provider. I get my IPv4 address spaces from my provider now, and they have the same problem, and IPv6 isn't solving it. I can't get a big portable allocation of IPv4 because IPv4 would run out if they did that. IPv6 won't, but they still won't give out portable address space because they forgot to deal with the routing issue. So now they've got this "spruce goose" of a new IP architecture which is probably going to have to be replaced anyway to do a universal portable routing architecture correctly. Not only do I not see any benefit to deploying IPv6, I even see costs which will likely be incurred over the next decade as they discover that all this was a waste of time, hurried along because of a sudden panic over fears of IPv4 space exhaustion (fears that were initially valid, but were also well dealt with).

Re:Cost of IPv6 Addresses

[takev]

Changing IPv6 addressen on al your computers only means changing the prefix on your upstream router. It is even possible to multihome using to different IPv6 address prefixes, all your computers will automaticaly assign all the prefixes to their interfaces.

So no more, we have to change al the IP addressen on al the computers by hand in the same night situation anymore.

Although I only have 5 computers at home, it was incredibly easy to change from my 3ffe:: prefix to my new 2001:: prefix. This change was inlcuding a change in prefix lenght (subnet mask).
I only needed to add the new prefix to the router and eventualy delete the old one.

Re:Cost of IPv6 Addresses

[vadim_t]

IANANE (I am not a networking expert), but what you want seems impossible, and not because of address space. It's routing.

Routing would be simplified by making IP addresses be dependent of geography. Say, /16 corresponds to a country, the ISP gets a /32, perhaps makes some internal division by areas, gives you a /48, which you can further organize into buildings, floors, rooms or whatever.

If you owned an IP range and could have the same range in US and Russia then routing would become a *huge* mess. Not to mention the problem of keeping track how to get to a particular IP. With your system, the whole internet would need to know that while yesterday you were in US today you're in Russia.

I don't see why you want your own IP either. That's what the DNS service is for, you get a domain name and when you move make it point to your new IP. What's the problem with that?

Re:Cost of IPv6 Addresses

[sourcehunter]

Changing addresses isn't just about renumbering your network and fixing each computer. IPv4 had a really "elegant" (and by "elegant" I mean "crapily hacked together to make work") fix called DHCP that meant, if you did your work upfront to assign everything a "static" ip from the DHCP server based on MAC address, then you'd just change the info on the server and be done with it.

The problem is changing the 1000s of DNS entries. One of the ASPs I work with host something in the realm of 200 domains. they currently have a class C from Sprint. That's about 400-600 DNS entries that need to be changed. Okay, some are CNAMES, some (like MX records) all point to the same hostname, but it still is a pain and cleanup all the records that are A records... They drop sprint, though they use BGP and have another connection coming in, they lose that IP range and have to go through the hell of fixing 400 DNS entries. The servers' IP addresses are a SNAP by comparison.

The IPv6 has the same problem, unless someone came up with a way to fix it...

Re:Cost of IPv6 Addresses

[Skapare]

Portability of IP address space is not about changing your IP address on the computers on that network; it's about changing the references to those addresses that would be present on machines outside of the network. And those have to be a full reference, including the prefix. DNS servers come to mind as one example where the address is mandatory. The actual renumbering of the servers on the network is trivial. I've done it so many times that's not a problem. The problem is in changing the references.

Re:Cost of IPv6 Addresses

[Skapare]

Yes, I know it is a routing issue. In the panic (FUD) of imminent IPv4 exhaustion, the developers completely ignored the needed routing scaling issues. They were so worried about getting enough addresses, they didn't bother to make sure they would be fully usable. Likely the problem was that they were in such a hurry, they just didn't have time to do the research to make a scalable routing architecture to go along with it. That's such a shame, too.

BTW, all your description of what would be wrong with routing with millions of portable networks in IPv6 is based on the existing antiquated routing architecture the internet is currently running on (BGP4), and it's 128-bit version for IPv6 which doesn't really add any scalability (just adds longer prefixes and a few new functions).

The problem is, I already have hundreds of clients running systems with /etc/resolv.conf pointing to my DNS servers. I've already had to update those once, and it was a royal pain. Fortunately I had a 4 month overlap window where I was running on both the old and new address spaces at the same time.

6 to 4 anycast bitch!

[andrewski]

6 to 4 is all anybody can use unless you have a fat pipe or a sponsor. It'll still be there.

IP6 and microsoft

[DonaldBeckman817]

sorry, but IP6 will never take off as an addressing system till Microsoft includes a full stack, installed on a NIC by default, with Windows . Till then, I wont be getting to excited by ANY development for IP6.

Re:IP6 and microsoft

[entrox]

The Internet would be so much better if there wasn't this huge number of self-proclaimed experts, who think they now everything better.

Look, I'm not on a Windows machine, but a 5 second google search gives me MS IPv6 FAQ as the first hit. Microsoft are even running a 6to4 tunnel at 6to4.ipv6.microsoft.com.

Mac OS X 10.2 also supports ipv6 and can be enabled with 2 lines in the terminal. I'm not sure, but I think it is safe to say that all free Unices also support ipv6.

So basically, you have absolutely no point.

Re:Pigs flying, hell freezing over, IPv6 being ado

[oddityfds]

Not to mention that many users of consumer level NATing devices (Cable/DSL routers) do so for financial reasons, not out of necessity. Why pay your ISP for another IP address when you can run upwards of 200 machines on the one you already have.

An ISP that charge more for one /48 or even two /128 than it charges for one /128 is a monopolist company and should be discorporated.

Where the sweet stuff is going on

[paskie]

This is kind of interesting --- when you will look where IPv6 was started to be adopted, first you will see Asia, mainly Japan. Then, slowly, Europe joined --- in fact from January on, things start to massively speed up here, a lot of providers decided at once that they want to try the thing out. Then there is North America, where somehow... well it doesn't seem that some remarkably wide IPv6 adoption is going on there.

The main reason is availability of IPv4 addresses (whole Japan has IIRC less than MIT, overally North America is where the addresses shortage is least apparent), but the side effect is that the centre of progress and cutting-edge front is moving from America to Asia and Europe. That is where probably the most of the further development is going to happen.

Re:Where the sweet stuff is going on

[chrome]

This is kind of interesting --- when you will look where IPv6 was started to be adopted, first you will see Asia, mainly Japan.

Yup,

Japan already uses IPv6 for it's keitei (mobile phone) network. All the phones connect to the net via IPv6 to IPv4 NAT gateway.

Re:Pigs flying, hell freezing over, IPv6 being ado

[Bluefirebird]

Why play the DHCP game when IPv6 completely obsoletes DHCP?
I am sorry but IPv6 still has DHCP for active configuration, but also has a passive configuration protocol that is supported by the radvd - router advertisement daemon.

In 2001, I installed a IPv6 subnet with Mobile IPv6 support, where passive auto-configuration was needed to detect that the computer (Mobile Node) had changed network.

A decade until Windows computers support IPv6

[mulp]

While Windows XP SP1 has "production" support for IPv6, this is a far cry from Windows supporting IPv6. The XP SP1 computers represent maybe 1% of all Windows computers. XP might represent 10% of all Windows computers. XP can't be installed on over 50% of Windows computers, so the only way those can support IPv6 for them to be upgraded to Linux.

And IPv6 isn't "out of the box" even with XP SP1. So that means that ISPs will have to provide their on network installation software to turn it on - most have their own "network installation" software to simplify configuration for their customers.

The lifetime of a recent Windows computer should be a decade. While a replacement computer costs around $200, you need to pay Microsoft $100 to get a valid license, so replacing things like CDROM drives and mice will make sense for most PCs which for the most part are used for web browsing and email.

ISP are part of the telecom world which is officially or in practice in bankruptcy, so none can afford to discard the customers who pay a couple of hundred a year for email and web access.

Businesses on the web can't afford to lose any customers so they can't afford to not have an IPv4 address.

The move to IPv6 is not going to happen soon, for the same reason that the move to broadcast HDTV is going to happen by the current deadline which is years later than the original deadline.

I wouldn't be surprised if IPv6 is replaced by another standard before IPv4 happens. After all, IPv6 is the second attempt to expand the address space, one that STARTED when the prior standard became available on all major operating systems.

The prior standard, the OSI suite was a COTS system, commercial off the shelf, which means it cost money to get an implementation. IPv6 was supposed to be so much simpler that it would be faster and cheaper to deploy, but as far as I can tell, IPv6 costs real money, and more real money, than IPv4, for all but the most technologically astute.