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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!
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?
...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
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.