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Deep Space 6 Publishes New IPv6 Status Pages
Mauro Tortonesi writes "The Deep Space 6 initiative publishes the first of the new IPv6 Status Pages: Current Status of IPv6 Support for Networking Applications.
The IPv6 Status Pages are a survey of the current status of IPv6 support for the Linux networking stack, system libraries and networking applications.
At the moment there is only one page concerning the IPv6 support of Linux networking applications, but we are planning to publish more pages soon and to extend our target to other important UNIX-derived OSes (e.g. *BSD) too."
It's a pretty useful list for UNIX users, however I don't see any Windows program that actually is doing IPv6 (for example Putty). It would be nice to also have such a list as I personally see IPv6 Win32 applications as the real breaktrough for IPv6.
-- Cliff Albert
It's great to see that a list is being kept of the programs that are IPv6 capable... that run under Unix systems.
Any such lists for programs that run under other IPv6 operating systems? Like Windows? (yes, it has IPv6 support!)
Any other mainstream OSes have IPv6 support? (MacOS?)
Oh Boy! don't Mix up your IP with you GPG-Sig :)
--
Stefan
DevCounter - An open, free & independent developer pool
created to help developers find other developers, help, testers and new project members.
enumeration addressing and routing
/30 address means 2) Facist countries like North Korea and the USA will need all kinds of
1) Contemplation about p+ and e- and enumeration of bits.
Lets assume you could enumarate most subatomic particles with 173 bits. I guess you are opposed to nuclear power by your shunning of neutrons, but
thats off topic, even for this post.
Thats about 10^52 or so particles. I will assume the average atom, crystal, etc, will contain 10 addresses or 10 routable subnets, in a generally star shaped network. Obviously atoms with an atomic weight greater than boron or so will need IBGP sessions between their multiple subnets to connect internally and EBGP for interatomic communications, etc.
Longest traceroute would have 104 hops.
Anyway at any temperature above absolute zero the BGP sessions would quickly go nuts trying to maintain an coherent routing picture. Major route
flapping, I expect.
2) How to exhaust the 128 bit IPv6 routing space, very easily
Assign addresses geographically.
International tier networks for international routing will be 48 bits. To the nearest byte level boundary we need 16 bits for countries and
16 bits for providers and 16 bits for the providers international routers. If you have massively parallel routers a provider could have move than 60000 or so routers, plus you have to allow for internal subneting.
This allows nice easy access lists to ban specific providers and countries from your internet space.
Then figure maybe 32 bits for regional ISPs to divide up their routers. Maybe 16 bits for different providers, maybe 16 bits for the routers themselves, probably subnetted.
Then figure maybe 32 bits for end user modem bank type things. Get rid of this dynamic PPP ip address garbage. With all the appliances and stuff having internet connectivity, you got at least one class C in every room of the house. Americans are ignorant tools. Figure your average house would need one big (sparse) class B. Ease configuration, try "upper 112 bits".X.Y.10 (=kitchen).1 (=sink)
So our full IPV6 address map could be
Country (16) - 2^8 is too low, 2^24 is too high
International Provider ID (AS number?) (16) AS # = 16 bits Subnetted international gateway routers (16) 254 gateway class Cs Regional provider ID (16) AS # = 16 bits Subnetted regional gateway routers (16) 254 class C's Enduser provider ID (16) AS # = 16 bits Enduser modem bank / whatever (16) Easily have 65000 lines in a central
office. Enduser (16) just to have a class B house with class C rooms.
Adds up to 128 bits.
I would argue you need class C gateways, because
1) 99.9999% of the population can't figure out what a
montioring and proxying stuff to "save the children" and "protect software jobs from piracy" "stop criminals". All those monitoring devices will use up IP space, and I assume they'd have to be installed at each gateway.
And you need at least a class C worth of gateways at each level, because I'm sure the entire USA has more than 256 under ocean fibers plus microwave uplink stations, at least. I suppose New York, NY has more than 250 optical interstate fibers, or will soon enough.
Not hard at all to fill up a 128 bit address space, and we haven't even tried autoconfiguration based upon MAC addresses and stuff. You could literally build a world wide autoconfigured plug and play internet, if you
had maybe 512 bits or so of addressing.
If massively parallel router architecture replaces the current "one big central router" concept, then all bets are off as to how many ip addresses would be required.
In other words, in an ideal world, 128 bits still won't cut it, but maybe 512 bits would be sufficient for a plug and play world wide internet.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
at this point in time IPv6 is not useful for anything other than reverse DNS for those people that aren't allowed to have reverse DNS (cable modem dynamic, etc).
No one has ipv6 that doesn't have ipv4 servers, there are few (if any) residential networking hardware manu's that distribute IPv6 enabled devices (for good reason, ipv6 will eliminate the need for NAT).
Win2k/XP is a PAIN IN THE ASS to setup for ipv6, I didn't even bother (I use it on the Linux side for reverse DNS on IRC) but the documentation available is near nothing for XP.
Someday it might come around and be useful, as of now, no.
The same goes for all site owners here.
Get your own free personal location tracker
There is an IPv6 capable putty client available at unfix.org.
:-)
It works well but it doesn't seem to like connecting to '4 hosts. (yet...) I renamed the IPv6 version to putty6.exe to get around that problem
This will speed up the takeover of decimal by hexadecimal. Disagree? Tell me in a web page--using your favorite color (ha ha).
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
you mean unix-like, not unix-derived, heh. /me looks around hoping SCO doesn't notice. jk.
Does it strike anyone as fucked up that the google ad collection across the top of slashdot is so often ads for blocking spam ?
I don't block slashdot's ads, because they are interesting one out of 50 times or so. But I don't like getting spammed with ads to block ad-spam.
I remember when slashdot used to have a sponsors page that was one giant list of all the banner ads they ran. If you remembered seeing something you could go there and look for it. Is that still around somewhere ? I saw an ad offering contract programming a few days ago, and I'd like to check it out.
When all of us linux guys who don't have any windows boxes, don't have any resdential networking hardware because we've allways used linux routers, start putting our P2P apps shared only on IPv6 you scrubs will jump on board.
A few things have to happen first, though. But it's getting there.
he just said that typing "ipv6 install" in a command prompt is difficult :) ;) .Net, just select it during install and have fun.
Dunno about you, but compiling a kernel is somewhat harder than that
And on
As for 2k it's a bit harder, then again it was not supported then either; but it sure is possible. Check the following FAQ
http://unfix.org
Speaking of Windows IPv6 programs...
:-)
Does anyone know why Mozilla under Linux (etc) systems supports IPv6 but Mozilla under Windows doesn't?
I'm really torn having to use Internet Explorer to visit IPv6 websites on my Windows computer
Bush is on fire and its not good for my lungs.
It's VERY simple to setup up IPv6 in WinXP, just type "ipv6 install" in a cmd, you can then configure it using the ivp6.exe , there's a bunch of ipv6 documentation available in XP.
Even a Linux user might be able to get this to work....
Apache 1.3 & Opera are the only ones listed that do not cuurently support IPV6 adequately. So what?!? This will be an issue when, 2010???? IPV6 is still far from wide spread implementation. When the time comes Opera will be updated with the necessary support. As for Apache. Well, hopefully by 2010 everyone will have stepped up to 2.x or maybe even 3.x.
It is possible to roll out IPV6 right now, the infrastructure and applications are all "capable". But it will require a great deal of effort and there is NO motivating factor, right now, to make everyone put forth the effort.
When the time comes that everyone HAS to implement IPV6 for some reason, they will. For now, the reason still isn't there and almost no one will.
When I try to connect to that site with Mozilla, I get an empty page back and their server is making connections back to the web server on my LAN.
Here are some very simple notes that I scratched about getting Redhat 8 working with IPv6 over IPv4. It's really that simple.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Windows programs use the Winsock API for network access. This means that since Winsock is IPV6 enabled, all the Windows applications are also IPV6 enabled. The only issues are going to be things like apps that require an IPV4 address be entered into a four octet field. Obviously an IPV6 address will not fit in such a field but the app could still work, depoending on what it does with the address. If the app relies in a DNS name in the field rather than the actual four octets, the it will work seemlessly through Winsock.
IPV6 isn't catching on because it will require a lot of work for EVERYONE to reconfigure EVERY machine on the netwaork. Right now there is NO driving reason to force this and no one wants to do it. Contrary to the myth that has been spouted for years now about the lack of IPV4 addresses, there is no shortage of IPV4 addresses right now. NAT and proxies have made it such that there are plenty of IP4 addresses to go around. At least for now.
Internet protocol, internet schmotocol. I always prefered NetBEUI
collins, brian
Matrix reloaded. When Trinity typed:
ssh 10.0.0.2
I realised that IPv6 is doomed.
With a name like Deep Space 6, they should really be using Cisco routers...
graspee
haha I see you incorporated some of my suggestions.
Just fix #4, the kernel is stable, its just that all of the OSS garbage software crashes; and #14 elaborate.
At least not until ISPs stop being jackasses.
My ISP used to offer all the addresses one could grab, so I just used my cable modem as a DHCP server for my lan like an idiot. The end result was that transfering a file from one computer to another went along at a slow crawl.
Companies can charge outrageous fees for more addresses. Now that they've stuck me to one, it would cost $150 to get two of the things.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
As a software programmer who has written IPv6 enabled applications what I'd really like to see is a similar report of the kernel support for IPv6 in addition to common applications, and for multiple operating systems.
For instance I took advantage of the superior multicasting capability of IPv6, but when porting to different Unixes I found varying level of support. Some just didn't do it, while others were missing some important APIs which made it easier. And some just have messed up C header files rather than faulting the kernel. IPv6 is supposed to have a whole new set of APIs which allow your application to do things like enumerate the various network adapters (important to know when multicasting). Name resolution is also done differently, and with more sane APIs.
The IETF IPv6 Working Group has been busy developing a lot of standards, and for the developer the two most important are RFC2553 for the basic sockets API, and RFC3542 for advanced sockets API. But many Unix vendors aren't up to the latest standard and still implement the older RFC's 2133 and 2292 respectively.
Oh, and on the applications side, many network administrative tools are missing from their list. What about netfilter (aka, iptables and iptables6), or tcpdump, nc, ping/ping6, or X Window? Also what about language support for those languages which have "super" libraries. Python's support for IPv6 is getting pretty strong, but I've found Java's support to be superficial (it only exposes say 10% of IPv6 functionality). Not to complain too much though, this as list is the most complete I've seen so far.
I'm seeing the same movement lately. About the same as people that migrated in the late 90s to Linux because Windows was to mainstream and to bloated in there opinion. Now the move is being taken to BSD (with FreeBSD as the main leader). It's obviously good for BSD, but probably there will be another movement in 5 years.
-- Cliff Albert
I NEVER said that "installing it" was difficult. I said that USING it was.
The commands to setup the interfaces are hard, the documentation is poor, etc.
I figured IPV6 was more like Deep Space Nine, neither one's going anywhere...
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
Thinking "worse is better" here... why hasn't anyone used IPv4 hosts as the prefixes for a much larger network? You could have bunches of hosts and networks inside each one, and the rest of the Internet wouldn't care. Only the endpoints would have to know about this scheme.
It's simple. Say you are 192.168.1.0/24 and you create a network with the prefix of 192.168.1.30. That goes into the usual 32 bit IPv4 destination field in the IP header, and all the existing routers use it to get packets to you.
Now, down in an IP option, or buried down in one of the protocol-level headers, you have the actual host address within that prefix. Call it 1.2.3.4. If you allow 32 bits at this second level, you now have about 4.2 billion usable addresses inside your network. Allow more and it grows even faster.
Need another set of 4.2 billion? Fine. Just create another prefix in IPv4 space.
Obviously this would require a bunch of changes in the IP stacks at the endpoints, but the networks and routers in the middle would have no idea what's going on. You'd also need some way to publish DNS entries for these second-level addresses, but that's not a huge problem.
I know this is a dirty, dirty hack, but think about it. What gets more acceptance? A from-scratch design that requires that everyone throw out everything, or something that can be implemented rapidly without getting help from anyone else? You could probably sit down and code this up in a couple of days tops. Compare that to how long it'll take the world to actually route IPv6 as well as it routes IPv4.
if you've got images turned off (or use links, lynx or w3m) the 'IPv6 Status Page' linked in the post is not going to make much sense.
Classic webmasturbator move, from folks who otherwise seem very together.
And all it needs is an alt attribute in the <img> tags.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
FAQ contains all the info for: .Net
6Wind (SixOS)
Cisco (IOS)
FreeBSD
Juniper (JunOS)
Linux - Debian
Linux - New - using iproute2
Linux - Old
NetBSD
OpenBSD
Solaris
Windows 98 / NT4 / 2000 / XP /
As for linux, you should have taken a look in the everlasting Peter Bieringer doc at The Linux Doc Project.
http://unfix.org
The fact that IPv6 support is still seen as optional may be part of the problem, the other part is that you can't actually send an IPv6 packet anywhere except by faking it over IPv4.
Porting an application to full IPv6 support shouldn't take more then a few hours, unless you were doing multicast in which case maybe a long day.
Then converting the backbone, and all the hardware, and all the ISP's, and all the DSL/cable modems, and all the operating systems... Yea right, THAT is gonna happen.
IPv6 is great for nerds, but it's a complete joke to everyone in the real world. Long live NAT.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
hey,whaddayaknow, it configures itself! damn, that was hard...
That's great! I agree it is easy to configure on a single box. But some of us have a few more boxes to be concerned about than the one on our desk.
Imagine the workload if you were responsible for reconfiguring/re-addessing 10,000 boxes, or at my former employer 120,000 boxes. Imagine if half of them required static addresses, not everything or everyone uses DHCP. Then think about the routers, switches, printers, alarm systems, time clocks, environmental control systems, monitoring systems, DNS records, firewall rules, VPNs, access servers, etc, etc, etc.
Personally, I am not looking forward to reconfiguring EVERYTHING in my organization, or even my home for that matter. It would be a LOT of work and for the next few years at least, IPV4 works fine and I don't have to do all that work.
Here's a mirror for you.
http://razor.ipv4.csbnet.se/www.deepspace6.net/doDebian is assessing *ALL* of its packages for IPv6 support. This is a huge task.
See this page for details:
http://debian.fabbione.net/stat/
If you want to go right to the package status/statistics, go here:
http://debdev.fabbione.net/cgi-bin/getstats
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
.. actually, the real reason IPv6 isn't catching on is because it's boring and nobody cares.
why should they? everything works fine as it is.
I am working in the network (Siegmund, why did I just type "notwork"? Any other psychologist here who can enlighten me on this?) department of a company, which very much relies on its international network. And I would be very happy, if I could advise my CIO to make an IPv6-Rollout on our network. But I can't.
This list is showing us, that there are a lot of open source applications already supporting IPv6. Fine, that means I can do test installations in a lab. But in normal business there will be many years until I can do anything in IPv6.
The reasons are simple: There are about 17,000 PCs in our network, and they all run windows. Though some newer versions of this OS support IPv6, they do not support the features that would be needed, like end to end encryption (the NULL-encryption built into the stack does not get me anywhere).
In addition to this most applications do not support it at all. First thing I can think of is our main business application, running on AS/400. I guess the developers of this did not hear of v6 at all. And then there are all the hardware devices, currently being addressed by v4: Airline Ticket Printers, Barcodescanners, Networkprinters, securitysystems at our doors, switches, CPE-Routers etc.
Currently this list shows us what we knew beforehand: IPv6 is a nice playground for nerds. And nerds should play with it, if they do not expect to retire within the next 15years. But today it is far from being usable in normal business. There are only very few companies, the smaller the better, which have sufficiently controllable environment to be able to roll it out.
What we would need today, to be able to roll it out in the near future (within the next 5 to 10 years) is a decision from our managements. The decision has to be not to make any investments in new hard- or software unless it is capable of IPv6. With that decision we could starve out all the v4-only devices over a period of time. But nobody makes the decision currently, again for good reasons: The v4-Stuff works. Additionally there are many cheap devices available on the market and they do not support v6. Pay 3 times the money for a printer, only to have support for a technology like v6? I mean get real, it is very unsure that it will be in mass market within the next 10 years. High risk of investing into something completely useless here.
So we have a simple problem here: Nobody builds v6 technology (at least nobody with commercial interests in it) because nobody buys it. Nobody buys it, because it is not produced in large numbers. (nobody that is with some exceptions, but I'm talking real mass market devices, and these are not Cisco-Routers or something. Compare the number of printer sold to the number of routers sold, to get my point).
Nils
Win2k/XP is a PAIN IN THE ASS to setup for ipv6
Not unless you have some psychotic sense of what IPv6 "setup" is. Getting it working on XP is as easy as ipv6 install at a cmd prompt. It even does 6to4 tunnelling automatically if there's no IPv6 router nearby.
imho it was extremely stupid to not embed the ipv4 into the ipv6 address space.
the way ipv6 was designed it requires _simultaneous_ upgrades on both ends, which is very unlikely to happen.
if ipv4 was simply part of the ipv6 address space and namespace, one could use an ipv6 client to connect to "legacy" (non-ipv6) hosts, without all the quirkiness and error-proneness of bolted-on ipv4.
what's now happening is that servers are supposed to get upgraded first. guess what, it doesnt happen. now if microsoft made ipv6 the default protocol in their next OS release and their users could *still* connect to all ipv4 servers that would be an entirely different story!
--florian