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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.
"...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.
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?
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. :)
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
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...
- fader
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.
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. :)
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.
May we never see th
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.
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
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.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars