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Pentagon Wants IPv6 by 2008
anzha writes "The constant question for 'when' for IPv6 keeps wandering across good ole /. It seems that the Pentagon has decided to put a foot down and put a deadline on their dark and dangerous portion of the net."
In Denmark and I guess in rest of Europe it is getting harder and harder to get a static IPv4 address at your ISP. All xDSL "allways on" connections are put behind NAT. and NAT is not a good thing if you like end to end connectivity.
As of IPv6 I can run it through a tunnel, but his requires a static IPv4 address, so IPv6 for end users is first realistic when your ISP upgrades.
Right now I am behind a 1:1 NAT at home but this will change soon accoring to my ISP. They will provide me with more local adresses (so you can add your toaster) at the cost of a static address.
So goodbye IPv6 tunnel, and services at home.
/Andreas Bach Aaen
It's nigh trivial to set up. However, the public gateways listed aren't terribly reliable. Don't plan on running useful servers behind a public 6to4 gateway. It is very useful for testing programs.
The protocols in IPSEC are insanely complicated, as well. There will be security-destroying bugs for quite some time. Plus, most users will hose it. How often do users check the certificate authority of certs presented through web browsers? If users have to make decisions on trust all the time, they'll make trivial ones.
So the encryption aspects will likely come later, and it won't be completely transparent in many situations. Having a future path to secure communications is great, but IPv6 doesn't translate into a huge security benefit over SSH right now. In a tightly controlled environment and in network cores, you can use IPSEC now, but many people believe the network edges will consist primarily of ad-hoc networks. Those induce really strange trust relationships, not all of which have been fully explored.
Hey! That's *exactly* what cisco want! A reason to sell router upgrades to customers!
-Dom
A portable class C isn't worth the hassle that comes with trying to actually use it. Even if you find an ISP to route it (which shouldn't be hard), the problem is that several large network operators refuse to accept rouutes for networks that small. Verio is the best example of this. So you end up being unreachable from portions of the internet, which sort of defeats the purpose of being on the internet.
/16 range and I thought it was the coolest thing to have a "B" with only 2000 machines. Now I know better.
The other problem with portable addresses is that is means a mess in the routing tables. Getting a block from your ISP means that they can aggregate your route with the routes of their other customers and then they need only advertise one summary route for a large group of networks.
One of the things they got right when they designed IPv6 was to emphasize that small networks are connected to larger networks, which are connected to very large networks, which in turn interconnect to the other very large networks. The IP addressing scheme should reflect that and emphasize the need for the IP addreses to match the network topology (small IP block fits into a larger block upstream, and son on). This allows for easy summarization of routes.
The only exception to this rule is for people or organizations that need multiple connections to different providers and even then there are ways to mitigate the need to advertise multiple routes (Cisco has an excellent white paper on this issues).
The last company I worked for had a portable
You are more likely to be pitched about Voice over IP than IPv6 from a vendor salesperson.
I'm responsible for product support of a major networking vendor, across Europe, Middle East, Africa, & India (EMAI).
plcurechax is correct--while I'm wholly on the post-sales side of the vendor equation, all our future plans revolve around VOIP solutions, with nary a mention of IPv6. I've plugged I2, IPv6, Linux support for our client software, etc. to those in engineering who would listen, but ultimately the market (and by extention, our products) are driven by what the customer requests. NAT, and the multitude of other options to alleviate the address allocation crunch, make IPv6's benefits secondary concerns to QOS, price per port, VOIP, redundancy, etc., etc.
End result? Don't expect to see IPv6 deployed in EMAI or the US in the immediate future. It's simply not on customer's radar. Not to mention most network admins are so poor in knowledge about networking fundamentals, that the leap to IPv6 won't happen for a long time yet.
How much time you give people there will always be people who will not be ready for the change. I say that the US government follows Japan's example. because it will increase it jobs and the economy. But hey let us see what what happens. In the next few years.
It's almost impossible to get your own IP range these days. Almost everyone leases them off an upstream ISP.
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enterfornone - logging in for a change
A Net Engineer friend of mine claims that Cisco are reluctant to support IPV6 because the amount of memory required to hold the routing tables for IPV6 is huge. Until memory prices come down it won't be worthwhile implementing it in routers (especially since there is little demand, chicken and egg problem).
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enterfornone - logging in for a change
It's fairly easy to see that they will run out in a few years. /8s left unallocated.
/8s so they must have a need.
This document lists the current allocations. There are not too many
There are a few allocated to large corporations that probably don't need that many addresses though.
RIPE (Europe) were just allocated another two
I think Microsoft is waiting for when will the various domain registrars (e.g., Network Solutions) start supporting IPv6 addresses on a large scale.
Once that happens, don't be surprised that Microsoft will offer an update for Windows 98/ME/2000/XP that will change the network support to include IPv6 addresses.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Unless ARIN has changed policy very recently, they charge an arm, a leg, and your neck to get an address block.
I think you hit the nail on the head there. IPv6 won't be a reality until Microsoft's implementation is no longer experimental, and is actually usable.
Sad, but true.
domc
There is an IETF working group with a charter for this: Site Multihoming in IPv6 (multi6)
cjs
The world's most portable OS: http://www.netbsd.org.
In Asia, the situation is pretty bad, and has been for a while. It's extremely difficult to get more than a handful of IP addresses from your ISP, and NAT is more common than in the US. This is one of the reasons why folks in Japan are further ahead with IPv6.
IIJ has been offering IPv6 service (not tunnelled over IPv4) for a while, and some vendors in the US (such as Panix in NYC, I believe) are also starting to offer this.
The world's most portable OS: http://www.netbsd.org.
I agree, the question shouldn't be "Why change" but "Why NOT change?"
To that end, at the NOC of the Academic Insitution I work for as a net/sys admin, we just made it an informal requirement that anything new being setup (either a new service, or upgrading of an existing one) should be IPv6 capable. Simple as that. Sure, it does restrict your choices a bit, but the impact was minimal to us since we use BSD for the majority of our services.
It's been a few months now, and *all* the basic services that we maintain (primary & secondary DNS & MX, http/ftp proxy, a cluster of mailbox hosts hidden behind a POP3/IMAP4 redirector, a large FTP archive and all our web pages) are IPv6 capable. I really like the fact that in all our hosts, all the services are binded to both IPv6 and IPv4 sockets and have both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses pointing to them via DNS.
The result is that, since I use FreeBSD at my workstation, like many other colleagues, we only use IPv4 for connections outside our network.
Granted, we're currently using an extra router and tunnels for IPv6, but it's only a matter of time until we upgrade our border router to handle IPv6 and get rid of the tunnel and speak IPv6 with the backbone we peer with.
I believe that the situation is similar in other countries too - once again it is the Academia that will lead the way, just like it did with IPv4. This is nor surprising. If you ask me *WHY* we converted to IPv6, I cannot give you an answer. Really, there's no answer. We just *DID*. This is not the kind of answer that management of a corporate entity likes to hear from their engineers, especially when it restricts choices somewhat and requires extra work to iron out bugs and problems, and all that for apparently no reason (as far as THEY are concerned).
I also get the impression that the shortage of IPv4 addresses and the difficulty one faces when seeking an allocation, is a status that many corporate entities actually *LIKE*.
This is exactly why IPv6 currently sucks. There's almost no benefit to it unless you can get portable space. And the allocation process for IPv6 is even more difficult than for IPv4. Sure you can get a lot more numbers ... if you can get anything at all. The problem is you can't even get portable address space.
I'd like to try out IPv6, probably using tunneling for now. But I want to get the address space NOW that I will keep FOR ALL TIME. They are not letting that happen. And that is what I think will be the biggest roadblock to IPv6 acceptance.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
So can I get my portable life-time IPv6 allocation from NTT?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The IPv4 shortage has many dire implications. I would hope that I have a right to have my personal mail server and my personal web server and ftp server. I feel quite uncomfortable with my personal stuff being kept anywhere outside my locked house. With current IPv4 is is not always possible. Assingning dynamic IP became the norm and static IP are either unbearably expensive, or even prohibited in residential areas.
Owners of the static IP ranges seem to be the king of internet universe, that can dictate price, conditions and force you to run your server off their premisses (for a fee).
Can somebody post details, how bad can be the censorship implications ov IPv6? I think, that the contents tags ccould be actually bogus, so that contents-based censorship might become ineffective.
How difficult would it be to stop a packets on the border? How many paths out of the country are there?
Does anyone know which operating system support IPv6, or have patches to provide IPv6 support? This is an important factor, along with software expects a non-IPv6 IP address. Unless the OS support and application support is there, I can expect a lot of problems.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
And you know what?
:(((
:) Never wanna miss another oppurtunity like that again!
I want to kill myself.
I remember about ~8 years ago, i was reading about network connectivity and stuff, and it said "do not just pick IP numbers out of thin air. Email xx@xx to request your own IP block". (it was email, the web didn't really exist back then, so there was no website to go to for IPs)
I could have actually gotten my own Class C or whatever, free, back then.
*sighs*.
I'd kill for that now, i really would.
Will IPv6 ip's be given out free? How much are they in the Australia region?
I just wanna get a block now, i wanna get in early on things now
BTW, IPv6 network connectivity works *perfectly* between FreeBSD, OpenBSD (and Linux, according to a friend that uses it). I haven't got it to work in NT4 or Win2k yet, but i haven't tried IPv6 in NT for a few years now. (The Microsoft Research website has an 'experimental' research IPv6 stack)
D.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
That is sad :(
Fortunately, MS said Windows Whistler/XP/NT6.0(NT5.1?) will contain full IPv6 capabilities.
So we might finally make some progress with IPv6 adoption....
I still wanna know where i can get public static IPv6 ips.
D.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
he end user needs only to have v4 nat happen - and have the v4 to v6 translation happen upstream. so - the end user has a 10.x private - which goes upstream to his isp, the isp has v6 peering relationships and has a block of legal v4 classes assigned to them. keep v6 out at the core backbone level for as long as possible - but each tier 1-3 has a certain v4 and v6 blocks that they own - and dole them out as needed v4 first.
This sounds like the "end user" would not be able to have a "real" IP address for running things such as a Web server...
My journal has hot
just fill in the nice form and it's yours.
Not to mention most network admins are so poor in knowledge about networking fundamentals, that the leap to IPv6 won't happen for a long time yet.
MOST. Some admins are actually quite knowledgeable. Kids, study up on your IPv6 NOW and you'll have a big advantage.
Yup. Supporting IPv6 is a good thing. IIJ is setting a good example by offering IPv6. I checked the American branch of IIJ to see if they offer it in the states, but it seems that they don't. Their rates are hideously expensive, too. Oh well.
Here's one guy's experience setting up a tunnel to the 6bone with OpenBSD. By doing it this way you get a connection the IPv6 backbone and you can run IPv6 in your local network without needing IPv6 services from your ISP.
Note that KAME is for BSD. If you really want Linux, try USAGI.
Wow. I got a reply from IIJ-America within 30 minutes.
The prices are out of my league for a simple home ADSL hookup, but I'm pretty impressed with their response time.
> First of all, thank you very much for requesting the
> DSL information. For your location, we can provide SDSL(1Mbps/1Mbps).
> For the price is below, installation(Including Router):
> 1yr. $1020, 2yr. $660, or 3yr. $480
> Monthly charge = $444.
>
> Regarding IPv6, please Contact us either phone at
> XXX-XXX-XXXX or e-mail at info@XXXXX.com. Thank you.
> Thank you for contacting us. Sincerely,
> ===================Shigeharu Miyazaki
Shortly after getting that message, a rolling blackout in California took out an m-l.net router and half of the 'net vanished for about an hour for me. Doh!
The Napster of IPv6 is the fact that its multicast native. Multicast will let anyone be able to stream live multimedia to an unlimited number of end users. In my opinion this is the most important feature of ipv6.
Users will be limited by the courage of hosting companies and the like. If I could (and I can't) get my home cable modem to run "lronhubbardisanalienslugmonster.com", I have the choice to criticize Scientology with that site. If the end user loses all hope of running their own services, then his freedom of speech will be limited by the most cowardly tendencies of hosting providers. Great, cable companies and Geocities will be the arbiters of content. Blech.
How does IPv6 fit into this? It's critical! Until the core internet becomes completely IPv6, the holders of addresses currently - ISPs, generally speaking - hold the limiting property for the medium. I'm guessing that as addresses become scarcer, and therefore more valuable, the ISPs find LESS incentive to upgrade.
It also looks like a truly portable address under IPv6 - say, tacocellphone.slashdot.org - has to rely on dynamic DNS with VERY low refresh...
Now let's look at the home user in the future. People on mass broadband - the type with dynamic addresses, or the type not meant for "real" use - your basic peon connectivity - might be the first to be stuffed behind IPv6. Their ISP maintains external v4, but of course you can't really be reached at home from pure non-upgraded v4 customers. If this happens, then some whole new layer of peer-to-peer services become critical.
But I can't see how Junior can run a quake server under this scenario, so we've got problems. On the other hand, I'm sure Time Warner would love for the net to become a passive medium, but for the sake of the argument, let's assume that they can't go v6 like this. Now we're stuck with v4 addresses becoming like broadcast licenses. Increasing censorship, high cost prevents newcomers, amateurs, hobbyists from participating, so the internet, while it has more "channels" than cable ever will not die, it will just become more and more boring, as the massive amount of content becomes more and more scrutinized.
The only way out that I see, of course, is smaller ISPs - how are they going to get you connected? Some kind of high-speed wireless, large cities only, I'm guessing. But the point is, the transition path might be that as v4 begins to suck, some customers will jump ship to v6 ISPs. They will accept becoming client-only for v4 net in exchange for greater freedom - v6 ISPs won't be tracking your P2P actions and snitching the way TimeWarner probably will, eventually. They won't care all that much what people do, it will just be a rebirth of mom-and-pop ISPs. The situation will be alleviated somewhat by application-aware routers that take a v4 address, look at the application layer - Host: headers, for example, and translate into v6 addresses. Lots more "port 80 tunneling" in that future. But eventually, the freedom to occupy space (all the addresses you can eat), crazy hobbyist content, special interest IPv6 ISPs, etc
So what happens? My guess is that Japan will have the first large-scale version of the v6 ISPs. They will figure "whatever, v4 internet is mostly english. If we all switch to v6, we can access Japanese content, good enough." Their government won't be terrorized, as ours is, by claims of too much government interference, so they will create incentives. The US may stay IPv4 for a long time, trying to use the v4 address privilege to maintain an aristocracy of content production.
Of course, all of this supposes a migration of the hip to v6 to create enough "cool" for the scenario to go to completion.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
No-one in the States, no, because the States has grabbed more than half of the world total. Plenty of people in East Asia and Africa, because they came late to the table and got hardly any. There are more people in China alone than there are addressable IPv4 addresses.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Or perhaps IPv6 integrated into the current desktop OSes. Wait, isn't it already (Windows 2000, Linux, OS X)?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Maybe IPv6 isn't widely deployed because of the lack of compatible applications. Many programmers don't make a step to have their apps work with IPv6.
I've written a french IPv6 programming HOWTO to help these people port IPv4-only apps to IPv6.
IPv6 is something really worth to look at.
{{.sig}}
I have been wanting to try it too - but simply couldn't get past the setup stage with the howtos (I am probably missing some fundimental knowledge here, but if a fulltime Firewall/LAN technician for a multinational has trouble setting it up, what chance does a normal user have?)
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-=DaveHowe=-
Assume you had a portable 'B' which you "own" from the early days.
if you hand back part of that, then you make routing difficulties for yourself. that is why they recommend you hand back the whole block, and accept a replacement (smaller) block.
The problem is, even after you have pushed though the renumbering, got everything working, and are happy.. the rules have changed. The new block you get will not be portable, and you will not own it - you will be allocated it which makes a difference. For a large company, it does not make sense to do the "right thing" and hand back an address range you are using less than half of, only to find you are given back something less flexable, with routing and multihoming issues, and expected to go cap in hand back to them if you need another class C in the future (and are probably turned down as you already have enough if you NATted them into your existing range)
under V6, things are worse - you have no rights at all in your IP range, to the point you can be asked to renumber into another range at any time if it makes routing easier. even leaving aside the chaos that will cause in the DNS, for a large organisation the renumbering alone could work out very expensive indeed... so I imagine most will try to hold onto their legacy V4 subnets until they are forced to give them up.
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-=DaveHowe=-
The new DNS may well happen - one of the failings of the current system is that it does not support non american-english characters; while from certain points of view this is fine (after all, if you can't type an URL on your machine, how many hits will they get?) support for the japanese charset in email and webpages has been standard in IE/OE for some time. The most obvious solution to this (encoding DNS names in non-US as the unicode multi-char representation, as web pages can do has been *PATENTED* in the us. I am sure I don't have to start the usual stupid-us-patents thread again though...
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-=DaveHowe=-
It is common practice for companies to hide an entire RFC1918 subnet behind a small number (8 or 16) of internet addresses. One or more of those will be allocated to internal addresses (so if your webserver (say) is 192.168.1.2 but your external webserver address is 200.100.50.5, then packets both ways will be rewritten to hide the internal address behind the externally visible one)
Given how large the available IP address range is for V6 (the *minimum* allocation would be a class B by the old standards) There is no reason you can't have a 1:1 mapping from IPV6 external addresses to internal V4 addresses; further, you probably will want to static-map the lower two bytes of your 1918 to that address range rather than the recommended (which is the MAC of the card) due to the fact that swapping out a faulty network card would then force-renumber your webserver to a different V6 IP address.....
I fully expect to see Hybrid mode firewalls in the near future, which in addition to mapping the small number of externally visible V4 addresses to Internal hosts, also map V6 (autotunnelling to the ISP) for both internal hosts and outbound browsing traffic.
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-=DaveHowe=-
Contrast this with IPv6 where even "dynamic" IP assignments (as you point out) are very likely to have a static component -- some bits to identify your userid. Mask out the appropriate bits, and anybody will be able to track you. Employers, insurers, ex-spouses, marketers, etc.
Myself I don't much like IPv6. 'Way too much overhead with 128 bit addresses. That's 24 extra bytes per packet, ~5%. Also a significant reduction in anonymity (fixed IPs vs current dynamic IPs).
I'm also not convinced that IPv6 will solve real (vs imagined) problems or bring compelling new features. The current IPv4 routers seem to be able to keep up, and if they have trouble, they should drop straggling routes (addrs away from their heirarchy). Most of the current Inet problems are more related to poor software (DNS, SMTP). QoS sounds like a neat feature, but I doubt it will be widespread because of the difficulty of cost charging.
As a security dork, I feel the need to point out something you all are forgetting...
IPsec is a part of the IPv6 standard, meaning when we all move to IPv6, all traffic will be encrypted, not just specific VPN links like we do now.. That's a HUGE benefit, at least in my eyes...
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
I'm frankly getting sick of all of this IPv6 hype. With NAT, BGP and classless routing protocols, IPv4 still has plenty of life left in it. The change to IPv6 isn't going to happen soon, and it doesn't need to. Besides, if you really want to run IPv6 right now, just to prove that you are so much r3373r than your sys-admin buddies, go ahead and run it, and tunnel it through IPv4. It's perfectly feasible, and probably what early-adopters of IPv6 are going to have to do anyways, because as far as I know, there isn't a single backbone provider who is even seriously discussing implementing IPv6 in their network. We have loads of IPv4 space left, the IPv4 network that we're all using to post on this great site is obviously working quite well, and a load of new address space isn't going to help the internet in any really useful way. IPv6 is going to be a whole lot of work, a lot of hassles, a lot of connection problems, and with little short-term gains. Everyone always preaches not to upgrade your kernel if there isn't anything you're going to gain from it, so why upgrade your logical network addresses if it's not going to provide better service to you? IPv6 will come, but not until we need it to.
//Phizzy
"Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing," -- Former CIA chief James Woolsey, referring to Echelon
Interestingly enough, the data center for NTT Communications ( a subsidiary of Japan's massive telco, NTT) is ready to roll with IPv6. Apparently they are the first and only data center capable of this. A sign of the times when a slow moving behemouth like NTT can be so forward thinking. Must be the influence of DoCoMo.
... But IPv6 won't be widely deployed until the consumer version of Windows supports it, and can transparently proxy for the old Windows apps that don't understand it. Until BillyBobWinUser can be assigned a IPv6 address and still play EverCrack, it's not going to happen.
.Net?
Question for the audience: does DirectPlay support IPv6? Does
www.eFax.com are spammers
Take a look at my website for a description on how to have IPv4 clients be put on an IPv6 network. I just finished research on it and it's not completely finished, but the base idea is there. All you need to do is translate at a gateway. On the inside looking out it looks like IPv4 and on the outside looking in it looks like IPv6.
Most of this is to do with the Local-IR requests which fail (at least at RIPE) because you need three separate peers before they'll even consider it.
Then of course your upstream should be allocating from their PA block anyway. And since most upstreams aren't allocating IPv6 to end users...
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Smegma.
I think an important factor here is that Microsoft isn't fully supporting IPv6 in its 9x or NT operating systems. I don't think we will see companies migrating over until MS gives it the green flag.
Don
Just this weekend a friend of mine (John) mentioned that his Co-Location provider was charging $4/year per IP address. Not much, on the surface, but this means that the class C that Curt got permanently assigned for free a decade ago is would cost John $1K/year now.
In 1992, the University of British Columbia department of Computer Science got it's own Class "B" range assigned (the UBC, generally, already had at least one "B" range assigned to it). This was for a network of, maybe, 400 machines. I challenge you to find me someone who's been assigned a class B in the last few years for as few as 1000 machines. In some cases, a 1000 machine network might only get one or two class 'b' blocks and be expected to NAT most of their machines through a firewall. "I mean, you don't really need all of those addresses, do you?"
So, yeah, I do think that IP addresses are getting scarcer these days.
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Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Ahh...
* 2001-05-09 19:38:06 USA lags behind in IPv6 deployment (articles,internet) (rejected)
I tried to post this same story a few weeks ago, about how the USA is falling behind in the deployment of IPv6. Basically, the reason for this is that the USA has got the lion's share of existing IPv4 addresses, so the incentive to convert has not been as high. So, we're letting ourselves lag behind, as usual. It will be sad when everyone else is speaking IPv6 and we're still stuck behind 10.x.x.x NAT's...
Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
Microsoft, or *shudder* AOL. MS's "experimental" IPv6 stack, standard in Windows XP, works quite well for me. Experimental doesn't mean unusable...
AOL though, they have the money to buy up as many IPv4 addresses they may ever need...
I read that list posted elsewhere, I guess Stanford recently gave back 36/8, and other /8's had been given back. But there are I believe more than 50 /8's still unallocated, and I don't think anyone but RIPE, APNIC, and ARIN can get them anymore.
I use IPv6 with a tunnel to the 6bone. My web and email servers, as well as others, are at this moment IPv6 ready. Here is a very good site for IPv6 information: hs247.com.
you have to justify it or else cop for a virtual
.oO0Oo.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
That should push availability up considerably.
rather than making themselves incompatible with the rest of INTERNET I don't really see what are they trying to achieve. Oh yeah, shooting themselves in a foot. Of course.
Hopefully they'll get it fully integrated in, like IPv4 for the final release. I'm running a beta of XP (NT5.1, not 6.0 :) right now, and to install IPv6, you run "ipv6 install" from the commandline. If you want to configure static addresses and routes, you do it from the commandline too. But it does work... I got to see the Dancing KAME from IE6.0 :)
I still wanna know where i can get public static IPv6 ips.
http://ipv6tb.he.net runs a tunnel broker and gives out /64 blocks. I've got 3ffe:1200:3028:81e7::/64, which gives me 2^64, or 18446744073709551616 addresses :)
If this network is sucessfully deployed (think 2002 to 2004), it should give IPv6 a huge shot in the arm.
We've been hearing stories for a while now (3 years? longer?) that IPv4 addresses in certain ranges will be running out. Has anyone actually had any problems getting one. Does anyone have a public IPv6 address yet.
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
For a uni it could well be worth the effort to migrate, after all, managing your network should become easier. Furthermore it would be a nice opportunity to teach students something about networks. Sure, it could be costly if routers have to be replaced because they don't support IPv6 yet (I don't know about that), but there will be some government fundings, no doubt. And if more and more IPv6-clouds appear, the threshold for others to migrate will become smaller and smaller.
I personally would welcome IPv6 with open arms. Not a chance here to get a decent connection to the Internet without some form of NAT, which means you can't run most services you'd like to.
Woefdram, l'apprenti sorcier
Japan jumps to IPv6, Japan create a new DNS sceme, everyone jumps to the new DNS and Japan Internet. Corparations get fair treatment (and MS gets to own .com version of the new DNS sceme and impemet thier entire .net crap) Current internet dies becosue the new internet supports 1GB bandwith per user, and static IP. US cries becouse no one is using the current internet...
And then I wake up.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
I've been reading through the FAQs but can't find any where to register my own set of E-Class(not C-Class since) IP addresses. Is there a particluar FAQ, RFQ, or website I should look for? Is there a particular organization I should go to?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
I have wanted to try out IPv6 on my LAN, but not sure it will cause more problems. I know few applications can handle it, and how backwords comptiable is it ? Since all of these IPs are behind a firewall, it won't make that much of a difference.
I think its great that they have created a deadline. I think more places in tyhe world should do the same. Its kind of everyone else is waiting for everyone to start.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Cisco do have IPv6 images availible but yeap, you're correct there are no general deployment images with IPv6 support.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
IPv6 is not the tool for giving us more NATed 10.x.x.x networks. Users will not benefit from IPv6 if it's only used as backbone technology and the endpoints of communication keep calling eachother 32bit names. What's the advantage of having bazillion addresses free for everyone if you can't enter them into your latest first person shooting game? Don't let people mislead you: The key for quick migration is not backbone providers making a start. It isn't some remote tunnel possibility either. It's IPv6 "Napster" which will do the trick.
Follow the link in the original story where the link says 'available for allocation'.
Or just click here.
And so it goes.
This is from the IPV6 Policy Document:
So, for example, someone could force all of Japan to change their IPv6 addresses for "administrative reasons"? I suspect this could get very political; imagine a governing agency of the IPv6 addresses wanted to sock it to a given area of responsibility.
Or perhaps I'm not reading this correctly.
And so it goes.
Right - also the point i was trying to make is that this allows for companies to adopt v6 slower - due to the fact that if they have old firewalls/equipment - they would not need to revamp or replace any of thier equipment or software in a hurried fashion. they would only need to if they planned on having V6 addys - which not all companies need. specially if they are less than 254 nodes.
well kinda - but here is what needs to happen for widespread adoption of v6:
;) and would give a lot of experience to all people. and could be promoted as national v4 to v6 implementation month etc... it is about time we had such a large scale project anyway - for community purposes.... ??????
:)
the major backbone providers need to adopt v6 - not the end user. the reason is as follows:
the model is this: tier 1-3 providers need to implement v6 on a backbone level - which will allow for major availability in the v6 arena when it comes to allocation.
the end user needs only to have v4 nat happen - and have the v4 to v6 translation happen upstream. so - the end user has a 10.x private - which goes upstream to his isp, the isp has v6 peering relationships and has a block of legal v4 classes assigned to them. keep v6 out at the core backbone level for as long as possible - but each tier 1-3 has a certain v4 and v6 blocks that they own - and dole them out as needed v4 first.
this allows for a "trickle down" approach to adoption of addy's in the new space.
then as the net grows - you can still use v4 and v6 so as to maintain layers of complexity.
re-allocate all v4 addys as class C.
then as an end user client you only have a C net at best to allocate for dmz/external addy's - and make it semi-manditory that companies implement nat on a 10.x net. this will allow for almost unlimited flexibility in the corp - and very very flex environs for the ISP from 3 to 1 tiers.
if i am wrong let me know - it is just an idea - what do you guys think.
however I will admit that it will require a large renumbering of the net - but I as an admin have no complaints about incurring such a change - as it would be a fun project (to delegate
let me know. I still will like it no matter what anyone says
It's probably most dependant on Router manufacturers. IPv6 addressing is backward compatible, however the internals of the packats make for certain incompatibilities that would need to be handled internally to the routers. Some manufacturers are developing smarter routers but not even these are setup to handle IPv6 yet as far as I know...
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
So I like some of the ideas behind ipv6, but at the same time I dont like other things. I personaly see why evently we need to leave dotted quad, but the ability to censor seems to be beyond reason. To be able to stop a packet at the border, to be able to tell the type of media being transmited, to be able to cap users bandwidth useage, etc.
I have heard that one of the reasons that people cant get ipv6 out there fast enough is because of companys like cisco and others not having ipv6 supported well as of yet, is this true?
If its not, why is it taking so long?
What are the bennifits to staying with dotted quad?
Where is a good lamens description of ipv6?
The Lottery:
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
thank god someone's finally taking the initiative, even if it is the baby-killers at the pentagon :P
For those not in the know, here is a brief article Explaining the benefits of IPV6.
I'm not Seth.
Won't we need IPv7 by then?
Before IPv6 can be deployed the vendors of the various routers etc. of hte internet will have to get fully tested and come in to line. Cisco, Nortel, Juniper et al must first finnish testing IPv6 on the hardware that currently creates the backbone of the new protocol.
While it is good to see someone pushing for this, it really will take the efforts of all major networking companies to make IPv6 a reality.
it is better to light a flame thrower than curse the darkness. -Terry Pratchett Men at Arms
Didn't the government want us to be totally metric by now also?
Gee, Thats around the time My contract is up... I wonder if I can get a bigger SRB becuase I've actually heard of IPv6? Because almost nobody in the ADP department has, I can guarentee you that...
Ummm, err, say what, now?
You do realize that IPv6 offers something like an IP address for every square centremetre of ground on the planet, right?
I'm not Seth.
Maybe the white house could push this through.
BTW does Bush even know what IPv6?
I called up one of my customers ISP's for support and asked if they support IPv4 and they said no.
If the Pentagon takes the initative and starts using IPv6, soon the rest of the US government should follow suit, then companies, corporations, and then the rest of the world.
:p
Which is a good thing, I suppose. Or does IPv6 have some evil bit that can track down Saddam?
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
Previously discussed... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/22/001221 9
Governments have set deadlines for turning off analogue TV, but it doesn't mean that will happen either.
IPv6 has billions and billions of IPs, can't "they" just hand out tons more free IPs to the networks already operating if they move to IPv6?
I guess it doesn't reflect that well on mankind that we display the most ingenuity and brilliance when it comes to finding ways of beating each other into a pulp, or trying to prevent the others to do the same for us.
But then again, it's biologically understandable: intelligence is the mean by which groups of human were succesful in preserving food supply, territory, mates from competitors.
-- MG
Address space is going so fast by 2008 the question wont be "What is your ip address?" it will be "Do you have an ip address?"
Anyway, I suppose the reason they are committing to use of IPv6 is because of security. Both security and quality of service were mentioned as reasons they were making the switch, but I suspect that the former has more to do with it. But I suppose that they have been securing their communications, maybe with IPsec or with any other similar method. I don't know as much about the Pentagon's communications. It'd be interesting to find out about them.
what exactly would an ipv6 whatever IP actually look like compared to the normal 1.2.3.4 i see these days.
From industry (namely the auto), you can already see transitions from standard to metric. It's just more cost effective to move to metric in internation trade and industry. As for a complete transition, I doubt it will ever happend in my lifetime (i'm 27).
Life is not for the lazy.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the Defense Dept. help develop the current IPv4 system decades ago? If so, they've (the Pentagon) had a part in the Internet for a long whiles now.
"I don't know as much about the Pentagon's communications. It'd be interesting to find out about them."
North Korea agrees with you.
There's also a write up of this over at wired news.
They should force release UNUSED static IPs. Use them or loose them. There is so many holes in the current allocations that are unused its a joke.
The only problem with this Troll is that I agree, now I hope I'm not modded down for thinking differently, I just have to wonder what they actually DO for us rather than make porn and spam which we can do ourself, I hope someone can respond to this and enlighten me instead of making it a -1, Troll.
Bush knows what IPv6 is just like Gore invented the Internet.
Life is not for the lazy.
I think this is a good idea. After all, they created the internet, so I'd be inclined to trust the DoD on this. Moreover, the milirary is moving to be a more and more integrated organization. The battlefield is quite rapidly becoming wired, or unwired.
Recently in one of our training excercise out in the California desert, every soldier, truck, helicopter, etc. was connected in a very integrated and dynamic network which allowed the commanding officers to witness the mock battle in real time, seeing which forces were where, and how to adapt to a changing situation extremely quickly.
In military theory, and well in any competitive environment, the goal is to gather information, assess the situation, decide on a course of action, and execute that decision. Whoever can complete this loop or cycle first has the clear advantage. By connecting everyone on the battlefield so that they can gather and pass on information as fast as possible is clearly a necessary step for this to work.
So, if all our soldiers need to be connected to the information infrastructure, it is clear that this will be accomplished with information technology. And how else to do this? Well, over cheap, abundant, and "easy" to configure systems. And what do these systems use as an underlying framework?
IP addressed based systems. (right? im a soldier, not a network architect, so my appologies if i am wrong)
So, from the military's standpoint, it would be a good idea to have as many IP addresses as possible. They will sure need them when there are hundreds of thousands/millions/billions of information nodes dispersed across the battlefield of the not too distant future.
"intelligence is the mean by which groups of human were succesful in preserving food supply, territory,"
Keep out of my room, and your hands off my ding-dongs!
"mates from competitors."
If that's true? Then why is it the guys best friend that ends up sleeping with the woman?
When did the pentagon ever become an authority with the Internet?
My guess would be right about the time they first bankrolled the damn thing.
The name DARPA ring a bell? Give you a clue, the D stands for a word that rhymes with de fence, as in "de fence over dere needs to be painted."
Nimrod
Hey! I resent that!
A. Gore
> one has to admit that they are great motive forces for technological advances.
I agree... I wonder they are so nervous when it comes to controlling balance of the power of access to infomation especially monitoring and spying on their enemies or even on their friends. And I don't know why they spend astronomical amount of bucks for developping uncrackable encryption technologies.
APRAnet was the Internet's predocessor. It was developed by the government so in the event of a nuclear attack with obviosuly phone lines out (destroyed) there would be more then one route to follow. Academics got involved. The net evolved. Now we're getting high speed access to such illuminating sites as goatse.cx
Seriously, major players like MIT, Stanford, AT&T each have more IP addresses than is assigned to, say, China or India. Sure, not exactly a convincing argument to NOT to move to IPv6 but for the short term before IPv6 is implemented, these players can ameliorate the situation by releasing blocks of IP.
You do realize that IPv6 offers something like an IP address for every square centremetre of ground on the planet, right?
If we're using those tiny-ass quantum computers, we're going to need all that and more.
The coolest voice ever.
Here it is.
I just have to wonder what they [asians] actually DO for us rather than make porn and spam which we can do ourself, . . .
Hint: People on other countries don't exist for the sole purpose of serving us.
I've been to Mexico, England, Finland, Russia and Latvia. People actualy have lives there, too. You'd be amazed.
Note to non-USians: I won't judge your country by your most outrageous people if you don't judge mine by ours. Deal?
every soldier, truck, helicopter, etc. was connected in a very integrated and dynamic network
Just need to add the black-armored bodysuits, exotic eyepieces, conspicuous tubes, deathly white complexion, and Windows networking.
The coolest voice ever.
When did the pentagon ever become an authority with the Internet.
If not for the Pentagon and the DoD, we wouldn't have the Internet.
But what's localhost going to be? Will it be something annoyingly long and complex? 127.0.0.1 is even to hard for many people to remember.
From the article:
I think I only have the old version of the Internet installed. Does the new version have better warez and porn support also? Where can I download it from?
(Yeah yeah, I know. I run IPv6 too:)
IPv6 by 2008 or else. What are they going to do? Cancel the internet?
IPv6 sounds great but I see that we will need more TLDs and a domain name will be absolutely necessary.
Frickin' Rainman will be the only one able to remember xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.
At least the giant corporations that are our new overlords will have to spend some serious $$$ to cover all the new 'name.new tld'. Perhaps after all this is done, they can work on flying cars. 'cause we are like 50+ years behind the times here, people.
But all that has to take a back seat to hard to remember IPv6.
Here's a plan, why don't we just take the internet away from all the AOLers, the Flash greeting card senders, the 'Great Story! Read this LOLRFLOLRLOL!!!!'ers, Zone Bejewled players and the cheaters at Counter Strike and we'll have enough IPs for all of the elitist bastards that are going to make my toaster talk to me.
Tell you what. I will trade all my IPs (192.168.x.x) for a friggin' flying car.
Let's make it happen. I'll even have a bumper sticker, "IPv6, but my doctor says I'll be fine!" with a smiley!
Gimmme my flying car.
...something like 1200 addresses for each square meter of Earth's surface land. I forget who told me that.
Remember that, like IPv4, not every possible combination of those 128 bits is a valid address.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
USians? How is that pronounced? Yussians? You-ess-ians? Yous-ians?
thanks
You said it in your post, they're major players. China and India are insects.
Bing Crosby?
This might help it happen sooner than we think.
I'm familiar with what the Pentagon uses. I have friends and former co-workers who work there. It's no different than any large corporation as far as tech being up to date (for unclassified systems, that is). It's not the latest screamer, but it's not too old, either. Systems are usually bought and auctioned on a three year cycle. Whoever told you that their stuff is outdated was either full of shit or misinformed themselves.
errr.... slicing up existing 8/ and 16/ blocks is going to really screw up routing... which is more of the reason we need V6 then #'s of addr's...
http://ipv6tb.he.net/
No, this is just wrong.
::1
::
From IPv6 Address Types:
5.2. What does an ipv6 address look like?
Example 7. An ipv6 address
3ffe:ffff:0100:f101:0210:a4ff:fee3:9566
For simplification, leading zeros of each 16 bit block can be omitted.
Example 8. An ipv6 address shown above, but abbreviated
3ffe:ffff:100:f101:210:a4ff:fee3:9566
One sequence of 16 bit blocks containing only zeros can be replaced with a double colon "::", but not more than one at a time (otherwise it is no longer a unique representation).
Example 9. Dropping zeros
3ffe:ffff:100:f101:0:0:0:1 becomes 3ffe:ffff:100:f101::1
And the largest reduction is seen by the ipv6 localhost address.
Example 10. localhost
0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001 becomes
There is also a short for anyhost (the equivalent of 0.0.0.0 in ipv4).
Example 11. anyhost
0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000 becomes
How much hardware will have to be replaced in the networks owned and operated by the telcos and cable companies? Most of my computers are IPV6 capable but my ISP may try to postpone supporting IPV6 if it requires massive network upgrades.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
All I've heard is that Duke Nukem: Forever is supposed to have built in support for it...
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
Come one, this is stupid. Trust the army to screw up and fight the last battle. 128 bits was what we needed in the 1990's, now we need, at minimum, 1024 bits.
0 32 95103906144016539038225792870901895835390320107657 44457305542673419082369699669734880889275496329484 96303482538270489266497896614602800178013445636154 70744071510983402152604892326878198758722011817673 7621501526369471177135320848354245186405050904232
Proof:
numOfPeople = 7000000000
def uniqueIP(n):
return 2**n
def ipPerPerson(numOfIP, people):
return numOfIP / people
>>> ipPerPerson(uniqueIP(1024), numOfPeople)
25681330498033084396132931296986067623113956842
By my calculations, that is the minimum number needed per person. With all the nano-devices we will have by 2008, that number will go quickly, trust me.
Even if there are production delays and the nano-devices are not here by 2008, they will still be coming soon, so we may as well be prepared.
Also, for those who are going to complain, having 1024 bit IP addresses will not be much overhead.
...is that there is no easy way to do this. There will be a major effort of large companies and corportations eventually, but only after someone takes initiative and sticks their neck out above the crowd. We can't all huddle behind each other saying "I'll go when you go..."
I would like to see something critical go IPv6 exclusively. If... say, most of the world's search engines ran only IPv6, think of how much that would inspire people to adopt it, from the consumer all the way up to the corporations that rely on the consumer's business. We just need someone important enough to put their foot down and say "You must have IPv6... now."
Not just search engines. Yahoo! could start serving their mail, chat, and games through IPv6 exclusively. MP3.com could only stream via IPv6, hardware corp's could stop producing IPv4 hubs and routers, which would still allow people to use IPv4 (the old ones won't be removed from the market, just no longer manufactured), but at the same time it would make the cost of staying with IPv4 increasingly expensive (as our supply of IPv4 hardware grows thin, the cost of using it will become too expensive).
I've heard this argumentation a couple of times before here at slashdot, but I really can't agree. The Internet is based on the idea of packet switched networks, which was developed in the early 1960. The first network to ever use this (I think) was, as you mention, ARPAnet in 1969.
What you should keep in mind is that the idea was developed simultaneously and independently by two other research groups, the Rand Institute and National Physical Laboratory in England (that's outside the U.S.).
Also, the http and html standard were developed in CERN, Europe. Not that these are fundemental for the Internet as such, but I guess we wouldn't have the same growth of the Internet without www.
Modern warfare is theorized by two overlapping schools of thought: "Maneuver" warfare and "Traditional" warfare (or whatever you want to call it).
The model of the period of iteration in decision making to action is from the maneuverist camp, but it has been more widely accepted. As maneuver types propose it, the decisions should be as distributed as possible, hence your IPv6 address for every device on every soldier inference. However, in this model, every node does not need to be addressed by every other node, and indeed the maneuver warfare proponents usually say that communication should be as decoupled as possible from the central structure. A global namespace/address space is (on the surface) antithetical. It provides means for centralized Command and Control, which is the opposite of what you suggest IPv6 would do for our soldiers.I suggest that the generals would be crippled by the human manipulation motive in an attempt to micromanage everything, because their orders can reach the sub-soldier granularity: "Tune all of the field units' fire-control to safe. We don't want any hot-heads escalating right now."
Hours later: "Sir, we just lost a whole platoon because they couldn't return fire ..."
True, there is LOTS of theory saying why this kind of order is bad, and it is starting to become a dominant influence in military doctrine (field manuals), but neither of those preclude that particular order from being executed in a battle situation.
Reference: ISBN 0-89141-518-1
Not that IPv6 is bad: it just won't work like that.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
They gave us ruby. And japanese universities have some interesting research on stuff.
I once wondered about whether nanotech would present problems for 128-bit addressing and did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to examine the issue. A little math to satisfy one's "what-if geek" tendencies:
earth's surface area = 5.1*10^11 m2
earth's land area = 1.483*10^11 m2
That's surface area, but we live in a volumetric space; let's define that space as 1 km high above/below earth's land-mass(part of that 1km being underground, part being in the air.) Thus the volume of human space above/below land is 1.48*10^14 m3. With 10^6 cubic centimeters per cubic meter, and approximately 10^23 atoms per cubic centimeter, we get 1.48*10^43 atoms in our human-habitable slab of space on earth.
Now, how many IP addresses for that space? Well, 2^128 = 3.4*10^38th.
Ergo we have enough IP addresses for nanotech devices of 43,600 atoms each, in a human-habitable volume completely covering the land-mass of Earth and extending to fill a volume of space above and below the earth's surface for a full 1 km. Sure, you might get nanodevices smaller than that, but would they be independent enough and sensing/generating enough information to communicate via IP?
Well, if that isn't a problem for 128-bits, what is? Let's check a few other test cases that your friendly sci-fi reader might imagine...
Well, that was just land-mass. What if we filled the sea with nanodevices, would that exhaust it?
The sea is 11km deep at worst, 3.8km on average. Water surface area is little over double land. Thus water basically requires a factor of 10x more devices. Given that you probably won't have more than 10% of the volume of any space being nanodevices (and this would seem to remain an extreme upper bound), this probably isn't an issue.
So what about interplanetary colonization? Still not too much of an issue for this solar system (ignoring the latency issues.) At least the first few planets (Mars/Venus/Mercury) which only add a factor of 3-4x expansion once 100% colonized form due to the roughly similar size of available nanodevice space on those planets as earth. True, a colonized Jupiter might pose problems down the line...
And if you used nanoprobes to fill/convert entire atmospheric systems, you end up covering a lot more volume (99% of earths' atmosphere fills approx 8.6*10^19 m3 by my calculations, five orders of magnitude more space than our 1 km slab.) Of course, any nanodevice design on that scale would probably use its own non-IP protocol.
Ah, but what other assumptions could be misleading us? For example, what is the efficiency of the 128-bit name space? Can we really use all those addresses? Well, I admit, I'm less an expert on this. The issue that Ethernet MACs will typically be your bottom 64-bits definitely chews up a lot of space, but if Ethernet doesn't make sense for nanodevices, we'll probably be using something else, or our self-assembling nanoprobes will build and configure themselves so that they share 1 higher-level IP but under the covers each have an colony-wide (not globally) unique ethernet address. How efficiently allocated is the rest of that (non-Ethernet) space? Well, I think CIDR-like tweaks can squeeze a fair amount out.
Still, even in the case where 128-bits isn't quite enough(!), I suspect reverting to NAT-type approaches in IPv6 will be workable. Certainly inter-stellar communications which will be limited to a relatively small number of transmitters will scale up with NATs for quite a while, assuming photon-based communications.
So I suspect the 128-bit addressing scheme of IPv6 will last us at least another 200 years, not just "decades" as
umm.. This guy's last journal contains an anti-michael rant. Trollish, yes, but what you've said is total bullshit. There is no journal entry like that (troll's are stupid, but not that stupid)
Admit it, you're either a michael fanboy or a stunningly clever metatroll.
IPv6 supports autoconf where you plug your machine in and if there is an IPv6 enabled router on the network it automatically configures itself. IPv6 supports having IPv6 addresses if you are assigned IPv4 addresses.
In theory, I can install a machine and plug it in, and it will do everything using IPv6. Configuring routers I admit requires some thought, but __nobody__, including the various Linux distributions by the default installs support being plugged into an IPv6 network and configuring themselves.
They all require installing "extra" tools, recompiling kernels, or manually configuring interfaces. Where is the automatic 6to4 address use in NAT gateways? Where is the automatic ipv4-compatible ipv6 addresses?
And thats for the PC operating systems, if we look at embedded devices (eg: Wireless bridges/AP's), most of them not only don't support IPv6, they "accidently" drop IPv6 thats forwarded across them!
IPv6 is designed to be so simple that you aren't supposed to realise that you're transitioning to IPv6. One day you update your OS and you just happen to be using IPv6 instead of IPv4 where possible. Except at the moment you have to spend a week futzing about playing with weird options.
The reason people aren't using IPv6 has nothing to do with if the core network is upgraded. IPv6 can support tunneling over that automatically if required using 6to4 addressing, the reason is that you have to conciously go and configure every frig'n device on your network to support IPv6!
C'mon disto-makers, spend a bit of time getting IPv6 support working in your distro by default. Make sure IPv6 tools are shipped by default (where they exist). Make sure that kernels are compiled with IPv6 support. Make sure that your startup scripts configure ipv6-compatible ipv4 addresses on interfaces that have ipv4 addresses, configure 6to4 addressing by default etc. It's not hard!
Boris Yeltsin ?
I mean really, +1 for posting such a blatant offtopic? Could the mods please stop being so lazy with their points, some of us want to read and interesting discussion at -1, not pages of mind-numbing meta-discussion.
Although I think that I would do better as a hotel manager than an engineer. /dev/null
$comments >
Gore never said he "invented" the internet. That was a creation of the republican campaign.
What he said was he "took the initiative in creating the Internet", and this is true, as Vint Cerf and others agree.
...is an ISP that offers IPv6. I don't expect small residential ISPs to support it right away, but it'd be a huge step toward IPv6 integration if data centers could bring in another OC3 or whatnot that ran IPv6. With the recent story about people stealing netblocks because there's the impending shortage, I think data centers would be eager to be able to offer IPv6. Until at least a big backbone ISP supports it, we won't see 'true' IPv6 to the household.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Bah, my initial starting figures for the surface of the earth are off by 1000. :(
:)
Earth surface = 5.1*10^14 m2
Volume extruded from surface, 1km high, ignoring spherical distortion = 5.1*10^17 m3.
# atoms in that space = 1.48*10^46
one IP address for every 43 million atoms, which is a bit of a different story from my first post. But maybe my assumptions were too conservative?
This raises another question, which is what is the rough lower bound for the size (in terms of # of atoms) for a working nano-device? I evaded this question a bit in my earlier analysis, but remembering the Times Ten size comparisons showing viruses, particularly rhinoviruses as the smallest living things, I went to look at how many atoms make up such a thing. A google search led to a Caltech thesis saying that "The smallest important viruses, the picornaviruses (responsible for polio, the common cold, and hoof-and-mouth disease) are composed of protein coats of about 0.5 million atoms and a nucleic acid genome of about the same size." (Some smallest virus in theory calculations suggest lower sizes, I dunno how good the underlying assumptions are.) So 1 million atoms is a reasonable size for a nanodevice, right? Well, partially-- viruses can't do much without a host cell infrastructure to tap into. But on the flip side, for a working nanodevice sufficient to have its own IP address, we wouldn't necessarily need the self-replication infrastructure of a virus. So I'm not sure this line of thinking leads anywhere.
Stepping back, my volumetric analysis was probably too conservative (1km high all over the earth's surface?) Tallest buildings size today is ~400 meters to the top occupied floor, so in that respect my analysis isn't too off. But what's the average density likely to be anytime in the near future? My guess is there's a 1/x power law distribution of some kind (hmm, perhaps so?) More googling leads to a paper saying that average building height in Los Angeles is really more like 12 meters (with cities like Phoenix at 5 meters). So maybe we can chop off two orders of magnitude from our 1km height estimate. So 430K atoms per IP #?
Then there are two other factors that lead to further overestimates of usable volumetric space; that urbanization itself isn't spread evenly over the surface of the earth, and that within this, say, 10meter high volume, there's a limit to the nanodevice density that humans (and the atmosphere) will accomodate. That alone cuts the max number of atoms worldwide dedicated to nanodevices down by several orders of magnitude further. Enough so that I'm still pretty comfortable that nanotech won't exhaust IPv6.
OK, I've spent way too long satisfying my curiousity. Hope someone out there found it interesting.
--LP
The DoD buys a lot of stuff. If they say they are not going to buy your stuff unless you support IPv6, then you will support IPv6. Of course the little guy can afford to not go IPv6, but the big players can't afford it.
In theory they can get togather and all refuse, leaving the DoD to change the policy or unable to buy anything. However IPv6 isn't a hard change, nor is it a diaster in the making so I don't expect anyone to try it. Some suppliers will wait to impliment it, but I expect all suppliers will be putting pressure on their suppliers to support IPv6. Expect a lot of embedded devices to support IPv6 out of the box shortly as manufactures realise there is big customer demand for it.
I think they made the adress space so large, so that even if american companies gets 99% of it and Asia get 0.01%, it won't be a problem.
Troll.
1. That's not an argument against IPv6, that's an argument against buying Cisco routers for IPv6.
2. IPv4 space is running out. US has 80% of the address space, and soon every cell phone will have an address. How about that?
3. IPv6 has a larger address space, which means that routing can be organized much more logically. With some planning, the address could encode the country, city, etc, and make a *smaller* routing table.
4. That's a point I guess, but who cares? If you're worried about that you could use compression and UDP.
Funny. Everyone freaks out when the idea "Internet phone numbers" that link a specific address to a specific user or household comes up. But, in effect, isn't this what IPv6 will do to some degree? By allowing everyone to be assigned their own static IP, all your travels online could effectively be linked to you unless you never ever give out your real name when using that IP.
Example:
Say you send a message to a mailing list using your real name. That mailing list is archived on the web, and your IP is in the archived message headers.
Now say you post messages on Usenet under an alias. If you have a dynamic IP or your messages go through a proxy server, and you don't provide any clues to your identity (e.g. unique usernames that you use in other contexts), you can be reasonably sure no reader will be able to find out who you are. Say, however, you have a static IP, and the user puts that IP into a search engine. The aforementioned mailing list post may magically appear, and people may find out things about you that you didn't want them to know.
The only limitations are a) that the mailing list/newsgroup/IRC channel/whatever you're participating in won't make your IP publicly accessible and b) that the search engine may not index the information or allow you to search for it. These are both outside your control.
The universal static IPs that will result from IPv6 is yet another thing that will make managing your privacy more difficult.
"sure, you might get nanodevices smaller than that, but would they be independent enough and sensing/generating enough information to communicate via IP?"
That's such a quintessentially Slashdot quote, it makes me smile.
I do understand that IPV6 is a LOT better then IPV4....and yes there does need to be a change somewhere down the line.... but why do americans assume that they own the internet? We all know that they created it...but times have changed...The internet is a world wide network....Why do they think they everyone will conform to what Mr US big brother says? I wouldn't.
Nobody's forcing you to use it. Don't switch, just sit back and relax while the rest of the world disconnects itself from you. I think this is what the Pentagon is trying to avoid.
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
They may not exist for that purpose, but we Americans can sure make them exist for that purpose. Fortunately, given the conditions of some countries these days, "bombing them back to the Stone Age" doesn't take much effort. And afterward, the Pentagon can make sure that IPv6 standards are enforced in the new, compliant infrastructure.
I've been to Mexico, England, Finland, Russia and Latvia. People actualy have lives there, too. You'd be amazed.
Okay, I've lived in Germany, and been to England, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, and what is now the Czech Republic. They do have lives there, and I'll give you those. However, I work in (management in) the meat industry in Chicago, and let me assure you, if they have lives in Mexico, why the hell are all the Mexicans up here working in my plant?
Note to non-USians: I won't judge your country by your most outrageous people if you don't judge mine by ours. Deal?
Cool by me. But remember that a majority of us who voted didn't want our current "leaders" in office. Please, remember that. We'll try to change it next year.
If using Linux is about choice, how come people complain when I choose to use Windows?
I bet the NSA wants us to keep using IPv4 as IPv6 has IPsec (crypto) build in. NSA is in the business of eavesdropping but the Pentagon don't like being eavesdropped.
But IPv6 would be a great way to implement a P2P sharing network. It supports multicasting and portable IP addressing, for instance. If the Pentagon (or anyone for that matter) really wants IPv6 by 2008, all they have to do is release a P2P program which utilizes the 6bone. Let all the copyright infringers do the work of testing and transitioning.
right?
~~~
Isn't the extra security of IPV6 a disadvantage for folks like the RIAA, MPAA, and DOHS who want to know what we're saying and what files we're moving? It appears that DOD wants IPV6 for its own usage and security. But for general deployment, I suspect most governments and commercial sectors will want the Internet to stay IPV4, so they can 'keep on top of' the general populace.
Perhaps what this means is that once one would have expect the Internet to be IPV6, and a bunch of legacy islands floating in it. Instead, I suspect we're migrating toward a bunch of IPV6 islands floating in an Internet of IPV4. Big Boys (like DOD) will have IPSEC tunnels through the IPV4 connecting their pieces of IPV6.
So we still don't have an answer to IPV4 address space.
Maybe we'll get lucky, and I'll get surprised by general deployment of IPV6.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Ergo we have enough IP addresses for nanotech devices of 43,600 atoms each, in a human-habitable volume completely covering the land-mass of Earth and extending to fill a volume of space above and below the earth's surface for a full 1 km.
:)
/. a while back). I can't find the paper he wrote (which was very interesting, BTW), but if you search for "Cerf IP interplanetary Internet" on Google you'll find a number of references.
Of course, this doesn't leave any room for the people (or air or water or buildings or...).
If we assume there is "only" 1 billion nanomachines / cubic centimeter in that space, we have 1000 IP addresses for every machine. Filling Jupiter with nanomachines might still be a problem, but for Earth, Mars, Venus, and their moon(s), we'd be set.
Certainly inter-stellar communications which will be limited to a relatively small number of transmitters will scale up with NATs for quite a while, assuming photon-based communications.
Actually, it's most likely that interplanetary communications will use some other protocol - TCP doesn't scale to the latencies we'd see going to anything further than the Moon. Vinton Cerf has been doing some work on this (IIRC it showed up on
So, if there won't be a direct TCP/IP link anyway, you could (maybe), simply re-allocate all of those IP address on each planet - giving every planet/moon system it's own set of 2^128 IP addresses, and then doing NAT over the interplanetary internet protocol. I'm not totally sure that this would work, but I don't see, offhand, any reason why not.
USians? How is that pronounced?
Heh. In my mind it's "you-ess-ians".
In real life I'd say "Americans", but some of the Slashdot crowd balks that "American" can refer to anyone in North America or South America.
If anyone has been following the discussions of the IETF regarding IPv6, there seems to be an ongoing, and rather embroiled debate over at least one issue: that being site-local addresses. Right now, v4 has the private address space (192.168.x, etc.), and if I remember correctly there was ongoing debate over whether or not the 'private' (site-local) addresses should be eliminated in favor of making what are essentially public address private via routing.
Okay, I've lived in Germany, and been to England, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, and what is now the Czech Republic. They do have lives there, and I'll give you those. However, I work in (management in) the meat industry in Chicago, and let me assure you, if they have lives in Mexico, why the hell are all the Mexicans up here working in my plant?
Heheheh. I almost included an exception for Mexico saying that they actually do exist only to serve us but decided it wouldn't be funny but just inflammatory. Besides, serving us is only a secondary purpose; their primary purpose is to love soccer (football to all you non-USians).
On a somewhat more serious note, they're up there working in your meat plant because you're paying them enough to make it worth their while yet not enough to not make it worth the while of "local" potential employees. (BTW, I'd wager a large number of them are sending money back to Mexico to help support their extended families.)
When I lived in Texas I heard a lot of people bitching about Mexicans in jobs, but the Mexicans were doing hard labor that the bitchers wouldn't want to do in the first place. Sometimes I worry if we're getting too lazy.
But remember that a majority of us who voted didn't want our current "leaders" in office. Please, remember that. We'll try to change it next year.
I'm not sure there'll be any decent choices next year. Hopefully there will be a check box for "present but not voting". Or maybe Michael Moore can get "Ficus" elected president...it's already been voted into some local governments. "Ficus, because a potted plant can do no harm." (I may have that quote wrong; I can't find the original now. Disclaimer: I'm not as liberal or cynical as Michael, but I find his work entertaining and occasionally insightful.)
Yeah, Scott Lockwood should get a life.
I know a lot of people here don't like Dubya, but why would he know what IP v6 is? Do you think Clinton knows? Do you think Jimmy Carter knows? Do you think Nelson Mandela knows? Do you think Condoleeza Rice knows? Do you think your boss knows?
I bet you don't know parliamentary procedure... Does that make you stupid?
[FromTheMorning]
A long time ago there was a "firm commitment" to move the Internet to OSI standards (shudder...), as mandated by GOSIP, a.k.a. FIPS 146-1. (See this ancient RFC for an overview.)
They were dead serious about it.
They failed.
The point? Government mandate is not a guarantee of success. Granted, OSI and IPv6 are worlds apart, and converting to a protocol which was designed to cause as little disruption as possible is at least technically achievable. But it would be foolish to disregard the technological inertia.
Just think how many IP addresses a port scanner would have to try just to locate a single computer, much less finding one with a particular vulnerability.
I must admit that I'm a bit confused by some of the posts I've seen here stating the huge number of addresses that IPv6 prommisses to bring.
I've perused the specification (I'll read it more thoroughly later) and the address format and I'm not getting 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 (128 bits) separate addresses. I'm getting 281474976710656 (48 bits) public (sub)network addresses plus 65536 (16 bits) of site addresses allocated to each of those, followed by a 64bit hardware identifier (MAC address). It appears that IPv6 means 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IP adresses each linked to a MAC adress, of which 281,474,976,710,656 are reserved for address space at each site.
Admittedly, I'm no expert on this and could be interpeting this wrong. Someone pease clarify how this works.
(Thank you bc, my favorite calculator.)
Read, L
Actually, I've bolloxed it pretty badly in my earlier post. Correction below.
2 possible hosts connected, if every network contains the maximum nuber of hosts.
There's a three bits for "format prefix" for the type of traffic, and eight bits "reserved for future use" and the 64 bits at the end are for the "unique hardware identifier" are not required to match the Mac Address (but often will).
It seems that there will be between 9,007,199,254,740,992 and 2,305,843,009,213,693,952 possible networks (the rfc uses the term aggregates) of 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 hosts each, depending on the what the eight reserved bits are used for.
That's 166,153,499,473,114,484,112,975,882,535,043,072 to 42,535,295,865,117,307,932,921,825,928,971,026,43
Read, L
I've been looking for people like you awhile... (sigh)
-dave-
The pig browse. With Google. Sigh is to the chicken. Chicken is fool. Giggle. The DailyWTF giggle.
coming at you, it brings a whole new meaning to the term "Network Cloud".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They don't exist for serving us, but we painfully brought the internet to them, that is alot of our tax payers money, and for what? So the overpopulated country and fuck around on IM and give us shitty porn? I don't think it's worth the taxpayers billions of dollars.
Decimal is widely used (AFAIK) because it is intuitive and the first system that people learn (most people count on their fingers at some point as children [and, for some, as adults]... and most people have 10 fingers.
Comparatively, hexadecimal is used widely only in the field of computers (ironically, called "digital" rather than "binary" or perhaps "discrete" electronics), because they are fundamentally binary, and hex is a power of 2.
For everyone to switch to hex, it would have to be useful for the general populace (i.e. all those people who are NOT computer engineers)
Just out of curiosity, though, I'd be interested in any other examples you have of situations where hexadecimal is more useful than decimal.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Good Lord! Now my cat can have her own IP address. 'nuff to go 'round? Sure!
"Everything works if you let it" - The Flying Mouse
the micronano bots would just use subnet mask255....255
the ip addy of the beast would be666.066.006.666
but wwith eough ip,s to cover ever adom in the planet 10,000 times if you were to call them all up at once it could cause a new black hole to apear.lol
Japan != China
Japan=Asia You should have qualified the original troll.
Where are you from exactly? I am saying the US should not be serving asia to bring them the internet if they aren't going todo anything for us back, and I also wonder where the hell they call American football soccer, I heard of football for soccer, but every other country call's America's football "American football" not soccer. Now, my question is why does America need to serve Asia and give them the internet just so they can waste IP's on child porm, spam, and they don't keep things regulated and ethical.
the Pentagon, and now DoD, both 2008? Concidence, or not?
Free means no restrictions, ironic the FSF's GPL forces restrictions, isn't it? What's your definition of free?