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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."
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
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
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
Let's see. How about a bargain basement price of US$0.01 per address. A small block of IPv6 has 4294967296 addresses. That's $42,949,672.96 Quite a killing there. Too bad it's IPv6 itself that's going to be killed.
All I need is a block of about 256 addresses in IPv6. Why is that so f***ing hard for the allocators to do? They need to stop thinking in terms of IPv4 to allocate IPv6 space.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Well, they can't really make it free, but it could be very low cost, charging for the administrative cost, not the amount of space.
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.
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.
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?
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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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=-
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
... 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
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.
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.
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.
That should push availability up considerably.
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
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.
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.
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
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--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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It will be ::1 which is short-hand for 00:00:00:00:00:00:00:1 . RFC 3513 is your friend.
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.
This might help it happen sooner than we think.
http://ipv6tb.he.net/
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
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..
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.
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).
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...
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
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!
I bet MIT get 100,000 square kilometre's worth then
...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
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.
"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.
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.
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