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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."
For those not in the know, here is a brief article Explaining the benefits of IPV6.
I'm not Seth.
Previously discussed... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/22/001221 9
It isn't a matter of one person or group moving to IPv6. The backbone support has to be there if they are going to be able to communicate with anyone else. The infastructure needs to be there and it isn't right now.
... and then the rest of the world..
Hate to break it to ya, sonny, but the rest of the world is the reason that the US is finally getting their ball in the game. It ain't America that's hurting because of IPv4, it's China, Japan, Russia, and the world at large: demand for IPv6 in the US is low because Americans have better than 80% of all the IPv4 addresses.
--porsche_lover@hotmail.com
just like the humble blood clot... turboporsche@telus.net
The Earth has about 2^170 atoms. IPv6 only provides 2^128 addresses. Bummer.
More acurately, IPv6 is 128 bits, compared to IPv4's 32. (I'm not gonna calculate the address space, I'd probably screw it up.)
Addresses are in hex.
See the tutorial at.
IPv6 addresses are printed in groups of 16 bits in hex, separated by colons. 3ffe:1200:301b:1:a00:20ff:fec0:ffee, for example. Notice that the '1' is really '0001' - leading 0s within a group can be left out. There are more little tricks, but you can go look at the various IPv6 RFCs if you're really curious.
Cisco has finally released IOS 12.3 which has full support for IPv6 in a production IOS train (see http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/732/Tech/ipv6/ ) - IPv6 has been in the 'T' train IOSes for some time. Their support now makes full use of hardware acceleration and looks very complete.
Juniper have had IPv6 in production JUNOS releases on the M-series/T-series for quite a while.
Most other vendors already have production IPv6, so in reality the router vendors aren't a roadblock. The same is now true for host OSs - Linux, Windows XP and modern Unixes have had IPv6 for a while as well. The real issue is getting applications ported (not that hard) and networks deployed.
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.
2001:04b0:1e41:23ab:9090:263f:94b3:1202
Like that.
Yes, that's hexadecimal - yes, that's 16 bytes.
(That's also part of the registered AOL/Time Warner block, incidentally.)
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
There's also a write up of this over at wired news.
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.
Hrrmm. According to my python console and this page
2^127 / (.51*10^15 m^2 * 1,000,000 mm^2/m^2)
Or, roughly, the number of usable addresses (estimate) divided by the number of square millimeters on the surface of the planet still yields 3.33*10^17 addresses per square millimeter!
Anybody care to check my math?
quick details update, in case somebody reads the previous paragraph :
- the problem before the beginning of the SI (International System) was that every basic measure came from a local source. While, for the meter, everybody has access to water or carbon (well, apart from some hundreds of million of people but that's another topic)
- base10 the only natural system : no. But it appears that this is the one the most people are using. Moreover, this is base10 across everything not any arbitrary number to convert from one length unit to another, fo example.
- you apparently missed a big point of those units, which is the consistency across different measures. If you start from the basic units, you can deduce every other ones.
For example : force : F = ma, hence Newton = kg * m / s^2.
So, when you finish with a formula containing many different units, you can just throw the numbers without any conversion needed and, for the unit, simplify them like normal fractions and find the resulting one.
#include "coucou.h"
It will be ::1 which is short-hand for 00:00:00:00:00:00:00:1 . RFC 3513 is your friend.
In 1986 he introduced legislation to enable the Office of Science and Technology Policy to provide Congress with an analysis of U.S. networking needs. In 1988 he introduced the National High Performance Computing and Communications Act that was signed by President Bush into Public Law 102-194 in 1991.
To quote a friend of mine: "You, out of the gene pool, now!"
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
The problem of overly-long IPv6 addresses has already been, um, addressed.
You may be interested in perusing RFC 1924, "A Compact Representation of IPv6 Addresses", from April 1996.
RFC 1924 defines Base-85, a compact encoding scheme for 128-bit IPv6 addresses. An address represented in the usual form would be ' 1080:0:0:0:8:800:200c:417a'. That same address in Base-85 becomes '4)+k&C#VzJ4br>0wv%Yp'. Unfortunately, Base-85 addresses aren't very memorable, and worst of all, they're case-sensitive. Try reading that out over a phone. RFC 1924 was released on an April 1st, so it's probably not serious.
That would be bad:
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!
Well, as long as you don't assign any to photons...
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