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Dept. of Defense IPv6 Interoperabilty Test Begins
securitas writes "The Department of Defense has launched Phase I of its delayed IPv6 interoperability test (mirror) in a six-month project dubbed Moonv6. It is the largest North American IPv6 test ever and its goal is to evaluate IPv6 for 'network-centric military operations.'
Phase II was originally scheduled to begin in January 2004 but may be delayed due to the late start of the current test.
'IPv4 addresses are 32 bits long, enough for around 4 billion unique addresses.' In contrast, the IPv6 address length is '128 bits, or 340 billion billion billion billion unique addresses.'
Experts hope this will solve a predicted IP address shortage as more devices are created to use the Internet."
I hope the DOD isn't building a network larger than this, why the heck would they waste the money on millions of machines that would be needed to be larger than the 6bone was. I can see claims that it is the largest single entity deployment of IPv6 - now that would be a useful claim
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
I am still not giving up my NAT!
Be it the cause, or just fall-out, I don't see NAT's disapearing. In fact, I see quite the opposite. Now that protocols or firewalls are getting smarter with NAT, I can see a lot less need for public address space.
And before someone mentions their cell phones, exactly who plans on hosting services from their phones anyways?
Implementing Phone based IPv4 private IP's is just as difficult as implementing IPv6 public IP's. Each phone will have a MAC, and you will have a DHCP-like mechanism to establish an ip/route/subnet, etc..
The only difference is that you can't host services on your phone that are internet addressable. Darn.
Bye!
There are a lot of good reasons for everyone to upgrade. There is a good article over at CommsWorld about this. Basically the main reason for upgrading is innovation. Once everyone can attach a public IP address to all of their devices, there will be a lot of cool stuff that will come out.
(Note: the article was originally linked to from CircleID)
IPv6 should eliminate NATs. The people who enjoy the false security (prevention of inbound connections) that NAT provides will keep using them.
However, I see no reason for most people to use them. With this many IP addresses, there's no reason why every connection can't be given 255 (or more) IPs. For example, I connect with my cable modem. Where's the hurt in giving me 255 IPs to use? If this is the standard, filtering shouldn't be any problem. And say I've got 10 computers on a LAN. Rather than use a NAT, I can simply assign every machine their own IP.
Every machine can now create incoming and outgoing connections on all ports, as they (and TCP/IP) were designed to do in the first place. This will be a wonderful thing for many home users who simply won't pay for more IPs, and for businesses who will no longer have to pay as much for many IPs.
IP address space is currently scarce. Limited supply with increase in demand = increase in price. IPv6 will dramatically increase the supply, decreasing the price, and making (most) everybody happy.
Whatever happened to IPv5? What was special about it?
I'm not sure if IPv5 really existed using that name, and if it did, it only existed at an experimental level. After some quick "googling", it seems "IPv5" was the real-time streaming protocol using version number 5 and running alongside IP, having some parts in common. Some people might have called it "IPv5", and "IPv6" was probably chosen to avoid confusion with this one. Here's more info about the protocol:
- Experimental Internet Stream Protocol, Version 2 (ST-II)
- Internet Stream Protocol Version 2 (ST2)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
340 billion billion billion billion = 340*(10^9)^4) = 340*10^36 = 340 undecillion.
Rank Presidents by th
For anyone who wants to 'pronounce' the number:
, 45 6
2^128 is:
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211
Which is:
340 undecillion,
282 decillion,
366 nonillion,
920 octillion,
938 septillion,
463 sextillion,
463 quintillion,
374 quadrillion,
607 trillion,
431 billion,
768 million,
211 thousand,
456.
IPv6 improves upon IPv4 in a number of ways:
One of the principle design goals of IPv6 was to simplify the workload for routers. IPv6 achieves this in a number of ways:
1. Part of the reason that IP addresses are so long is that part of the address space is being used for an improved addressing hierarchy. In turn, this will allow routers to maintain much shorter routing tables.
2. IPv6 routers not longer fragment IP datagrams
3. IP Header checksums are been removed
As many people have noted, the IPv6 addressing structure supports a much larger number of IP addresses. Experts are predicting that the number of IP addresses required are going to increase enormously in a relatively short amount of time. Most people are familiar with cell phone adoption rates and the impact on IP address assignment. Potentially a more interesting example is the impact of new PC bus architectures on networking models. Intel has announced a new bus architecture titled PC-Express. What makes PC Expressing interesting is that it applies a data networking model to the PC bus. [Thinking addresses, flow control, retransmissions, etc] Where this gets interesting is that PC Express can be scaled from the level of a PC bus up to an enterprise class switching fabric. Once this gets widely deployed, there is no reason why the processor on one system could not control the video card on another. We are rapidly migrating to a model in which all sorts of peripherals - processors, sound cards, hard drives - will need to be configured with their own IP addresses.
IPv6 provides much better support for autoconfiguration. This is critically important for the consumer electronics manufacturers in the Asia/Pacific.
IPv6 requires IPSec, so we might finally get pervasive network layer security. I'll be very happy to get rid of abominations like "SSL VPNs".
There is a LOT of good stuff coming down the pike.
Ease of routing is the reason. With 64 bits you have to be careful how many IPs you give to each ISP. If you give too few you have to renumber or add disjoint addresses, polluting the routing table. If you give too many, you could still run out. You would also give just a few addresses to end users, say 256. That makes it impossible to do proper routing at the customer end, and addresses still have to be carefully assigned by hand or by DHCP. With 128 bits you can afford to embed the MAC address in the IP address, guaranteeing that it is unique. Goodbye to (stateful) DHCP.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Um...actualy yes, but not for that reason. According to cisco recommendations for ipv6 access services, it is suggested that a /48 subnet is given to each access server. The access server can then proceed to assign a /64 subnet to each ppp client (modem,ISDN,adsl you name it) that connects. The IPCP phase of the ppp will be abolished hence the address,prefix,default route and mtu assignment in the link will be done through address autoconfiguration which is the default method in ipv6. One good thing is that the access server will actually be able to remember the subnet you were given last time, so your address will be mostly the same for large periods of time. Also you won't have to use nat (unless a /64 prefix is not enough for you!!!) as you can use any number of machines you like behind the connection.
Oh, one last thing, your ethernet network card may have only 48 bits address, but the 48 bit address is converted to a 64 bit address which is called EUI-64 address. This is done to include in the EUI-64 space all kinds of link technologies, not only ethernet but also token ring etc
The reason is that 64 bits are used for the network part and the remaining 64 bits -- automatically derived from the interface MAC address -- comprise the host part. This allows stateless autoconfiguration, which makes IPv6 networks easier to administer.
Yes, you can use hexadecimal numbers, and I think I'd recommend it too. :-)
::ffff:1.2.3.4. ::1 in shorthand form. ::0.
There are some "address concatenation" features/rules to make IPv6 addresses shorter.
- You can skip leading zeroes.
- One sequence of 16 bit blocks of zeroes can be replaced by a double colon -- "::", but not more than once.
Some examples:
- An IPv4-mapped IPv6 address:
- IPv6 address 3ffe:ffff:100:f101:0:0:0:1 becomes 3ffe:ffff:100:f101::1 in short form.
- 127.0.0.1 in IPv4 (localhost), i.e. 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001 in IPv6, becomes
- 0.0.0.0 in IPv4 (anyhost), i.e. 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000 in IPv6, becomes
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
> Experts hope this will solve a predicted IP address shortage
This "hope" is the same as "hoping" that two randomly-selected files don't have exactly the same MD5 hash. (IPv6 addresses and MD5 hashes both have 128 bits.)
People could even generate their own IPv6 addresses using MD5 applied on a sufficient source of entropy, and the chance of a collision would be far less than the chance of an asteroid destroying the earth next year.
Of course, you can Google for yourself, but it's apparent from some previous posts that some of you don't have access to Google. So, to you, cheers.
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. E. Tufte
Shortage, perhaps not, however why do I have to pay more for more than 5 static IPs with SBC? Why does another local SDSL provider (Arrival.net) charge $5/month/ip? If there was no shortage, and some ISPs were just giving away addresses like it was nothing, then I would say it wasn't a problem. Right now, the problem is that there is a finite amount of addresses, so ISPs will only give out as many as you can justify, as they have to justify them to ARIN/RIPE/APNIC.
/48. That's /16 worth of /64s (/64s being what you commonly assign to a LAN to use automatically addressing with EUI-64). In other words, I've got the equivalent of a Class B worth of networks to play with, or 65536 /64 netblocks, just for my company.
/64 and then have a nearly unlimited amount of nodes online without the ISP having to micromanage IP allocations.
/64 for a single end user or a /48 for a company, you just do it. Yes, a company with a /48 should allocate it internally as wisely as possible to minimize routing tables, etc., but that's a given already with IPv4 RFC1918 addressing.
The same is somewhat true of IPv6 allocations, except that the allocations are HUGE in comparison. From Sprintv6 we received a
The advantage with IPv6 deployments is that every subscriber of an ISP could easily have a
My point is that you don't think about if you can justify allocating a