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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."

34 of 342 comments (clear)

  1. This is one area the US could get left behind... by bc90021 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...if we don't quickly develop a plan to start working with IPv6. Most Pacific rim countries have already started, and for them, it is a matter of necessity. Since the US was responsible for a lot of the early internet (DARPA), we have the vast majority of the IPv4 addresses. Other countries (such as China) see IPv6 as a way to "equal the playing field" in addition to solving their "how do I get enough IPs for 1.2 billion people" problem.

  2. Would it surprise anyone... by _PimpDaddy7_ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If China, South Korea, Japan move ahead of the US, with regard to broadband, the internet, and amount of homes hooked up to broadband, etc.?

    If so how will this change our direction, or would it?

    1. Re:Would it surprise anyone... by Hott+of+the+World · · Score: 4, Insightful

      As long as companies feel perfectly fine in charging $60, $70, and even $100 USD for sub-quality cable service (or DSL), The US is going to remain behind.

      --
      | - | - |
    2. Re:Would it surprise anyone... by javilon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Nowadays, the US seems to think that the only important thing is military power.

      --


      When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
    3. Re:Would it surprise anyone... by rifter · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Nowadays, the US seems to think that the only important thing is military power.

      Perhaps, but our military power comes from high technology. The US does not have a huge population or a very large military force in terms of troops on the ground, but we do have technological superiority which allows those troops to be more effective. Some of this superiority includes communication technology. Remember that the internet started as a military project, as were some of the earliest computers.

      It therefore makes perfect sense that a more militaristic US should still lead the way in terms of tech. The Cold War and the World War preceding it spawned technological booms. The current move towad Mars and Moon exploration are reactions to fears that China will overtake us in space technology. All of this leads to a confluence of the drives toward both technological and military superiority.

  3. IPv4 good enough? by PatrickThomson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    OK, we don't have anough addresses. Ok, lets firewall and subnet. Outcome? I can't connect directly to my friends's computer, and I can't run games (or any other) servers. Decentralised P2P suffers similarly. Rock on IPv6! I have my own IP address, unlike about 1/2 the people at my university and all my friends at other universities, and it's damn useful. Rock on IPv6!

    --
    I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
    1. Re:IPv4 good enough? by AKnightCowboy · · Score: 4, Insightful
      I can't connect directly to my friends's computer, and I can't run games (or any other) servers. Decentralised P2P suffers similarly.

      Well, speaking from a business standpoint, I couldn't care less if people can't connect directly to our workstations from the Internet. The machines we want people to talk to are on the DMZ. Everything else is clients and internal protected servers (file servers, databases, etc.). IPv6 won't catch on until firewall software is updated to interoperate with it unfortunately. Don't expect people to have a change of heart and to suddenly go back to the bad old days of every system being wide open on the wild west Internet.

    2. Re:IPv4 good enough? by sapped · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The problem with this is the daylight robbery that ISP's engage in to provide these addresses to us. Unless prices come down significantly, my entire house will still be sitting behind a router with a single IP going off to my ISP.

      For the absurd price differences I will live with the inconvenience.

    3. Re:IPv4 good enough? by happyfrogcow · · Score: 2, Insightful

      just because two computers can talk to each other directly doesn't mean they are "wide open on the wild west Internet". but you were speaking from a business standpoint. I'm speaking from a technical aspect as well as a community aspect. the control of who gets to publish information on the internet is restricted by things like NAT which doesn't allow direct connections, and rediculous Terms of Use by ISP that do not allow the running of servers on your paid for connection. Media companies like Time Warner want to restrict who gets to create the information, hence their "Roadrunner" cable service Terms of Use. Give me the "wild west Internet" and remember that the pen is mightier than the sword.

    4. Re:IPv4 good enough? by Rich0 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Right now I'm typing on a computer which is on a routable class-A IP address. You couldn't ping it if you wanted to - the firewall blocks any access except to a few proxy servers in the DMZ. However, if we ever had a merger we wouldn't have to run around remapping every subnet in the company as a result - our addresses are unique worldwide.

      IPv6 really is a solution to a lot of problems. You can assign a 16-bit subnet to every floor in your building and never worry about running out of IPs, and never have routing complications resulting from splitting up subnets/etc. If everybody in the USA could have their own class A, that would be great. As it is, IPv4 can't handle it, but IPv6 can.

  4. Re:You're kidding, right? by d_strand · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Parent is obviously trolling but just in case not:

    the only thing that would happen if the US decided to shut down 'their' internet is that the rest of the world would lose access to US sites (when we've reconfigured some routers).

  5. Bottleneck by savagedome · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If you look at the OSes used to access Google (which is a good indicator of total OSes used), Win98 is listed at the top with 27%. And with Microsoft extending support, it creates a speedbump.

  6. Better security? by GunR · · Score: 4, Insightful

    IPv6 may have a better and safer design, but have you ever considered the software that's going to use it? I see networkrelated security issues popping up "all the time" with IPv4 software. Now, what will happen when we do move over to IPv6, which is in fact a more complex protocol? I have a feeling we will be seeing quite a few security reports on not only the various stack implementations, but also on userspace programs.

    1. Re:Better security? by jheiss · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Sure, there will be some issues to be worked out with the stacks. But this argument about IPv6 providing lots of opportunties for bugs in userspace apps seems specious to me. (I've seen others make it too, so I'm not just picking on you.) For example, in Java you generally need no code changes at all to support IPv6. Even in C you don't go poking around at IP addresses much. Mostly you just get a pointer to a addr struct of some sort and pass it along to the next system function without inspecting it. Outside of the stack and libc I don't see much opportunity for new bugs.

  7. Start faking the... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    .. MAC address. now they can not only ban the IP they can ban a specific MAC.

    Its in the IPv6 headers, watch more MAC filtering take place on an internet scale.

  8. Re:This is one area the US could get left behind.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Notice how North American-based networking gear manufacturers (Cisco, Nortel, et al) are all offering IPv6-ready devices? Ironically, it will be North Americans that will be late to the party.

    IPv6 is a solution looking for a problem. The IP address exhaustion scare of 4 or 5 years ago is a moot point these days after the dot com bombs, the explosion of usage of NAT, etc. People are beginning to realize there's NO point in having every device use an Internet accessible IP address. Our entire campus of 5,000 machines is behind 2 IP addresses.

  9. Why is NAT a "bad thing"? by Dlugar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I guess I'm not quite sure I "get it", but why is NAT necessarily a "bad thing"? Because it's not "how it's supposed to be"? Because it's klugey? Bad design? Insecure?

    I guess my thinking is, if I've got a house full of electronic devices (let's say a dozen computers, an IP-enabled toaster, fridge, television, etc.) I don't really need or want world-visible IP addresses on all of them. I'd like them to be just 10.* or whatever IP addresses, and if any communication ever needs to go on between them and the Internet they should necessarily go through some central house-server/router/firewall. I should have the option of having, say, three of the computers have world-visible IP addresses, but the rest having local 10.* addresses. But why make my toaster be visible to the Internet when, really, there's no need for him to be?

    Or am I missing something terribly here?

    Not to say that IPv6 isn't a good thing ... it basically needs to happen sooner or later. But what's wrong with IPv6 plus keeping NAT around? Or is it just the excitement of "We don't have to anymore!"?

    Dlugar

    --
    Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
    1. Re:Why is NAT a "bad thing"? by Hatta · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There is absolutely no point in IPv6+NAT. If having your toaster publicly addressable bothers you, stick it behind a firewall and block the ports. Address translation and port blocking are completely orthogonal. It's only out of convenience that firewalls do both.

      --
      Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
    2. Re:Why is NAT a "bad thing"? by Sique · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Imagine you are standing in your favourite supermarket, and you wonder if you should buy eggs, because you want to bake a cake for the weekend. With a public address for your fridge you could check remotely, if you have enough eggs at home. With a 10.* IP address you can't.

      Think about what an address is good for: to address something. Giving it an unique identifier, so your request goes to the right place. There are definitely more than 2^32 objects in the world to be addressed. Think about embedding phone numbers in IP, as necessary with all the gimmicky mobile phones.
      I guess the phone numbers alone exhaust the IPv4 space.

      Think about people on aircrafts, if you could reach them because every flight seat has its own address (no need to go to the tower, speak to the pilot, sending the stewardess...) Think about utilities remotely querying the counters for electricity, water, gas and heating in each home. Of course a single utility could use 10.* addresses, but what if there is a merger? Or the billing gets outsourced to another company?

      Think about computer management, where every device (processor, harddrive, usb port, monitor...) has its own address, no need to fiddle around with nonstandard SNMP extensions, just query the device directly.

      Think about giving every postal address an IPv6 address, thus improving the automatical sorting at the postal services. People don't need to know the actual IPv6 address themselves, let the postal guys do the "DNS" ;)

      NAT is fine for a network with a few hosts and hundreds of clients, because the clients initiate the request. NAT is unusable in any environment, where you have lots of little servers and services, which are just listening for requests.

      --
      .sig: Sique *sigh*
  10. Multicast comment by webhat · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Whether it is IPv4 or IPv6; multicast will not be useful until we stop building star shaped networks and build meshing network.

    Besides from the added bonus of making the networks failover. (c;

    --
    'I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds'
  11. Civil Rights Issue by fadethepolice · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I think that switching to IPv6 is really a civil rights issue. The United Nations supports the "free and unfettered communication" of people as a basic civil right. There is no way a system where people have to pay for IP addresses can in any way be "free and unfettered". The switch should be done as quickly and smoothly as is possible to ensure that every individual who wants to express their views on the internet can do so. People should also be albe to get IPv6 addresses on demand. This is the best way IMO to ensure that free speech is protected. Imagine if you had to pay for you street address to receive mail.

  12. Re:IP6s problem is the numeric addresses r so comp by Dielectric · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well, by your post, you probably haven't grokked the true beauty of IPV6. There are a lot of mechanisms in place to address your issues. Host configuration will be done by querying an upstream router. The only people that really have to key in the huge hex addy are the root guys, maybe. Then they'll probably automate it or at least use cut-n-paste. But seriously, IPV6 is quite beautiful, and really has a lot of thought put into the headers and routing to make everything work seamlessly without massive amounts of configuration.

  13. Re:This is one area the US could get left behind.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The "Third World" of over 4 billion persons being the best example of your thesis?

  14. Re:IP6s problem is the numeric addresses r so comp by Alioth · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Oh for heaven's sake, that's a pretty lame excuse.

    I didn't find it particularly difficult to set my entire server network running with IPv6. DNS wasn't hard to set up (both forward and PTR). Routing was no more difficult than IPv4. My website is available over IPv6 and even the forum is IPv6 aware (including having an IPv6 whois).

    Once it's set up in DNS, you seldom have to touch it again - that's what DNS is there for.

  15. Irrelevant... by Pii · · Score: 4, Insightful
    While your point is not without merit (I'm a fan of choosing a technology based on its applicability, rather than its relative coolness), this is a little deeper than some "golly-gee-whiz fancy IP addressing."

    It's vital to Americans that the United States maintain it's lead as a technological innovator, because from a global economic perspective, what do we have left?

    We don't really build anything here anymore. We have gotten out of the business or agriculture (We could, even now, provide enough food to end world hunger, but we don't.). Metaphorically, we are becoming a nation of gurus and burger flippers. We have people that can afford expensive cars, and people that wash them.

    Our niche lies in development. If we are no longer the leader in that space, then the United States will be doomed to global mediocrity.

    Domestically, we already have a kind of class warfare between the "Haves" and the "Have nots" (I don't particularly subscribe to that... It's closer to "Haves" and "Have laters." Even poor Americans have televisions and refridgerators.). Having enjoyed a prosperous history, America as a nation could not stomache becoming a nation of "Have nots."

    IPv6 is coming... In some places, it's already arrived. In others, it'll be there Real Soon Now. It needs to find it's way here, and the sooner the better, for three reasons:

    • It's inevitable...
    • The US would be wise to stay on the cutting edge of technology from a global economic perspective...
    • The longer we delay, the greater the difficulty in making the transition.

    Making the switch today would be traumatic, because there are a lot of devices that need to be upgraded, modified, or otherwise reconfigured.

    Further delay will only mean that there are even more devices that will need to be changed in the future. The Internet continues to grow explosively.

    A conversion to IPv6 now would result in far less duplication of effort later.

    --
    For those that would die defending it, Freedom
    has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
  16. Re:Global IPv6 Service launch event in Brussels by jguthrie · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Bluefirebird wrote:
    There is still some way to go on IPv6 but the main problem is the lack of IPv6 link requests from users that makes the ISPs ignore IPv6 as an important issue.

    This is why I can't take the IPV6 folks seriously. Demand for addresses comes from the leaves, not the root. So what if every backbone provider has native IPv6 routing throughout they're backbones? They're not the ones who use addresses by the ton!

    I've got an IPv6 tunnel and addresses from a TLA, but I can't get native IPv6 access because neither the cable modem that I use nor the equipment it talks to upstream knows anything about IPv6. In fact, there is little, if any, end user WAN equipment that speaks IPv6 natively. Availability of that kind of equipment is necessary before a "global service launch" has any kind of meaning.

  17. Re:I despise IPv6 and I think it's horrid... by gbjbaanb · · Score: 2, Insightful

    what you're really saying is that Sun's IPv6 implementation and tools are sadly lacking from a usability point of view. Shame on Sun.

    I've no doubt, Sun thought that a 'GUID' per address was a good idea, and that no-one would ever want anything different... but you describe exactly why you *would* want somethign else.

    Maybe its just that the tools for managing the addresses/network are poor.

    (lol. maybe you should upgrade to Microsoft :)

  18. Tunneling by Detritus · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Initially, I think what is needed is a cheap home IPv6 router that will automatically tunnel over the cable/DSL IPv4 network to a IPv6 gateway, run by another party. The cable/DSL operators may not like it, as many prohibit VPNs on their current networks. A ban may not be very enforceable.

    This echos the early days of the Internet, where IPv4 was layered on top of DECnet, SNA, X.25 and other protocols.

    I wouldn't expect to see IPv6 in a firmware update. You will probably have to buy a new box to get IPv6 support.

    The interesting thing will be the reaction of the mass-market ISPs, especially cable operators, who tend to view their residential customers as peons down on the farm.

    --
    Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
  19. How do I sign up? by dynamo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Ok, my os (MacOS 10.3.2), a lot of my software, and my personal philosophy all support IPv6. Where are the publicly accessable routers? Where do I write to get an IP block assigned to me? I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for my cable company or workplace to start passing out longer IPs, the majority of the users probably have trouble with it as it is. But there has GOT to be some free service provider (ala DynDNS) passing out v6 addresses or at least agreeing to route to me if I give them my hardware assigned one and a v4 routing path.. I don't know all the details of the protocol but I doubt they would have missed the opportunity to turn all those NAT-like addresses into real, routable ones. Help!!

  20. Re:This is one area the US could get left behind.. by jav1231 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I disagree. New technology brings new exploits and/or means to exploit. It's a myth to think exploits are going to hit a ceiling. As a given hacker's understanding of a given protocol or technology increases so will the chance of him cracking it somehow. While Code Red in its current incarnation may have been stimied, it is far more likely that a new "Code Red" would be implemented. In the short term, obscurity would be on your side but the more pervasive a technology the more likely it will be targetted.

  21. Re:This is one area the US could get left behind.. by ClioCJS · · Score: 2, Insightful

    With multicasting, I bet a worm could spread through an IPv6 network much faster than an IPv4 network.

    --
    -Clio
    Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
    Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
  22. Availability of small scale hardware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Sure Cisco makes enormous routers with IPv6 capabilities. But who makes an IPv6-enabled DSL modem?

    As an ISP we would dearly like to go IPv6 across our network, but it's hard to find an IPv6 replacement for the $20 DSL modems we supply to our customers today.

    And of course, we will need legacy IPv4 support for all the Win9x boxes out there.

  23. Code by rs79 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Do you really care how much you dislike or like the author of some code?

    Edison was an insufferable jerk. Do you use light bulbs?

    Often time you may also find people respond in kind. I've never pissed off Jim Fleming or Dan Bernstein and they've been remarkably civil to me for over a decade. Shrug.

    --
    Need Mercedes parts ?
  24. Re:IP6s problem is much deeper than that. by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What header? All but the first and last router don't care about anything but the source and destination address, and most times not about the source address at all. So what else is there to simplify?

    You're ignoring header checksums and fragmentation.

    Yes, a lot of IPv4 features were simply taken out of IPv6, but that doesn't make IPv6 unnecessary. Taking a feature out of IPv4 would result in something that's not compatible with IPv4, thus you'd have to give it a new name and upgrade all the equipment. So why not increase the address size while we're at it and call the result IPv6?