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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."
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
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
God forbid uncle sam tell the US to pull their standards into line with the rest of the planet and use a well thought-out system that makes sense, instead of based on the length of some ancient greeks' gods' feet or some such.
My car gets three rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
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.
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.
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?
...Americans have better than 80% of all the IPv4 addresses.
:)
I don't know where you got this number but I'm not disputing it, it sounds reasonable.
What I'd like to add is that "the rest of the world" wouldn't even have to worry about IPv6, IPv4 or whatever without the U.S. because it's highly unlikely that there would even an Internet without the U.S.
Do you honestly think that any other country was capable of doing that? Keep in mind that the first ARPANET node was established in 1969. That was a whole different world than we live in right now. I'll address the three countries you listed.
1) China - c'mon, even if they had the technological know how they would never have let it out of the country.
2) Japan - of the three you listed and I dare say of the world, this is probably the most capable. Japan's economic boom started in the 1950s - 1960s, so yes, Japan had the economic resources and the populace began to move away from an agrarian society to a much more industrialized society. Japan also saw a growth in the supply of educated folks at this time. So, again, Japan is probably the only other country that could have pulled it off at that time. But they didn't so here we are.
3) Russia - similar situation to China in that we were deep in the Cold War during the infancy of the Internet and Russia would have kept the technology to themselves. Period. They might have shared with China, but only for a military advantage not academic.
In closing, without those "Damn Yankees" we'd all be sitting around reading books.
The notice was to contractors and bidders to DOD or defense associated public works...
They don't need to cancel the Internet, just VOID your lucrative military contracts unless you comply.
This is standard governmental practice and works on pressing the only button industry responds to (IE: the wallet button). Virtually all major software companies foreign AND domestic do business with the DoD so yes, this will be an effective way to escalate IPV6 propagation.
If your organization had made a significant contribution to the early development and deployment of IPV4, they might have a class A network too. If you don't like the address allocations or the structure of the domain name system, too bad. The people who provided the funding, and did the development and deployment, set the rules.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Nobody would dispute you about that - though several other countries also built early internetworks independent of the arpanet within a few years of its birth. Once the net was extended outside the US, it plugged in to plenty of existing networks already built - it wasn't a case of the technology flowing out from the US to the rest of the world.
And again, nobody would dispute that the 80% figure is understandable from a historical perspective; when IP adresses started to be doled out, nobody envisioned a net of anything like the size we have today. That does not alter the facts, however: many countries _are_ feeling an adress crunch far more than the US, and are consequently substantially further ahead in transition to ipv6.
What we need to do now is to not repeat our earlier mistakes. IP6 addresses probably should be assigned to country NICs in proportion to their total and estimated future population, not to their current number of connected nodes. There should probably also be a substantial number of adresses held in reserve for various purposes (moon and/or mars bases, space stations and satellites, underwater bases, high-altitude autonomous flyers and what have you). There are lots of adressess available; no need to be stingy.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
i'll hopefully be able to get a static IP thru my service provider
No, probably not. IPv6 encourages dynamic addresses, and has several mechanisms in place to aid in their use. This is a managability issue more than anything else -- one of the reasons IPv4 is running out of space is that the existing allocations are inefficient and renumbering would be too expensive. By using more dynamic addresses, the address space wastage can be significantly reduced.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
...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).
The math you linked to is certainly interesting, though it raises another point. We can't possibly use that many addresses (though I'm sure somebody said this for ipv4 also...). Unless I'm being entirely ignorant, aren't we just going to end up sending a bunch of redundant zeroes around the net? I suppose we could use the first nybble for other purposes (evil bits!). But I can't help but wonder if they're all entirely necessary.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
...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
The whole point is to have excess capacity. Currently, we seem to be heading in the direction of _everything_ being network accessible. Can't find your shoes? Send them a command and they'll beep at you.
Think your husband is cheating on you? Put a GPS-enabled credit card in his wallet, and track his wherabouts in realtime.
Feeling down? Here's an injection of nano-sensors to track your brain chemistry, and also to let your wife know if you get 'excited' when she's not around.
While each of these examples is trivial, the sum of all the plausible uses points towards every person on Earth having a need for dozens or hundreds of addresses eventually. Besides, how will the govt. keep track of us slashdotters without ATIANRWMI (Absolute Total Information Awareness, Now Really We Mean It) and a bug on every square inch of my skin?
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.
Transitions like this can be quite expensive. One reason why the move to metric is so slow in spite of the system's advantages is that mechanics will require two sets of tools until long after all new cars are 100% metric. I've had several cars from US auto cos that used a bizarre mixture of both metric and standard bolts. A carb might be held onto the manifold with standard bolts, but the manifold is held onto the head with metric bolts.
FreeSpeech.org
The US military's computers are not outdated overall. However, _field_ systems do not reach end of life until they are replaced by another system, and aren't 'fielded' until long after development. This assures that we have lots of obsolescent and just plain old computers doing various tasks for the actual combat troops. That doesn't mean they aren't suited to their tasks, but it does mean that they are hard to integrate into other systems. No ports, in other words. The word used for these programs is 'stovepipe', entirely vertical, no integration. The military is trying to get rid of that kind of stuff, integrating systems together early on in their lifecycle. But there are lots of 20 and 30 year old systems still in use out there, so it'll be when i'm an old man that that problem is gone.
The general purpose SBU (sensitive but unclassified) gear you see on military public web sites is nothing you haven't seen before. Dells, Compaqs, etc., modern vintage stuff. The switches and routers and such are all modern stuff in general. Desktop machines come in waves but are less than 3 years old in many cases.
While there is a kernel of truth to what you say, it just ain't so.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
As has been pointed out elsewhere in the discussion, the US has the least to gain from switching over to IPv6. Since the Internet is, after all, a mostly American invention, there is some US-centricity to it, especially in the DNS system and in the allocation of IP addresses. Amercians own more IPv4 addresses than the rest of the world combined. We have the least to gain from going IPv6, and the most to lose.
I freely admit this is somewhat of a bad thing.
In the last few years, IP addresses have become a scarce resource that people are willing to pay for. Demand is literally outstripping supply, and you can tell it is because people are paying good money for blocks of addresses. (Down at a more personal level, you'll pay more for a broadband connection with a static IP address.) People are buying numbers. This isn't something the designers of the Internet, who foresaw a system with a few tens of millions of nodes at most, could have anticipated. They didn't imagine that every Chinese citizen might want to wander around with a cell phone connected to the 'Net.
There are infinitely many numbers, so it's basically pointless to compete economically over them. The right answer from an efficiency standpoint is to transition to IPv6. Sure, it'll be a pain in the butt as we get it done, but the rewards will be significant.