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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.
the IANA giveth, the IANA taketh away. Are they running out of addresses already?
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.
2006? Who cares, we will all have jet cars by then...
Are they afraid they're gonna run out of IPs or something?
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.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
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.
6bone? Oh my, i've slipped onto one of those sites again! /me closes before mum walks in
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.
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".
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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
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.
/20 as of 1998 i believe it was)
/20 or more, you are suppost to buy the block from ARIN directly.
:)
/24 of theirs on its own ASN, and tell the other ISPs you use to route over the whole block. /28 out of that, your more than welcome to. /24, it would be more wasteful to leave them unused than to simply route them to you in the first place.
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
If you need a
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
If you want to subnet just a
But as the ISP cant use any of the other IPs in that
What? You are not a what?!
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
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.
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
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.
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.
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
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.
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. :)
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?