Pentagon Wants IPv6 by 2008

True.. by chendo · 2003-06-13 17:47 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.

Which is a good thing, I suppose. Or does IPv6 have some evil bit that can track down Saddam? :p

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Yeah, well,,, by Kris_J · 2003-06-13 17:47 · Score: 5, Interesting

Governments have set deadlines for turning off analogue TV, but it doesn't mean that will happen either.

free ip's by rengalan · 2003-06-13 17:48 · Score: 3, Interesting

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?

That's a long time. by insecuritiez · 2003-06-13 17:49 · Score: 2, Interesting

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?"

Good to Hear by Shackleford · 2003-06-13 17:52 · Score: 2, Interesting

My understanding is that the Pentagon has been relying on outdated technology for quite some time. In fact, it was only recently that the building was renovated. I understand that they used highly outdated computers for some time. So it certainly is good to see that they are keeping up with the times.

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.

just curious by Anonymous Coward · 2003-06-13 17:52 · Score: 2, Interesting

what exactly would an ipv6 whatever IP actually look like compared to the normal 1.2.3.4 i see these days.

Re:just curious by OldMiner · 2003-06-13 19:00 · Score: 4, Interesting

I hope the example you gave wasn't intended as a serious one. First of all, there is the issue that most of the time hex numbers are case insensitive. The additional trouble caused by a difference between a and A would be quite a hassle. Once more, for any alphabet that reaches through l (as in 'el', not 'one') or O (as in 'oh', not 'zero') suddenly has problems with font choice for representation. Secondly, consider if you used all of the symbols you recommende. 0-9,a-z,A-Z. That's 62 unique characters, and we need a number of characters that is a power of two for things to work out. So next we have to throw in some other symbol. How about we just say we follow that with ' and " (there are probably better choices, but that's not pertinent). That gives us 64 total characters which represent log2(64)=6 bits in our address. This means that we still need 22 of these hexaquartadecimals. If we wanted to drop this back down to the current 8 characters required, we'll need a system which represents 16 bits per character, or 65,536 unique characters per position.

With hexadecimal, we have a well-established system used several decades for a shorthand form of long binary numbers that required 32 significant characters with no typographic duplicities. This new proposed system will require recoding all software dealing with IPs to be case-sensitive as well as accept new characters, introduce duplicities, and save us not quite one-third of the length. Quite possibly a bit more of a hassle than it's worth.

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Re:2008!!!! by wazlaf · 2003-06-13 18:03 · Score: 3, Interesting

Not quite. In fact if the available IPv6 addresses get distributed properly, they will last till 2008 easily. The problem is simply that some US organisations have class A networks, which they do not deserve nor require at all.

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Re:No thanks by phalse+phace · 2003-06-13 18:05 · Score: 2, Interesting

now they want in on the standards of the internet

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.

Re:2008!!!! by Anonymous Coward · 2003-06-13 18:21 · Score: 1, Interesting

What I want to know is where IPv5 went...

Re:Advantages of IPV6 by pompousjerk · 2003-06-13 18:42 · Score: 2, Interesting

If (, if, if IF ), I've done it right, it's also more than 33 trillion addys per square micrometer of the earth's surface.

Re:OpenBSD by kikta · 2003-06-13 19:15 · Score: 2, Interesting

And I don't know why they spend astronomical amount of bucks for developping uncrackable encryption technologies.

Well, that's quite simple. If someone breaks our encryption - people die. It's not like someone will find out trade secrets or read embarrasing emails. People will die quite possibly horrible deaths. As one of those protected by that encryption, I'd just as soon see them as much money as they reasonably believe necessary.

P.S. Back off the bold tag before you put someone's eye out with that thing.

Tunnel Broker to IPV6 network. by ron_ivi · 2003-06-13 19:24 · Score: 2, Interesting

here's is an ISP that's playing with IPV6 today, and has a IPv6 Tunnel Broker that enables you to reach the IPv6 Internet by tunnelling over existing IPv4 connections from your IPv6 enabled host or router to one of their routers.

This might help it happen sooner than we think.

Get Your Free IPv6 tunnel by spudchucker · 2003-06-13 19:37 · Score: 3, Interesting

http://ipv6tb.he.net/

Regional Networks by Detritus · 2003-06-13 20:10 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.

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Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat

Re:I believe it works out to... by WoofLu · 2003-06-13 20:14 · Score: 2, Interesting

Parent is right.

An estimation had been made with a really pessimistic case, and the current addressing schemes (/48's to leaf sites)

they came up to 1200 addresses per square metre, which isn't that bad..

Re:Hardware vendors have to come in line first. by Florian+Weimer · 2003-06-13 20:14 · Score: 3, Interesting

Cisco has finally released IOS 12.3 which has full support for IPv6 in a production IOS train

With some high-end Cisco routers, the problem is not software but hardware. For example, only very, very few GSR line cards are currently able to route IPv6 traffic at reasonable packet rates.

Actually, these theories are hotly debated by aphor · 2003-06-13 21:07 · Score: 3, Interesting

Modern warfare is theorized by two overlapping schools of thought: "Maneuver" warfare and "Traditional" warfare (or whatever you want to call it).

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.

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.

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Nanotech, interplanetary wont exhaust 128-bit IPv6 by LinuxParanoid · 2003-06-13 21:41 · Score: 4, Interesting

...at least if you use a non-ethernet addressing scheme for those bottom 64 bits and get a full 128-bit space.
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

I've said this before by anthony_dipierro · 2003-06-14 01:54 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.

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