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X Might Be Ready For IPV6
makapuf writes "According to linuxtoday, the X Consortium has published enhancement proposals to let X and IPV6 interoperate. This is surely a relief for the masses here that longed for X support for IPV6. Or the contrary? The proposal can be found here."
The only thing holding me back on IPv6 was X. Well, that's solved. IPv6 here I come!!!
I can think of what that will be like.
"Hey...X doesn't work with IPv6. I'll just tunnel it through an IPv6 ssh tunnel. Problem solved."
I guess I won't have to worry much about that day.
Besides, if you're using X over the net WITHOUT ssh (the only place where IPv6 is necessarily needed, since everywhere else you can use private addresses), what are you thinking?!!!
It's WAY to slow without compressing, which means sending it through some kind of tunnel. Personally, I think it's way too slow anyway. RealVNC beats it for bandwidth usage and it's just a framebuffer, even compared to dxpc and lbxproxy (at least that has been my observation).
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
You are so wrong, my presription glasses had to be wiped clean.
The purpose of IPv6 is: fix some flaws within the design of IPv4 and expand network addressing.
If you think IPv6 is a waste of time, you wait when the global networks start using IPv6 for the same strengths they needed and IPv4 did not provide.
If you think IPv6 is a waste of time, you wait when you need an IPv6 X client to connect to your server and VPN is not an option.
If you think IPv6 is a waste of time, you wait when even streaming media or realtime data requires IPv6.
LOOK: IPv6 has strengths that IPv4 doesn't have and never will be able to have, with exception to workarounds on the application layer. Don't knock IPv6, it is a Good Thing(TM).
IPv6 support for X seems to be a logical move, since the only way IPv6 would be embraced by the masses would be the support by the applications. After all, it takes but a few changes to the network layer socket code for the different packet structure.
:1, etc) with the IPv6 address, since both IPv6 and the screen number uses the colon (:) separator.
:1 would be
However, the applications layer is important as well. For example, the X team has to consider changing XDM-AUTHORIZATION-1 to XDM-AUTHORIZATION-2 since the earlier could not support the longer packet structure.
Another change of mindset for X users that is required is the way of specifying the display number (:0,
Thus, the traditional way of denoting 2003:1080:1111:4034:1212:3fdb:1123:0001 with screen
2003:1080:1111:4034:1212:3fdb:1123:0001:1 !!
For the clients, the X team has suggested the use of strrchr or rindex in their code so as to maintain compability.
For the human users, we need a DNS (most probably, since the address is too long to remember), or, well, we can all use an extra octet in the address, can we?
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First on the list is accessing servers behind a NAT. Wouldn't you like to connect directly to the multiple Linux boxes behind your NAT box without having to first log into the NAT and out again, or having to set up ad-hoc port forwarding kludges? Configure 6to4 on your NAT (easy if it's a Linux box) and you can establish a direct logical end-to-end IPv6 ssh connection even if the path in the middle is IPv4 only. Works great for me. I have been maintaining my parents' network in exactly this fashion for some time now.
Also on the list is VoIP. Look at all the hassles involved in running H323 from behind a NAT. (SIP may be more NAT-friendly, I haven't investigated it yet.) If only H323 supported IPv6, life would be so much easier.
But the real killer app for IPv6 will be cell phones. If cell phones are to implement true VoIP, there is simply no alternative to IPv6 because there are simply far too many cell phones in the world for the number of available IPv4 addresses.
Basically, IPv6 is all about wiping out the NAT plague and restoring the end-to-end model that originally made the Internet great. That's exactly opposite to the claim you make in your subject line. If you don't use NATs, or if you're unimaginative enough to think that you'll never need to do what they make difficult or impossible, then you probably won't be excited by IPv6. But eventually you'll probably discover why IPv6 is inevitable, even though it will have to coexist with IPv4 for a very long time.
It might not detect any of my mouse buttons, but it sure as hell can address 2^128 nodes!