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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."
...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.
libertarianswag.com
another short article from GCN on the subject.
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?
Not something I saw mentioned in the article links, but it's worth bearing in mind that the support of IPv6 is mandated in the protocol stack definitions of the 3GPP standards. This means, to cut a long story short, that all 3G telecoms kit (handsets, basestations and switchgear) will support IPv6 out of the box. At least in Europe and Japan.
:)
So, when it finally stops being vapourware, and assuming that people actually buy into this technology, I'd say that was a fairly good driver for other industries to adopt it too. Not looking forward to the transition though.
These sigs are more interesting tha
It's about time we move on from the archaic state of the internet we're at right now. Besides the content, nothing's really changed in 10 years, and it needs to. With the current prolonged influx of security problems caused by an infrastructure that was never meant to handle the things we do to it, I'd say it's about time someone big pushes IPv6.
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.
The telecoms sat on their thumbs during the dot-com-boom on IPv6, they won't be too eager to spend the money now that cash is tight.
Trolling is a art,
How did they manage to put six carriers in five? Perhaps if you use NAT you can fit six integers in five... Or is it CCT (Chinese Carrier Translation)? "Five key Chinese carriers, including..." 1. China Telecom 2. China Unicom 3. China Netcom/CSTNET 4. China Mobile 5. China RailCom 6. CERNET (China Education and Research Network) "Including" even implies there are more... OK, sorry. I'm tired.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
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.
With ip4 its failry easy to set up a box yourself with dns, hosts file etc because of the simplicity of the numeric addresses. However good :: as a shortcut for a block of zeros and leaving it at that.
ip6 might be in other respects , in this respect however its a nightmare. A 128 bit number converted to hexadecimal is NOT a pretty site and leaves a huge scope for typos and other cock-ups.
Ok , this isn't a reason not to use it but it should have been something the designers could have addressed other than just having
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
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.
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?
... 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!"?
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
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
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);}
The same charges were leveled at IPv4 back when it came out -- it was considerably longer than was considered necessary (32-bits? That's way too much space!), it's a far bigger number than is convienently held in short-term memory, and yet, according to you, it's simple.
Funny how people adapt.
Between that and the mystic thing called "cut and paste" that's available on pretty much every platform known to man nowadays, this is a real non-issue.
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.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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:
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.
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.
I assume you meant to say "The US is less densely populated than Europe and Asia".
Otherwise, I'd beg to differ.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
There are good reasons to move to IPv6, including security, multicasting, simplified header structures, and better routing to name a few.
And the number one reason to move to IPv6 is so we can stop having so many stories about it here! Please, for the love of all that is good, we must adopt IPv6 before slashdot is buried beneath a tsunami of IPv6 stories.