Slashdot Mirror
U.S. DoD Commits To IPv6
babaloo writes "According to this
article the U.S. Defense Department wants to move it's entire network to IPv6 by the year 2008. Will this be what pushes at least U.S. based companies and providers to actually convert over?" It's definitely a shot in the arm that IPv6 needs. This seemed to be more of a priority back when NAT was much less prevalent, but it seems we'll eventually find ourselves on IPv6, even if we drag our feet there.
Wasn't this covered here:3 /194120 6&mode=thread
/.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/1
oh wait, this is
any news is good news!
In solaris frex. you simply have to say yes to enable when asked during install and hey presto your machine is instantly IPv6 aware.
Economic Left/Right: -0.62
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.69
From ifconfig:
inet6 addr: fe80::240:93fa:fe43:6f50/64 Scope:Link
And you're right - DNS will become more invaluable. ::1, or ::2, etc.
Although you only have to remember your subnet - eg 2001:618:15, and the address you use on that subnet, which is usually something like
Get your own free personal location tracker
Windows XP already supports IPv6 out of the box and it's a very small, downloadable, and free upgrade for 2000.
Also, pretty much every single *-nix I can think of supports IPv6 natively. I know for a fact that OpenBSD supports it and I cna't imagine Linux doesn't. Heck, it'd be a fun challenge to find a Unix that doesn't support IPv6.
So that's *-nix, MacOS X, and all future versions of Windows. What else would an 'average home user' be using?
The Carter administration tried to get the country converted to metric, but Reagan killed it.
if it were not for the increased awareness of security, this would never had happened.
Won't we need IPv7 by then?
No, we will not. The current IPv4 has approximately 4,300,000,000 (4.3 x 10^9) total addresses in its address space. IPv6, however, has 3.4 x 10^38 available addresses.
To quote from the WIDE FAQ: "If the address space of IPv4 is compared to 1 millimeter, the address space of IPv6 would be 80 times the diameter of the galactic system."
It is simply not feasible that we will ever need anything more than IPv6.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
There is no address space shortage as reported...everywhere. -davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
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.
...simple info on IPv6: http://www.internet2.edu/resources/infosheetIPv6.p df
Do not read this sig.
It's not that they've specifically banned NAT, I don't think, but rather that NAT falls under the blanket of "evils" that are being outlawed to keep those darn users from sharing files. I think. Read: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000336.h tml
Do not read this sig.
It's hierarchical. Someone owns "all" the IP addresses. Big ISP 1 asks for a chunk of space, and gets, oh, I don't know, a /30. ISP 2 gets a /36. Company 3 (me :O) ) gets a /48, which is 65536 subnets, each of 2^64 addresses, which is more than enough for me.
Hierarchical is good, as it means that the world doesn't need to know about routes for each company. It just says: Oh, that address is in the range belonging to Big ISP 1, so I'll pass it on. Big ISP 1 knows that it belongs to ISP 2, and ISP 2 passes it on to Company 3.
Get your own free personal location tracker
For those not in the know, here is a brief article Explaining the benefits of IPV6.
One of the big differences between the GOSIP OSI stack (which failed in the market) and IPv6 (which might succeed) was that GOSIP was big, clumsy, generally didn't work, and didn't have lots of applications, while TCP/IP was much lighter weight and had lots of commercial support by vendors and lots of people really developing useful applications (like FTP and SMTP as opposed to X.400.) It's possible that the same thing will happen to IPv6, but if Microsoft and Cisco support it and the DoD's DNS servers support it, it's got a chance of working.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The subnet is the easy part. Unfortunately, your end IP fields will rarely equate to a single digit, like ::1 or ::2. More often than not, an automatic configuration scheme will give you something like :203:6dff:fe1d:85c4 at the end (my PC under a /64 prefix, as an example). That value is calculated via the MAC address. Preset IP's are usually only given to routers and servers.
"You tried your best and failed miserably. The lesson is...never try. Heh!" -Homer
Your argument is a bit of a red herring. Firstly, security is a host problem more than a network problem, but let's ignore that for now.
Your IPv6 router can *still* be used to firewall off your internal IPv6 network even though it has globally addressable IP addresses. The added benefit (you might not think this is a benefit, but many firms do) is if everyone has globally unique address space, and say, for example, two companies become partners, they don't have to renumber vast amounts of machines so the two networks can interoperate properly.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows