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What's Your Timeline for IPv6 Migration?
SgtChaireBourne asks: "IPv4 has, over the last 20 years, seen unexpectedly wide adoption. During this time it's proven to be both flexible and robust, but also several problems, though once small, have grown. IPv6 looks to solve some scalability problems, add needed privacy and authentication mechanisms, address quality of service, and provide better routing and addressing capabilities. What kind of timeline does your site/institution/business have for rolling out IPv6 and how?" Those interested in IPv6 migration may also be interested in this article, from a year ago.
None of the organizations I work directly with are even thinking about IPv6.
It's seen an unexpectedly wide adoption since 1983? If it takes that long to get unexpected adoption. how long does a slow rollout take?
I am still using IPv2, if it is not broken don't fix it. I hate these IP guys, always trying to make you buy a new version every 20 years.
When my ISP cuts my company off.
I'm still trying to figure out the mess that is IPv4! Once I get our internal networks configured as perfect as I can get them, I'll start researching IPv6. Until then, I'll continue to figure out all the problems with the older protocol.
"Nobody else is, so why should we?"
That's basically the position we've taken for some reason where I work. Sure, we've been toying with grabbing a block and deploying it on some of our core routers across North America, but...there's no real need per se to do a serious deployment. Nobody's been asking for IPv6 either.
Maybe if there was a way to have mandatory conversion, things would move along a lot quicker.
In today's business climate, we can't imagine migrating without a financial incentive to do so.
IPv6 is like BetaMax tapes back in the 80's: sure, the format is technically better, but we've already got a ton of IPv4 gear and software. Even if you only use free software, there's still man-hours involved for implementation and planning. I pity the fella who walks into his boss's office and says, "Yeah, I'll be spending the next week on the IPv6 migration, getting all the desktops working, upgrading our router firmware, getting an IPv6 address from our ISP, etc."
IPv4 will work just like VHS tapes did: it'll be fine until the next dramatic quantum-leap comes along, like Tivos and DVD recorders will cut down on VHS recorder sales. IPv6 has some neat features, but nothing that a typical small business can't live without.
In the go-go-90's, you'd have been able to pull it off, but these days, if it ain't broke...
What's your damage, Heather?
I can't say where I work, but it's on my list of things to look at. I'm looking forward to having an entire block of IP's and not having to use NAT to the Internet. I'll just have to make sure the firewall works right in an IPv6 world.
Here are some helpful links:
IPv4 Policies
IPv6 Policies
Ya but does it have an evil bit?
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
I've already switched, but isn't it more important whether all the really huge backbone servers switch? I mean, the majority of them are using IPv4, so are they willing to shut down for a few moments to upgrade (assuming it takes that long)? If they switch, could that entail major loses in their companies income?
We have no plans at all to migrate to IPv6. Don't see any need in the next five years.
No header checksum?? Forget that, won't work on wireless networks. Useless.
You'll see more of it when cellphones, PDA, and other such come onto the Information Superhighway.
IPv6 Should be built alongside and parallel to current Inet. If it is done parallel to the Inet, we could fix alot of what is broken with the Inet.
Addressing is just one of the issues that IPv6 addresses, but the Parallel nature that I am proposing would fix things like Security, Spam, Porn, Enum, Virus, Streaming media, meta port assignments, directory services etc.
There is much more. Trying to build IPv6 ONTOP of the current Inet is just as broken as the current Inet.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
ISPs are going to have to add support for this in a real-world environment before it begins to really move in businesses. Right now, a fairly complicated tunneling process has to happen before machines using IPv6 can hit the internet in general. Yes, I know you can run IPv6 and IPv4 at the same time, but doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose? Besides, until IPv6 addresses are being assigned by ISPs, the addressing schemes are going not conform to the standard that is finally settled on, meaning that individual addresses will have to change numerous times for people who adopt it early.
Mind you, the above statements are highly uninformed, based on what I've read of IPv6 and my own brief experience setting up a tunnel for it with 6bone (which, I understand, is no longer with us).
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Such a huge update would mean the end of anything less then WinXP in the Windows world, you aren't likely to see many companies completely upgrade every machine in an organization to WinXP until there is a business need, other then just being ready.
The widespread use of NAT and RFC 1918 address space has somewhat mitigated the need for more address space. I realize there is more to ipv6 than just more addresses, but I think shrinking ipv4 space is going to be the thing that makes everyone switch over.
The best reason for IPv6 wasn't even mentioned in the blurb. Multicasting is like Bittorrent on steroids. I don't know how all of the money for the bandwidth changes hands, but imagine being able to download the latest iso for your favorite linux distro, the first hour it is available. Better yet, imagine being able to host that iso from your own whimpy machine. Better still, imagine a world free from the dreaded slashdot effect.
Right now, never. Seriously - not even considering it.
Realistically speaking, I'd say 5 - 10 years, right after I get my flying car.
I'm thinking that it'll really start to get to the point where I will start using it in 2008. This is me speaking about my small hosting business as well as a member of the local Internet Cooperative. I'm sure I'll be playing with IPV6 in the next year or two to get up to speed on it.
At the moment you can't get IPV6 service from any of the large providers. And really only people on ipv6 can take advantage of it, so... Until a significant portion of the end-users have IPV6, I can't see that we'll have any real need to start using it in any real way...
It's, obviously, a chicken-and-egg thing. It was really pushed because of the "sky is falling" shouts about running out of IP space. Todays world seems like there's plenty of IP space, if you're not super wastful with it, and we have other problems to face like router table space and ASNs.
The other problem I don't think we really have ironed out right now is that the routers are really underpowered and optimized for ipv4 routing. I expect that having significant traffic on IPV6 is going to stress many of the bigger routers on the net to the point that they can no longer function. Lots of "big router" admins are already working hard getting the routers to handle current traffic.
Sean
IPv6, right now, is almost as useless as the Athlon64 is going to be. IPv4 was a major breakthrough for its time, and the time it took to develop a 32-bit processor was far too long, but, right now, no one /really/ needs IPv6, and people(NOT companies) don't need a 64-bit desktop processor.
IPv4 and 32-bit processors still have a some life left (5-10 years, tops)...
Of course, then we'll all be migrating to these new technologies in a hurry... So... Make these changes gradually?
Ever since I found out Windows XP Service Pack 1 supports IPv6, I've been using it on my Windows XP box. From what I've seen, my Zaurus with OpenZaurus also supports IPv6. So, I guess I've already migrated to IPv6. I still use mainly IPv4 apps, but it's nice to know that I'm already there in readiness for the migration.
We've got a lot of systems pretty much ready for IPv6, but we're waiting on the infrastructure (routes, DNS, etc) to be set up. Latest versions of RedHat Linux, the *BSDs, and Windows XP all support IPv6. I believe there's a test IPv6 implementation for Mac OS X aswell.
I imagine a lot of people are in the same situation, waiting on IT departments without enough time to make the changes.
Oh, at home... well, the equipment is simple off the shelf stuff, I doubt any of it supports IPv6, and my ISP would probably just look confused if I mentioned it.
Well put. Thats what I see from all the companies I consult with. Don't hold your breath. The cost/benefit just isn't there, and won't be for the forseeable fututre, i.e., years.
I'll expect to see IPv6 in wide deployment about the same time as the release of Duke Nukem Forever.
I don't plan on ever using IPv6. Of course, that could be just me since I'm still very happy with my Windows 3.1 box running WinTrumpet.
Aw man... you're not old school! I'm old school!
I'm still using IPv0.62. I mean seriously, who had this stupid idea of periods in IP addresses. IPv6 holds no appeal for me, I'm waiting for IP XP.
lysergically yours
I'm not really to concerned about when the switch will happen. I'm sure Lain will see that it goes smoothly.
We'll see but it could easily be another 20 years before the world adopts (wholely) IPv6.
My company and I will give up IPv4 when you pry it from our cold dead hands.
Reporting someone to the BSA is not worth it for revenge. Its kind of like selling your soul, not to the devil, but to the highest bidder.
I've seen no plans to migrate to V6 here either. The routers can go with just a firmware upgrade I understand though, but the bottome line is WHY ?
With NAT I just don't see the need. At home I'd rather not have a bunch of registered IP's for everything at my house anyways, make the stuff work behind my firewall, anonymously
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
... I am waiting for the shipworm [pdf] standard to be formalized. Right now I can only get an ipv6 address for my firewall machine, or if I want to do port forwarding with freebsd I could have one internal machine attached to ipv6, but since I only have one ipv4 address I am out of luck until shipworm becomes a reality.
This, in addition to the fact that I would have to tunnel to get ipv6, the fact that there is nothing I NEED that is available only over ipv6... But I'd still do it just for the experience if it were possible.
+++ ATH0 +++
Once IPv6 has a killer app, you will see widespread adoption. Until then, who really cares? There just isn't a real need for it.
Nobody -- not ISPs, not users -- is going to switch to IPv6 until they have a reason to do so. Private networks have obliterated (not just mitigated, in my opinion) the argument that IPv4 does not offer enough IP addresses for everyone. We have all the IP addresses we will ever need using IPv4 and NAT. That was once considered the main reason for IPv6 adoption. Now there isn't much of any reason to switch, other than the coolness factor that only techies will appreciate.
I'll roll out IPv6 as soon as there's some pr0n on it that I can't get via IPv4.
.sig
-- this is not a
[shameless plug]
We provide IPv6 ready testing tools for L2 through L7 testing that are seeing great interest and buyers in the market.
[/shameless plug]
Judging from the response we're seeing, IPv6 is quickly being implemented by the network equipment manufacutrers (NEMs) - though the rollout at ISPs and businesses is probably not as fast as one would hope due to the general market conditions and lack of rollout pressure due to IPv4 addresses still being available.
Thing is, why update to IPv6? What's the main reason for a casual net user who is generally pleased/apathetic (conform consume obey) with the internet as it is to want to switch?
And whatever happend to IPv5?
I don't know much about it ... but, I do know enough that I'm going to pretend that I've never heard of it until there is a good reason to start using it.
What good would it do if I was the only person using it?
..and even sells routing and other IPv6 equipment... and yet, we're not even dreaming of planning of designing a possible IPv6 migration for our own (50.000+ node) network. NAT does it for talking to the outside world, and we still have plenty unallocated public addresses.
Business cases have been made, feasibility plans created, consultations and meetings have been held, and it all points to: IPv4 works just fine, thank you. Our network-related problems have absolutely nothing to do with IPv4, so nobody is going to put his job on the line for the fancyness of a new technology that nobody really needs. OK, maybe somebody needs it, but heck, I really didn't see any such company around.
So, you see, if even the cook doesn't want to eat his own soup, you probably can stick to the tried-and-tested Big Mac (so I like Big Macs. Got a problem with that?) too.
Sigged!
So far over the horizon that its dropped of the radar screen. I think most organizations have this on the back-burner if it has been thought of at all.
A large number of providers offer IPv6 support today. NTT/Verio has been offering this as a Commercial Service for quite some time, as well as through the domestic provider OCN and the OCN DSL services. As the 6bone tunneled networks go away, there is ongoing native support being added to networks. IETF and other conferences have been supporting providers that offer native IPv6 services. Aside from the always behind the ball DSL/Cable providers in the edge provider space of multicast, IPv6, etc.. you can contact any of the Tier-1 networks to obtain IPv6 services. Likely for free and not out of the 3FFE space. Build IPv6 into your kernels, ask your service providers for IPv6 and encourage them to provide these to you for little/no additional cost. Juniper and Cisco routers currently offer IPv6 in their current software releases. Now that Cisco has acquired Linksys, hopefully they will assist in providing support for these services in the edge-router space.
What's in it for me? I got IP addresses already. Maybe if some day I need more I might have to get IPv6 ones. But only if I can get portable ones. Of course that brings up the critical issue that during the development of IPv6, while that scaled up the address space massively, they didn't do so with the routing issue.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Then we'll start on IPv6.
The reason we are running out of IPv4 addresses isn't technical, its a poor implementation of routing by Cisco that is mostly to blame combined with a political mess.
/19 minimal allocation is a complete waste of resources.
/24, that means for 15 interfaces I need 8 meg of memory to decide where the packet goes for mostly static tables.
99+% of the net today can look at the reset of the world as a "default route". That means for most of the world, the
A very small number of companies fit in the dual homed category. While they may need better routing, most of the time its not for efficiency of the routes but redundancy. Note that is is virtually impossible for a small business to be dual homed and have things work when one of the links goes down.
The remaining is the core routers. A core router shouldn't be using routing tables they way they are done now. For most routes in a core routers, its just a switch. Stuff to 1.2.3/24 goes to interface 2 and that's it. There tend to be a few dynamic routes for some of the stuff that's close but everything else is far away and very static (relative to the routers ability to change all of it). Since no one is switching far away traffic in smaller groups than a
Ipv6 isn't going to fix any of this. It doubles the amount of bits that are needed for the hardware routing and then double that for the local address. That doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
I would like to play with IPv6 on a public network but Racksapce (where I keep a server) won't give me an IPv6 address.
if you could run t-1 to a a 10baseT connection
why couldn't you build a router (f***, this is slashdot right?) or I suppose, a linux box,
that 'steps down' the IPV6 to something an older machine could understand?
just because win 98 can't handle IPV6, doesn't mean Linksys can't
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Maybe what they mean is that IPv6 is going to make it better?
But I'm using it extensively on our internal network. Life is sweet with BSD routers.
At that point, Marketing is going to turn to Management and ask "Why arn't we using this next generation networking technology?" To which Management is going to go to IS, and ask the same question.
IS is going to report the following.
Management is then going to ask "How long it will take to deploy?", and "How long do you expect to continue working here?". At different companies different emphasis is going to be placed on those two questions.
ISP's and CoLos will have the same set of problems. Large businesses are going to ask why they are not ready for IPv6, and will have to seriously look into how much longer it will take before they start loosing their big customers.
At that point, IPv6 will be discovered as already existing in just about every router and server OS that is out there. The exceptions will be hardware that is due for replacemnt shortly anyway.
People who have been fighting with silly problems with IPv4, will crack open the manuals on IPv6 and realize that almost 90% of the problems they have been fighting with, dhcp, ddns, IPsec, IPNat, are already built into the technology that they already have deployed and mearly need to add a few statements to interfaces on routers in their network.
The early adopters are going to move their CoLos out of the US to countries where the CoLos have already deployed IPv6 in their infrastructure. Some of them will prosper on the added business, some will not get it right and will fail.
Nay-sayers on Slashdot will point at the failures in the early adopters and say "I told you so, the technology ain't ready."
Are there problems with the above senario? Sure. There are problems with some of the deployed IPv6 stacks on some Cisco routers. There are questions about the efficacy of using some of the applications that businesses are using on IPv4 being migrated to IPv6. I understand that there are Novel 3.2 servers out there that are still in use because the company using the server has a functioning solution even if spport costs in the future are going to skyrocket.
Those of you complaining about being out of work, might want to spend some time at the library and brush up on both your IPv4 and IPv6 knowledge. You will then have a potential advantage over those people currently working, fighting with IPv4 problems and ignoring the possibility of using IPv6, because "No one has found a real need for it."
After all, I could be wrong.
-Rusty
You never know...
Loopback is going to be 12:70:00:00:00:01 :-(
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
as an end user, i really have no idea what the difference will be to me... is there gonna be some great new things happening? can someone enlighten me as to what I'M going to see with IPv6 vs. IPv4
www.necroticobsession.com
Oh. Oh fuck! Fuck! Oh no!
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
That might jumpstart both IPv6, AlterNIC, and decent routing.
Of course, to make this happen, I'll need a Bambleweeny 57 sub-meson brain , an atomic vector plotter, and a nice hot cup of tea.
www.eFax.com are spammers
The major operating systems out there are now deployable with IPv6 support. The major infrastructure vendors (Cisco and the like) are ready. The big limitation as I see it right now is software. More network-aware software needs to be address family agnostic.
The path forward for software developers is fairly straightforward:
Making software address-family agile should not impact your IPv4 users at all. Why not do it the right way now so you don't have to re-do it later?
It is coming.
I and my company have no plan to move to IPV6 until my ISP or customers require it. IPV6 just offers no benefits we will want or need in the forseeable future.
On the upside, at least IPV6 was well-planned and is getting a ton of testing!
IPv6 is like BetaMax tapes back in the 80's
As with most attempts to use the BetaMax analogy in the computer world, this one fails: BetaMax was incompatible with VHS, period, end statement. If you had a Beta machine, VHS tapes were useless to you, and vice versa. IPv4 and IPv6 can happily co-exist, though. Totally different situation.
That said, I agree with the underlying premise that migration isn't going to happen until it's easy and cheap, and (moreover) there's some motivation out there. It's possible that this translates to "never"; it's also possible that it translates to "some time in the next 5-10 years". I'm reserving judgement for now, but I'll be amazed if I have to deal with IPv6 in less than five years.
I'm mostly there. My network and systems are all dual IPv4 and IPv6. The problem I've been running up against is that there are no DSL or small-office/home-office-type providers in my area that support IPv6! Most of the people I speak to at my current ISP (SBC) don't even know what it is (had to call them, my 4 or 5 e-mails about it have all gone totally unanswered), and finally when I get ahold of someone in the "emerging products" group, they say they have no idea if/when it will ever be available. I can't even sign up to help test it.
So for now I'm stuck working through a tunnel broker with terrible latency. Basically, I'm still doing everything with IPv4 that's not on the LAN.
As soon as Evercrack, Sims Oncrack, or Battlecrack 1942 come out with IPv6 versions, that's when you'll see widespread adoption of IPv6.
Anyone who has a single static IPv4 address can use 6to4 to get a /48 up and running right now.
...when the next version of Enlightenment and Duke Nukem Forever ship with IPv6 support.
What's Your Timeline for IPv6 Migration?
Tomorrow around noon. Is that good for you?
No, seriously - tomorrow around noon.
Adi Gadwale
(Rating guide for the humor impaired: +1 Funny)
We already have to update everything every 26 seconds because something doesn't work (especially in windows) so why would anyone want to upgrade something that is working just fine
... Texas, were everything needs FIXIN')
Don't fix it if it ain't broken (unless your in the handyman's paradise
no, cisco stock was one of the good ones. it should have been obvious to any shareholder that it was time to sell as soon as cisco's market cap was briefly larger than microsoft. you'd have made your money.
With an IP-Masqueraded network everyone can have an entire class A to themselves.
We need to educate network administrators that most (not all) networks that use real IP's could just as easily be converted to a NAT+MASQ system which, if properly configured, will work just as well for most applications. If this where to happen we would dramatically reduce the IPv4 allocation.
I'm all for IPv6, I just don't think it's necessary right now. Not for at least another 15-20 years.
With all those billions of phones and PDAs coming in the next few years, ipv6 will be hopelessly outdated when it finally rolls out. Why not skip it entirely, and jump straight to ipv8?
Not until Drizzle's network guru calls me up and tells me "Hey, we're switching over to IPv6, you'll need to update your DNS boxen."
I've tried -- hard -- to understand the IPv6 FAQ, the structure of IPv6 setups, and how those setups relate to DNS. Maybe I'm dense, maybe I just don't work well with the FAQ the way it's written, but so far I've not had much luck.
I will say that the FAQs seem to put out nothing but pure theory, and they expect the reader to make the intuitive leap as to how to set up v6 for their own network.
I definitely don't work like that. I usually need to be shown, explicitly, HOW to do something first (as in comparing what my v4 and v6 DNS setups would look like side-by-side), and my gray matter will then pick up the theory along the way.
In other words: If someone can show me, in a PRACTICAL manner instead of bombarding me with the theoreticals first, how to make the switch and how my current addresses relate to IPv6, then I will create the appropriate setup for my domains and keep it mothballed until the time comes to use it.
Until then, well... my current setup is definitely not broken. I don't see any reason to "fix" it.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
For some reason id 5 was allocated to an experimental stream protocol called ST. A lot of good information about IPv6 is contained in Christian Huitema's book, including some of the politics; althought it's quite outdated now:
IPv6 The New Internet Protocol
ISBN: 013241936X
IMHO once CIDR, NAT, and IPsec came into wide use most of the benifits of IPv6 became null.
All you people who say you don't need IP6 because you have NAT need to remember that pretty soon now NAT's going to be criminallized to stop all us criminals from downloading music and movies and to protect us from terrorists!
So you'll HAVE to go to IP6 to be good, law-abiding sysadmins.
better get started now!
We, Like most other companies around the world.. will only do this when we HAVE TO.
When someone legislates us into submission then we'll get off our arse and do the right thing..
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Why only a move from 32bit to 128bit addresses? I mean, I know there are a hell of a lot of assignable addresses through IPv6, but wouldn't it have made more sense (and be more futureproof) to just have an address that can be dynamic in length?
It is probably not regarded as a pressing issue to increase the range of addresses above 128bits, but then 32bits (and 640K RAM cough) seemed a lot at the time. As has been stated in previous comments, this addresses will eventually be consumed by even the most trivial of objects like light switches or microwave oven bells.
A similar point could be made for dates, where fixes for the year 2000 suddenly allowed dates up to 9999, but what about when we hit the year 10000? Sounds silly, yes, and no doubt we will have moved on to much bigger and better things by then... but what if, for example, we suddenly (within years) moved to a new style calendar system where we started counting from 18209 years ago? Yeah, the point for dates is probably stupid, but why not just let the date/address be any length it needs to be?
Just start with the lowest bit and then work towards the most significant bit that will uniquely identify an object? Perhaps this is unworkable, but it seems to make more sense than just relying on no one filling out the address space (again... will we never learn?) It also seems to follow logically from how the domain name system works where there is a hierarchy involved from some top level towards the actual machine address. I imagine I am missing some vital concept of addresses needing to be a fixed number of bits or something though, I haven't delved into it enough to understand exactly the issues involved.
... I guess
That's when i'll change...
and I dont think it's that far off - AOL probably have more need than most and might pull it off more easily.
They already need heaps of IP addresses for all their dialup users.
Most aol users wouldn't give a monkey if they installed AOL v19 and suddenly it used ipv6... they just wouldn't notice.
The remaining computer literate aol users (if they exist) would probably be quite pleased.
Just my thoughts.
The US centric views of slashdot are nevermore plain than the majority of comments on this topic. The above poster got it right: IP space is not terribly scarce in the US, but it is in grave shortfall oversees. MIT and utexas have more address space allocated that most asian countries. (Strictly heresay, but a friend that worked for MIT's IT staff said when machines were retired, so were their IPs, DNS entries still exists for boxes turned off a decade ago).
Plus therr are a lot of technologies for which NAT sucks. Any p2p app, including nifty stuff like voip, most gaming servers, etc. Now admittly little of this would interest a corporation, and too many ISPs have a stake in charging by the IP for IPV6 to really happen.
In my company we've been testing it, but we have a freer IT environment than most. If one of the above posts is accurate and win2k has even a halfway functional stack we will probably move into a parallel deployment, with tunnels between all our remote sites. We would roll it out in an instant if our ISP (verizon Internetworking (yuck) or Birch telecom) would offer it.
...when Ellen Feiss switches, and not a moment sooner.
I currently have my localnetwork on IPv6 to the router which holds 1 IPv4 to the Net. I use IPv6 for the geek factor.
On the other hand, the company I work for will not adopt IPv6 untill there is a large average user base on the Net (like AOL and MSN using IPv6). Unless there is a strong reason to jump on, then the company has 'better things to do' which is probably the position of most buisnesses.
About the same time Richard Stallman installs a fully GPL'ed Windows on his Dell laptop...
Hell, it's hard enough to get budgets approved for URGENT matters. There's no way I'm recommending an IPV6 migration unless I can tie it to a significant savings in $$$ -or- we're forced to by some kind of federal mandate. Right now, there's certainly no cost savings, rather the opposite -and- the feds are not going to move on IPV6 without some kind of lobbying from big biz. Since MS is so keen on connecting everything under the sun, maybe they should be ponying up some jack to get this moving? Hell, just switching MSN to IPV6 would be a start.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
What about RFC 1886?
BIND can support AAAA records, it is a matter of wider adoption, but there certainly is support. I once wrote a zone file editor that included plenty of support for v6.
You people in the nice non-gov't world can fret about luxuries like IPv6 and IPSEC while I have to battle in 2003 to even get rid of telnet. Yes, in this day and age we are still running telnet. At this rate if the world adopted IPv6 tomorrow I would get to implement it a few years after I can teleport to work.
Q: When will the US go IPv6?
A: The day after the US goes metric!
--Kimota!
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
I'm planning to roll out IPv6 support in my networks this summer. This means that nodes that are capable will have routable IPv6 addresses. This means routers that can support it in hardware (we're due for upgrades anyway), and basic services starting with DNS. We'll try to move as many services as we can to availabilty on both stacks.
I'm guessing 1/4 to 1/2 of our nodes will support it, and maybe 1-5% of offsite traffic will be IPv6. (But those are just my wild guesses.)
It is importaint to note that IPv4 will not be going away anytime soon. I don't even see any IPv6-only nodes in the immediate future. I don't see the end of IPv4 globally routable addresses any time soon, and local IPv4 will probably outlast most of our careers.
Had IETF chosen to set aside of chunk of address space to permanently and portably allocate to serious deployers ... space that would not ever be taken back ... that could be kept forever as the payment for helping to make IPv6 happen ... then I think a lot of ISPs and businesses would have done this. Instead, what we have are 6bone addresses that will not be routable on the real IPv6, and tunnels that will be taken down soon, making those addresses useless. Sure, there is a routing scalability problem still in IPv6. The only benefit IPv6 has over IPv4 in routing is that there hopefully won't be a case of single companies advertising dozens of unaggregated prefixes ... or at least no more than one per major location. So shame on the IETF for not having solved that problem with a fundamentally new way to do routing in conjunction with the development of an addressing technology that now way overscales the ability to route it.
It's now a chicken and egg problem. ISPs simply will not, not in this economy, and not for years even after it gets better, make an investment in deploying IPv6 unless there is customer demand for it. Customers won't demand it until there is some real need for it, which is not the case, especially with so many businesses now running big LANs via one NAT'd IPv4 address. If some web site goes online with both IPv4 and IPv6, everyone will access it via IPv4 and that won't create any demand for IPv6. If they go online with IPv6 only, no one can reach them for a while, and they will probably not really make it.
But there are some possible ways to make IPv6 happen:
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
There is hardly any sites that use ipv6 and the only way I can access them is to go through a sloooow tunnel. So until my ISP implements ipv6 well no ipv6 for me.
IPv6 is all cute n'stuff, but adding more address space will solve one problem while inflating another: bandwidth!
If we all get to run more IPs into our offices and homes, we're going to find more ways to transfer data. Bandwidth is too expensive for what it's really worth these days.
My current cable ISP has a 10 Gb monthly quota, which I could theoretically exhaust in roughly 6 hours of peak usage. Download a linux distro, there goes 1/5th of my monthly allowance. And if I bust that limit, it's 8$ per Gb. Bandwidth is being controlled by the telecommunications giants, and we all know the service would be dirt cheap if it weren't run by profiteering gluttons.
With so many things relying on the internet for their Raison D'Etre, maybe it's time we took it out of the jaws of capitalism and made it truly public. It has well served to unite people of all nations (except maybe China); it has helped dispell the plague of racism; it has opened the door for numerous advances in modern technology, all this because of open communication. Before the telcos grab us by the balls and drive our connectivity bills through the roof as content grows richer and bulkier, I think it is of world importance that the internet become a truly free, public domain service. Who's going to host the root servers ? Who's going to install this fiber ? Who's going to handle domain registrations ? WE WILL. And governments of all nations should help out because it improves quality of living and of business for everyone. Who would bother having a phone if you could only use it 5 minutes a day or pay through the nose ? Nobody. Why should the internet be any different ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
There are evident, unsolved, pragmatic problems with native IP multicast. For instance, there is no proven, support inter-domain multicast routing system, and thus no way for multicast groups to sync up between different ISPs.
There are application-layer problems with multicast. For instance, nobody has come up with a reliability scheme with a service model other than "streaming video" or "big fucking file transfer" (as opposed to, say, web page download).
But even if you believe that problems like these are close to being solved, there is a fundamental, intensely painful scaleability problem with global native IP multicast: rather than asking the Internet backbone to route entities that represent hosts (a hard enough problem), native multicast demands that the backbone route entities that effectively represent pieces of content. As in, web pages.
Most of the benefits of multicast will come from overlay systems, both centralized (like the one Akamai built) and decentralized (like peer-to-peer file sharing networks). There's no evidence that the problems Deering-model multicast aims to solve can't be solved more easily at a higher layer.
It's just another example of the end to end principle in action.
Mozilla/Apache already supports IPv6 literals, although Slashdot doesn't. Go to http://[::1]/ to view your local website if you're hosting one. Too bad I can't link it.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
from my cold dead hands.
Living through all this - async tty, polling addresses ( Univac, Burroughs ), BSC, SNA (SDLC), X.25(HDLC), X21, IPv4, ATM, and so on - there always were persons believing that that's the ultimatium of protocols, no better can ever exist. so - just a question? IPv6 will not be the last but it offers so much over IPv4 - why not to use it for next 10 or so years ?? And as some has alreay pointed out - some countries are already implementing it. Do we really want to be late and followers ? I don't - it would mean a lot of extra work in all hasty - i.e. 18 hours days, etc. later on. have a nice day - tuomo
Do you think that your ISP is going to sit and watch as you multicast through their network, causing them to send out many times more data than is coming in? Not if they can help it. They will charge for every multicasted bit. Maybe it's more efficient sometimes, but it will still cost lots of money, most likely.
Naw. They get their money from the people the multicast bit is going TO. Replicating it means more people upgrade and pay for bigger inbound hoses.
Think about it: Got broadband? Didn't you pay a premium to get a fat INBOUND pipe? Isn't your OUTBOUND pipe pinched down a bunch? Don't you use it that way? Do you feel cheated because your outbound pipe is narrower than your inbound? Or do you watch your streaming programms and suck down big images on the web with a few characters of URL going the other way?
Now if you could originate video streams and feed a LARGE audience on a DSL that was good for one stream upbound and several down, and a bunch of others could, too, and these indies made enough programming to convince a few hundred thousand users to upgrade to such fat pipes and pay a higher fee, and the ISP only had ONE COPY of this content-feeding-thousands on any given internal pipe rather than several, do you think the ISPs would nix it? Or would they sell it to all comers and laugh all the way to the bank.
It's CONTENT that drives internet expansion. And right now the general user as content provider can't feed enough people to make it worthwhile. So the main thing that's popular in peer-to-peer content provision is so-called piracy - where a CROWD of people each serve a FEW consumers with content mostly cloned off other people's well-advertised productions.
With broadcast origination available to general users, ORIGINAL content can reach enough people to justify the production costs. Without it, you need a major-league expensive infrastructure even for webcasting.
So the ISPs have a fine financial incentive to allow it once their infrastructure is up to it - and make the bucks back from the increased feed for pipes fat enough to originate and view it.
Or at least the ones that are NOT owned by a media conglomerate do. The ones owned by a media conglomerate have an incentive to suppress any broadcast technology where they don't originate the content themselves - because it represents competition for their more lucrative content-production-and-distribution business.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
as soon as my company uses up all of its private ips!
I'm curious, when you say the "Journaling filesystem" of NT 3.5 that no one used, I'm assuming you mean NTFS. You might remember it, it's the file system that was installed by default.
I was deploying Windows NT 3.1 and 3.5x systems for several years, and worked with dozens of others who were doing the same thing, we all went directly for NTFS for all of our data storage. Maybe you're thinking HPFS?
Please, feel free to quote your source of information on the lack of use of that non-working file system.
of a friend of mine who still insists on using Netscape 4.7. Why? "Because..."
Nevermind the incompatibilities with a large chunk of the "modern" web... she thinks it's not only stable, but that NS4 is the best for web design debugging.
How looks your geekroom?
When my ISP updates their entire backbone, and replaces the Cisco 2500 series router they gave us.
In other words - probably never.
-ted
from my ISP. Looks like I'll be waiting a /long/ time, since the ISP appears to have no intention of implementing IPv6 until their customers absolutely demand it as a mass.
/sucks/, we need native ipv6 across the networks to make it really useful - and that doesn't look like happening anytime soon.
And so the cycle continues: "nobody is using it, so we won't bother yet." Ipv6 tunneling
At least windows and most linux and bsd variants now support ipv6 to a useful, if far from complete, extent.
what the hell are you babbling about? i'm a router guy and you're not making any sense to me. you would get laughed off of nanog if you ever posted gibberish like this.
Local IPv6 addresses don't offer any advantages over 10.* IPv4 addresses.
Global IPv6 addresses don't work. Most client computers around the Internet can't talk to a server on a global IPv6 address, and most server computers around the Internet can't talk to a client on a global IPv6 address. Sure, a few people could connect to my IPv6 addresses; so what? Why should I go to extra effort to make those addresses work?
All the operating systems I use have been claiming ``IPv6 support'' for years. But they still require manual action by the system administrator before they can talk to IPv6 addresses. What do I gain by spending time setting up IPv6?
(All of this boils down to a small protocol design error in IPv6. A small change to IPv6 software would make IPv6 addresses work without any administrator action. I have a web page, http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html, explaining this in much more detail.)
WHEN WE HAVE NO CHOICE
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Ever heard of MSDP? Not perfect, but there's plenty of work going on here.
Who ever said that it needed to support something other than real-time (read audio/video)?
There are some real life applications in use today that a couple of large cable operators use to redistribute things like VoD content to multiple sites.
The Nasdaq uses mcast on the trading floor for live video, and also to remote sites.
While it's largely an enterprise type application, there are some areas where ISP's can benefit from it especially as we start to see more and more streaming applications.
I doubt I'll actually change to having an IPv6 address any time soon because I already have my static IPv4 addresses. On the other hand, I'll start connecting to people with IPv6 addresses sometime soon without realizing it. It's also possible that I'll have new devices without IPv4 addresses that I'll get IPv6 addresses for.
Actually, does anyone have a simple test to see if I'm already able to connect to IPv6 addresses?
If the ISPs can charge extra for multicasting, they will. It's hard to blame them either. The Internet is best served by ISPs selling bandwidth as a true economic commodity, and companies selling a commodity in a competitive market get profit driven down to 0 by the laws of economics. Nobody wants to sell a commodity. They want to differentiate their product.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Only Microsoft and Cisco? That's it, well blow me down!
Maybe if Slackware and VA Software where there it would be worth something!
But only internet-midgets Microsoft and Cisco? Ya sure like they have some sway over what technology gets adopted...
Teenagers. It's all about teenagers.
:-)
You see, when the kids install ThreeDegrees, Microsoft automatically enables IPv6. Isn't it insidious? If this is allowed to continue, we'll have millions of IPv6 machines before you know it!
You have to just jump in! I too am already using IPv6 comfortably alongside my routed IPv4 network. I actually forced myself to start using it just 'cause, and it's wonderful. The autoconfiguration features are worth it alone. And I have a mixed network of Linux, AIX, HP-UX, Windows 2000, and Cisco. My bind/DNS is configured for IPv6, my sendmail is configured for IPv6, and so on. But the underlying IPv4 network is still there right along side. There's really no reason to not go ahead and start experimenting with IPv6, to get comfortable with it before you depend on it.
Actually my excuse to start playing with it was I was developing an application which could make use of multicasting. And let me tell you, IPv6 multicasting is a dream come true when compared with IPv4! And the sockets-API is much more sane and complete, after all the IETF learned from the shortcomings of the IPv4 API. See these wonderful resources and just jump in!
So now that I'm enjoying it, I've been seeking out open source applications that use IPv4 and providing assistance to the developers to get them compatible with IPv6. A lot of the smaller projects in particular could use help, as some of them are unnecessarily tied to the IPv4 stack and probably don't even know it nor know anything about IPv6. I also suggest that anybody with some expertise to lend a hand as well. The open source/free software community can not find itself falling being here.
I'll consider migrating to IPv6 when my ISP can give me IPv6 addresses.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
There are a few major things holding up a conversion anytime soon. 1. Lack of stable standard routing protocols (internal or external). 2. No 100% seamless method of v4-v6 conversion, this makes seperate infrastructure a costly neccessity (for large deployments). 3. Limited affordable commercial support from the providers. There are some semi-public backbones (WCOMs vBNS+, I2) but nothing that will be picked up by regional providers any time soon. 4. No application support, and little demand for it. There are some places where it is being looked at, or even deployed on a large scale. Obviously the asian electronics manufacturers. And several current government/military contracts require full v6 services. Anyway, plenty of time for us to play with it.
Stealth Multicast
Did this protocol just suck, or what?
Up until last year I have been developping firmware (embedded server load balancing) for the new line of switch/routers of a big company that shall remain nameless.
At no point were we instructed to even think about IPv6. IPs are internally encoded on 4 bytes, in various and sometimes rather obscure locations within the code. They can even be found as fixed-size strings for ASCII representation for command-line processing.
From what I have seen the rest of the firmware, all the way down to the proprietary ASICS's internal registers, it has no provision whatsoever for IPv6.
Given the amount of work needed I doubt this line of switch/routers (edge & core) will ever support it, despite the fact that this is a new product and the next generation won't come out until 2-3 years - if there's any.
I have no problem with liking big macs (though I don't feel it) but I do have a problem with not eating your own dog food.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For IPv6 to be widely adopted, common users must have a native IPv6 connection. Tunnels are nice for testing, but obviously slower than native connections.
So, ISPs should migrate to IPv6 and give a couple of IPv6 addresses to their customers.
This is exactly what Nerim, a nice french ISP, is doing for some weeks, and according to their internal newsgroups, a lot of people are using this facility.
However, there are showstoppers for IPv6 ADSL :
- While the core TCP/IP stack of Windows XP fully supports IPv6, the PPP client does not. This is an important issue.
- OpenBSD 3.3 (and -current) PPP client does not either. You have to compile FreeBSD's hacked pppd to make IPv6 on ADSL work with OpenBSD.
- I'm not sure whether Linux without USAGI patches works either.
{{.sig}}
In today's business climate, we can't imagine migrating without a financial incentive to do so.
Well this company refuses to spend out any money to investigate ipv6. Yes there is an IP shortage. And do you know what causes it? Primarily IANA who are holding about 1/3rd of the total IPV4 address space in reserve.
dont believe me? check this.
OK, IP adresses are just fina and dandy for routing etc.
BUT
Why does every NIC have a MAC number that is -AFAIK- Unique ?
Why, oh Why not USE what is there instead of inventing a new can of worms?
Free ?! Does that mean I can't get a Discount ?!
This message was
I tried that URL with both Phoenix and Lynx. They didn't understand it.
I also sent a test message to myself@ipv6-localhost. My sendmail configuration couldn't quite take it.
I took a look into v6 and found some nice things in there. But I wouldn't want to use it currently. Having PA-Addresses on every networkstation in our internal network and not having to use NAT sounds like a good Idea. Until you change your provider. Big renumbering ante Portas. And the autoassignments might be nice, only I do not trust them yet. There will always be boxes configured by Hand.
... All that little things, already supporting IP. They only can do v4.
And then there is the vendor support. Not only the software missing (that was mentioned before), but also the missing Hardware: I'm talking about network printers, Barcodescanners, telephonesystems, powerswitches
So we cannot switch until all the devices we need support it. And that won't be the case within the next 5 to 10 years I guess.
Nils
I am already there. My Dutch ISP supports IPv6, my Cisco routers support IPv6 (as of IOS v12.2), my Windows XP machines support IPv6, my Linux boxes support IPv6, Windows Server 2003 supports IPv6, and we are rolling that out right now, and of course both Bind and Microsoft DNS support AAAA records, so there is no need to wait. :)
On the other hand, learning the new numbering scheme is quite a pain...
Having been involved in both the process that defined IPv6 and also the process that was intended to perform a similar function to extend the life of DECnet (remember that?) I confidently predict that IPv6 will never achieve critical mass. Which is perhaps just as well, since it's a political solution to the problems of 15 years ago. It's not going to solve critical problem #1 - DoS attacks on critical bits of network infrastructure. Back to the drawing board?
After all, I could be wrong.
I think so too. It's obvoious that if they are using v6, they will have 6to4 anycast up and going too. That is a crucial part of the system that may not go away for a long time. Many sites will probably continue using 4 with anycast and NAT.
The crucial question isn't 'when will we be able to switch' it's 'when will the service providers provide widespread v6 access?' Many gamers, myself included, would jump on v6.
One thing that nobody has ever been able to satisfactorily explain to me is how the global end-to-end routing that IPV6 offers will operate in practice.
/24 would overload most routers currently in use, and that John J. Average can advertise routes for microsoft.com and traffic goes down a black hole.
/16. Since the only people who can realistically maintain a /16 are ISPs, mega-corps or state institutions, this basically takes the 'dream of a global network in which everyone is connected', breaks its legs and ties it directly to the financial interests of it's largest players.
IPV4 can't be routed in this manner, because of router resource limits and the unreliability of route information - e.g. keeping route information for every individual
CIDR (Classless Internet Domain Routing) alleviates both these problems to some degree by removing the ability to effectively route any address block smaller than a
Some would say (and I would largely agree) that the commercial benefits to infrastructure providers of offering routing to the 'smaller' nodes on the internet are non-existent or negative. So it just won't happen.
CIDR + IpV6 gives us nothing we don't already have. It simply offers more addresses behind each NAT machine - and really, nobody I have ever heard of is NATing more machines than will fill the 192.168.0.0/16 + 10.10.0.0/16 blocks.
I could be wrong, maybe new routing protocols have been developed to handle IPv6 routing out to network's edge, and maybe these protocols have been adopted as industry standards and are present in the firmware of all IPv6-capable hardware from the vendors that matter.(I don't imagine it will be a problem to deploy this stuff to 'software' routers)
I, along with many others, desperately want to be able to take advantage of the internet's fault-tolerance, but are prevented from doing so by CIDR etc. More addresses don't mean anything unless they are visible from more than one upstream point.
The internet has already reached its commercially supportable size limits, in terms of route-branches. It can still grow in terms of users, but becomes more and more vulnerable to destabilisation and control by the manipulation of single entities as it does.
IPv6 is a solution in search of a problem, and it won't be adopted, ever, unless there is either:
1) A wholesale replacement of router infrastructure coupled with a sudden burst of altruism from the corporations that own that infrastructure
2) A revolution on routing algorithms, resulting in the massive reduction of route-table storage and lookup cost - maybe quantum computing combined with a cheap and compatible framework for deploying QC devices
3) A widespread IPv6 tunneled network becomes prevalent - P2P networks are the pioneers of this type of thing, but it is unclear how such a network could perform, given the constraints imposed by the underlying IPv4 system, and given this situation it is quite likely that it will be more efficient to devise a new protocol than to do IP-within-IP.
Which do you think will happen first?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I never knew about this one. This finally looks like some serious reference grade quality audio app in the OSS dept. Cinelerra, Gimp, Sodipodi and now this. It's another patch closing a wide gap in open source and it seems a damn good one.
I'm more the 3D guy rather than a sound fiddler and helped buy Blender (www.blender.org) free, but this is so cool I'll think I'll donate a little here too.
If you've got a paypal account allready, spare an Euro, Dollar or two, it's a good deed for the day.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Woooops! Sorry!
That's the first time that happens to me. Gues it's those cool 'zillatabs that got me confused.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I first evaluated IPv6 at home, with a 28k8 modem
and a tunnel broker. That was over three years ago.
Since a long time, we're using it in production,
with no problems whatsoever - except for most sites
and mail servers, and some IRC servers (freenode.net
being the good exception) we still need NAT on
IPv4 to access them.
Good news is that my IPv6 provider has a mail
server with relaying enabled for its own netblocks.
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
Suprisingly enough, we already have rolled out IPv6 at my office. At the moment we mostly use it to ping the other 3 or 4 machines out there:P, but we also use it to send high quality streaming video over seas using Fujitsu Comet cards. So far we're routing over a slimmed down linux router though, so we don't really get all of the benefits.
I know for sure of at least one mobile phone company in the UK implementing pure IPV6 on its entire network, with the end aim of going pure ipv6 from themselves to their voice carriers etc.
ISP's will have to upgrade to IPV6 if they want to keep this huge business, and corporates will have to use IPV6 to use the new features that will be offered. How else is my mobile going to have its own permanent static ip address?
so yes.... this is happening now.
Hi!
The company I work for is quite a large telecom provider in austria and we are already running IPv6 paralell to the v4. The implementation of the new protocol was done about a year ago (plus/minus two month). within our network (behind the firewall) the server communicate via v6 but as far as i know they can also talk v4 for fallback reasons.
".Sig Stealer" was here
thanks for reminding me...i had almost forgotten :) *starts looking for dvorak linux patches*
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I've IPv6 enabled on all my machines, my upstream provider offers IPv6, and most of my former clients have IPv6 rolled out internally. It doesn't buy much for the moment, but I've noticed a large surge in interest over the last year in the techie community to learn all they can about IPv6. I know one guy who is staking his whole future on being the IPv6 guru.
Having been at several RIPE meetings and national Net Operator Group meetings, the biggest problem is getting peering and transit connections negotiated. IPv6 requires many things which were optional in IPv4, like multicast support end-to-end. Many of the clued ISPs and carriers in Europe now have IPv6 internally, and offer it to their clients. Larger ISPs are naturally lagging behind, because the techies have no voice in the business operations of big telcos, and the suits haven't heard enough to start asking their customers if they want it.
There was a chicken and egg problem, where ISPs weren't asking their customers about wanting IPv6, and customers not implementing it because it wasn't offered by IPSs. This has changed quite a bit in the last year, for two reasons. Big telcos rolling out 2.5G/3G mobile phone systems are using IPv6 internally, and smaller ISPs are looking for an edge in these lean times. My upstream ISP made a few announcements on internal mailing lists about offering IPv6 over IPv4 tunnels for testing purposes, and was overwhelmed by the response. They now have a few dedicated cisco routers, and allow a full IPv6 login without needing tunnels. The last I heard, almost 20% of their customers have taken up IPv6, mostly the businesses with clued techies and home experimenters. Other ISPs are now looking to roll out IPv6 soon, but the biggest problem is hammering out the peering/transit issues, not in the offer to customers.
The other delay is waiting for the IPv6 working groups at RIPE to get the registry database objects well defined and implemented, and a few other technical services like route servers and DNSSEC implemented. But the work is ongoing and will take a while until the backend issues get ironed out.
My bet is that, at least in Europe, there will be some mainstream buzz about IPv6 starting in 12 to 18 months. The early adopters like myself already run IPv6 alongside IPv4, most systems have it built in ready to go, and ISPs are getting up to speed.
the AC
Leaving for Barcelona friday
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
the porn industry needs it, it will sit on the back burner for another 10 years....
1) take over world
2) enslave humanity and use them as "energy cells"
3) wire each unit with IPv6
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I'm not too sure if windows XP supports ipv6 out of the box, but I know windows98, the most popularly used, doesnt. ISPs have routers that do support ipv6 but some have disabled it. I dont mind moving my LAN and servers to IPv6 if a threshold number of clients can access it, about half of all averare users, and we're not there yet. Unfortunately even for this switch, we have to wait for Microsofts move and wonder if they would introduce non-standard patented changes.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Our organization is mandating that no system without IPv6 compatibility can be purchased after the fall of this year. Two years after that, we switch.
From what I understand, ARIN is still going to charge an arm and a leg to register blocks to corporations and you have to meet a lot of guidelines.
I'm sure they have their reasons, but all I want is a small block of a few million IP addresses for free. Is that too much to ask?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Micrsoft is comitted to pushing IPv6.
They do have the influence to make this happen.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
ARIN should go ahead and make direct, permanent, portable, IPv6 space assignments to the companies that already have such assignments in the IPv4 space. Don't wait ... hand them out now. That way, when an ISP does decide they might try IPv6, there won't be any of the excuses about dealing with ARIN in getting address assignments.
BTW, NAT routers can be used to avoid having to enable IPv6 on everything in the LAN. One new NAT box and the whole LAN is on IPv6.
As for brushing up on IPv6, the April 2003 issue of ";login:", the magazine of USENIX and SAGE, has an excellent jump start article on understanding and deploying IPv6.
The need for IPv6 is in the future. Way in the future. But we can go ahead and use it today if we solve some issues (some technical, like routing, and some political). But taking address space back from early adopters is not going to encourage them to use IPv6 directly. Hopefully the universal reachability of it will.
I just hope spammers stay on IPv4.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Until there is a *viable* multihoming solution that actually works in the real world rather than on paper, my organization cannot even consider switching. We currently multihome on IPV4 but we cannot qualify for the requirements for provider-independent addresses for IPV6. Because of this, if we moved to IPV6, even if our upstreams supported it, we could not provide the same level of reliability that our IPV4 network has; we'd be tied to a single provider for provider-aggregated space in IPV6 which would not allow us to keep our IPV6 network visible if that one provider (or our link thereto) failed.
For those of you who think that multiple links to a provider will solve that problem, think again. How many times has a typo in a router configuration caused routing issues on a backbone?
Thus, when there is a multihoming solution that is workable for the smaller companies who need to it (and size != need to multihome in this market - you can't get big if you can't multihome), we cannot deploy it for critical services.
If it works in theory, try something else in practice.
You're asking a mostly American audiance about IPv6 but we're the ones with all the address space and no incentive to switch. I believe that US entities like IBM and MIT have class A addresses, which is obviously more than many countries have. If anyone does IPv6, it will be those with out much ipv4 address space.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
IPv6 is an essential part of our business. It's an easier option than a VPN. For example, if we needed to link two networks that both use numbers from 10.0.0.0, there could be a numbering clash.
With IPv6 we don't have the problem, and all the machines configure themselves as an added bonus. We just run a route advertising daemon somewhere on the network, load the appropriate modules on the computers, and we're away.
The services we provide to the outside world all talk IPv6 as well as IPv4, but at the moment that's not our primary motivation for supporting it.
If the IPv6 standard were to have come out earlier it would have had a better chance of people wanting to deploy it because of the apparent crisis in IPv4 address space exhaustion.
Now, with NAT, no one wants to muck around with their network infrastructure. You're talking about committing expert people's time and buying new hardware. Since March 2000, committing big bucks to IT has been considered uncool. Do more for less, etc.
No, IPv4 will have to show itself to be a real impediment (performance, security, complexity) in some way that IPv6 solves before IPv6 adoption will take off anywhere except places with more money and experts than most businesses.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
You look like a million dollars. All green and wrinkled.
Please take note that I'm far from knowledgeable about network routing and protocols.
But doesn't using encapsulated IPv6 inside IPv4 packets create an ugly overhead in packet sizes?
Adding that extra header of IPv4 on top of a IPv6 packet seems to me like a "less than smart" solution.
What did I miss?
Murphy(c)
WTF is that?
The idea the a system derived on technology today will still be in use 260 years from now scares me more than the thought of running out of addresses.
The limitations of the IP system are numerous and becoming more apparent everyday, more numbers are not gonna help that, zone locators are not gonna help either, unless you want to track people or connection.
The OS vendors are doing their part, but ISP's aren't bothering. There's no incentive to speak of yet.
It's going to take government incentives from a major country or three to make it happen - kind of like with digital TV.
Now digital TV is bad, because they apparently prevent recording shows. IPv6 is at least as worthy a cause, and merits the attention of a congresscritter who wants a bill to sponsor.
Sorry, I don't have $2500 a year to throw around just to play with IPv6, and larger companies don't drop $20k on it. Hell, the biggest problem with routing-table inflation is the ass-backwards policies that give everyone 14 micro-allocations rather then one that fits them. I've had to throw 6 routes out into the global tables rather then one convienent one.
"IP Address space not considered property" Well, duh. If it were property you woulnd't have to keep PAYING them over and over.
To be honest IPv6 is being driven outside the US, specifically in Japan and China, with a slightly later transition in Europe. This is because this is where IP address are not allocated proportionate to the needs of the population (tell me why a US company has 2 class A addresses allocated to it, and frankly a small university in Mass. as well)
The next thing to happen is IPv6 support will have to start being placed in ASICs in switch/router environments, today it isn't worth the transistor counts for the packet levels over the interfaces. When the IPv6 transition starts finally happening, you will see ASIC vendors putting support into their hardware, rather than software
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
When Yahoo and Google switch over to IPv6, we'll know it's time.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
IPV6 is not just a software upgrade. Take a look at how much processing is baked into the hardware in your infrastructure. Most routers, switches, IDS boxes, firewalls, etc. Anything that does DNS or even touches an IP address. You are going to have to replace ALOT of boxes on this one... I was thinking that the real way to re-ignite IT spending would be to mandate an upgrade to IPV6....