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."

Comments

Useful

[dimmu]

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.

Only Unix derived systems?

[Gavin Rogers]

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?)

The reason that IPv6 isn't catching on

[CausticWindow]

enumeration addressing and routing

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 /30 address means 2) Facist countries like North Korea and the USA will need all kinds of
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.

IPv6 useful? Not really.

[garcia]

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.

Challenge to Slashdot

[caluml]

Slashdot - put your money where your mouth is, and implement IPv6 here. Run 6 over 4 if you don't want to get native IPv6 connectivity.

The same goes for all site owners here.

Re:putty

[DMDx86]

geez, as soon as I try to visit that website, I get return port scans from them. How nice (NOT)!

Where's the status of stack features?

[dmeranda]

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.

Re:Even though...

[dimmu]

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.