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."

Comments

I despise IPv6 and I think it's horrid...

[NitroWolf]

Yes, that's right... I think IPv6 is a stupid, stupid move.

While the expanded address space is good, that is the only advantage I can see to IPv6. As a system admin, and one of the people responsible for moving my company to IPv6, I've taken a couple training courses on it, and I have found it wanting... alot.

From an end user standpoint, IPv6 is no big deal. I'm not worried about that. But from a sysadmin standpoint, IPv6 is going to be an utter troubleshooting nightmare. 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. From a troubleshooting standpoint, it's just plain illogical.

I dread the day we have to officially switch over to IPv6, because keeping the lists of ip's in use on the network, then finding that list (have to *always* use search and find, as opposed to scrolling to the appropriate place on the list).. and if you mistype an hextet (since it's not an octet!), trying to track that down is going to be a nightmare.

I'm sure there's a lot I don't know about IPv6, but everything I've read on it, and everything I've experienced with it has proven it to be just plain stupid. Like I said, the expanded address space is nice, but it's a dumb protocol from an networking standpoint. There are plenty of things they could have done to make it better and easier to manage and I guess that's my major beef. IPv6 is a thousand times more difficult to manage for a large network than IPv4 is. You'd think managment should get easier, but it doesn't, and it just pisses me off.

I think we're going to have a lot of people suprised by how unwieldy IPv6 truely is, once they have to begin deployment... but by then, it will be too late.

What I think will eventually happen is the large backbone providers and large companies will deploy IPv6 externally, and internally (behind the corporate firewall, etc...) we'll see IPv6 networks on private subnets, just because they will be easier to manage. So I don't believe IPv6 will change much for the end user, and most of them will still be on IPv4 networks, with the encumbant problems we currently have.

Re:This is one area the US could get left behind..

[tundog]

Nonesense. While IPv6 was noble concept, it's outlived it's usefulness. The days of network layer modifications are over. Everything is handled at the application layer these days. Back when IPv6 was conceived, it was conceivable that you could 'change' the internet. Those days are gone.

See this