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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.
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?
Here are some helpful links:
IPv4 Policies
IPv6 Policies
Ya but does it have an evil bit?
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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?
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.
but the Parallel nature that I am proposing would fix things like Security, Spam, Porn,
Baby, if IPv4 porn is wrong, I don't want to be right.
What's your damage, Heather?
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
I'll expect to see IPv6 in wide deployment about the same time as the release of Duke Nukem Forever.
My company and I will give up IPv4 when you pry it from our cold dead hands.
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.
..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!
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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.
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
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.)
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.