Slashdot Mirror


The State of IPv6

Gnea writes submits this article "about the current state of IPv6, the Next Generation of Internet Protocol version 6, mostly according to Cisco. It's also an interesting roadmap about where and how IPv6 will proliferate around the world.. Apparently China has a grasp already with Korea and Japan, who leads the "Five key Chinese carriers, including China Telecom, China Unicom, China Netcom/CSTNET, China Mobile, China RailCom and CERNET (China Education and Research Network), are slated to join CNGI, building their own national IPv6 backbone independently, while interconnecting with at least two IPv6 IX." while Verio appears to have already tuned into some turnkey solutions recently that are publicly available." And SgtChaireBourne writes "ZDNet is reporting that the EU and South Korea will collaborate to develop IPv6 applications and services. The agreement was finalized at the Global IPv6 Service Launch Event in Belgium last week. There are good reasons to move to IPv6, including security, multicasting, simplified header structures, and better routing to name a few."

7 of 342 comments (clear)

  1. Here's... by ArmenTanzarian · · Score: 4, Informative

    another short article from GCN on the subject.

  2. IPv6 is MUCH more than a replacement for IPv4 by anti-NAT · · Score: 5, Informative

    Keith Moore, an author/co-author of a number of RFCs on IPv6 and other topics, posted the following to the IETF mailing list, regarding what IPv6 will enable and can be used for.

    The comment was in response to somebody's claim that residential users would be happy with NAT, and non-globally routable IP addresses for their "internal" networks.

    Re: dubious assumptions about IPv6 (was death of the Internet)

    That's like saying residential telephone users don't need to have a phone number at which they can be reached. (after all, the purpose of their residential phones is to call businesses for the purpose of obtaining services, right?)

    There are lots of apps that would be valuable to residential users if residential users had reachable IP addresses. check the status of your alarm system, or your roast in the oven, or your freezer's inventory. Grab a picture from your baby-cam while you're out for dinner and have left the kid with the baby sitter. Reset the thermostat if you're going to be out of town longer than you thought. Do all of these from your portable phone/PDA which is running guess what? -- IPv6.

    Also, don't assume that IPv6 addresses will be used by people or their personal computers. IPv6 enables lots and lots of individually addressable devices which don't have to be associated with individuals. Every km of highway can have an addressable traffic sensor so that police and emergency crews know exactly when and where a traffic accident happened. Every streetlight can be monitored to see if it is functioning properly or if it needs service. Every traffic signal can be made individually controllable so that they can dynamically adapt to changes in traffic patterns. For reasons like this, the demand for IPv6 addresses won't be determined by some linear multiple of the number of humans on the planet.

    Finally, don't assume that IPv6 devices will require the support burdens we associate with PCs. PCs as we currently know them are dinosaurs. Appliances that talk to the network aren't going to need the same kind of technical hand-holding that PCs do (because they'd never succeed if they did), and neither will the devices that replace what we now think of as personal computers.

    IPv6 will eventually replace IPv4, but it's misleading to think of IPv6 as just a replacement for IPv4. By the time IPv6 replaces IPv4, we won't recognize the IPv6 network as something that resembles what the IPv4 network is used for today. Even though the underlying technology is very similar, IPv6 is really a new kind of network, one that enables things that were really never possible with IPv4 on a large scale.

    --
    The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
  3. No IPv8 by crow · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you read the various followups to that posting you linked to, you'll see that there are two separate IPv8s. One was a proposal that competed with IPv6 and lost. It's dead. The other is a joke.

    So the deal is that there is not, in fact, a serious IPv8 effort underway.

  4. Also, there are more addresses! by Emil+Brink · · Score: 4, Informative
    There are good reasons to move to IPv6, including security, multicasting, simplified header structures, and better routing to name a few.

    Um, is this just an oversight, or is the poster so US-centered (s)he doesn't realize that one of the major reasons why IPv6 is interesting to us in that weird "foreign" part of the world is that is expands the address space?

    I don't recall how large the US allocation of IPv4 addresses is, but I'm pretty sure it's at least 25% of the space, and that's being conservative. Since the US doesn't even have 1/16th of the population, that's obviously b0rken, and IPv6 is a more or less natural fix.

    Now, I'm Swedish, and I'm sure we have enough IP addresses for our puny country, but the nations of Asia probably can't say the same. Thus, more interest in switching over sooner, and less in the US where there's no (or less) pressure from simply running out of addresses.

    --
    main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
  5. Re:I despise IPv6 and I think it's horrid... by Alioth · · Score: 5, Informative

    The biggest problem that immediately jumps out at you with IPv6 is the fact that individual addresses in a subnet have absolutely no relation to each other. So John in the cube next to me will have an entirely different address than I do, and it will have no relation to me.


    I'm sorry, but that's unadulterated bullshit. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from assigning adjacent addresses, or using the phone number of the cube-owner, or any other addressing scheme you want for your IPv6 addressing scheme.

    For simplicity, on my server network, I simply assigned 2001:470:1f01:109::1 for the first machine, 2001:470:1f01:109::2 for the second, all the way onto the sixth, which (predictably) is 2001:470:1f01:109::6. I could have quite easily used the MAC address instead if I wanted to. Or used 2001:470:1f01:109::dead:beef and 2001:470:1f01:109::baad:f00d if I really wanted. Or set part of the last 64 bits to be telephone numbers. Or...and the list goes on.

    IPv6 doe NOT put any constraints on the way you assign addresses in a subnet.

    How you manage your network is up to you. If you chose lame IPv6 allocations, that's your fault, not the protocol's fault.
  6. ALL miss the point: IPsec by johnjones · · Score: 3, Informative

    ok

    all I really want is IPsec

    (and maybe MobileIP)

    imagine that all your IP conections are secure !
    screw that crap 802.11 security just let the router only allow IPsec connections and if you want to lock it down ask for the machines keys and only allow these

    why is this so hard ?

    IPsec is in all modern linux *BSD *ix MacOS and Win2k WinXP (win98 with download util)

    really I have not seen a laptop with a OS that could not use IPsec

    IPsec is manditory part of IPv6

    why do these people miss the point ?

    regards

    John Jones

  7. Re:IPv4 good enough? by asdfghjklqwertyuiop · · Score: 3, Informative

    IPv6 won't catch on until firewall software is updated to interoperate with it unfortunately.

    Most firewall software already does work with it. It is supported by linux, all the BSDs, Solaris, Win2k+, OS X. All the major router manufaturers support it. The only exception I can think of off the top of my head are those $50 disposable broadband routers that you get at consumer electronics places...