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An Introduction to IPv6
Playboy writes "Here is a great introduction to IPv6 in general, the technological background, the reasons for the move and the effects this will have on networks. Understandable for network novices like me but still includes many details on the technological side of things."
The :: rule really pisses me off, making it much harder for me to remember IPv6 addresses than just a simple 32 char hex number would be. Yes, _I_ can expand my own in all cases - but that doesn't help me when reading other people's. Bit like perl - I can read my perl, but other people's styles are almost guaranteed to confuse me. (note: it might be telling that I like lisp, apl and forth in programming languages, the less syntax the better, really - people are different).
If this is a measure of when people will start using IPv6, the answer is today. It's already there. Every major TCP/IP stack out there supports IPv6. Tunnel networks exist through IPv4. Internet 2 uses it exclusively.
When are corporations going to start moving to IPv6? Who knows...that will depend on individual needs, but in general, large corporations aren't going to see a big need to move towards IPv6 any time soon. Without end user by in, who is going to 'force' people to use IPv6?
Yes, IPv4 space is running out. It has been for a long time. That's why Network Address Translation and private address space are so common in today's world. They may be hacks, but they do the trick. Where's the business case involved in reorganizing major networks?
My UID is the product of 2 primes.
The article instantly delcares that IPv4 was short sighted because it didn't allow for enough IP address but is IPv6 any better? The articles states that it will allow every person in the world to have close to 10 IPs but with the expanding products that carry addresses could this be short sighted as well? Think about the products that people are getting or are supposed to have within the next 20 years.
Phone (Voip)
Cell
Computer (could be many)
TV (could potentially need IP)
Webcams
then we have the possible use that people keep proclaiming will happen
Fridges, and other appliances. This list could continue to grow and I could potentially see 100 being the closer value for many folks in many years. This being said of course not every person in the world is going to need lost of IP addy's since many people dont even need to use one now.
But just think how fast the growth of Ip-Address need has grown in the past 30 years and use that to predict the growth for the next 30. As soon as there are available addresses people will use them. The only reason they aren't being used as liberally now is because they are not available.
We might look back in 10 years and think how short sighted IPv6 was and why another 2 byes weren't just added to the protocol to make its growth laster for many, many,.... years.
Oh, and I almost skipped the obligatory bashing - his first reference at the bottom of the article is Understanding IPv6 by Microsoft Press.
Now if we can just find out what happend to Netscape v5.
As for the shortages, you think that it's a good idea to have scarcity in the IP market just so people will be encouraged to run NAT? I think its presumptious of you to force conditions on me, personally I'd love to have IPs for each machine in my house, but I can't because IP addresses are hard to come by.
/16's to stop their worms from hammering me.
Sysadmins and regular Slashdot readers are in the minority. Personally I'd rather have the Comcast weenies behind a single firewall... Then I wouldn't have to block entire
Last time I looked at IPv6, it seemed there was no way to multi-home hosts to two or more ISPs. Of course, this capability is essential for IPv6 to succeed. BGP has scaled pretty well thus far, but it is impossible to support peering on IPv6 like it is done on today's internet due to the size of routing tables and it's heirarchical nature. Anyone familiar with this problem or know if any progress has been made?
Don't need to move entirely- just get a NAT that supports IPv4 on the LAN side and IPv6 on the WAN side. No problem.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I was under the impression that a 128 bit addressing scheme was enough to directly address every molecule in the Universe with some bits left over. Why then is IPv6 limited to 60 thousand million addresses? I understand that some addresses cannot be used because of multicast addresses and some other things like that, but what other sort of limits reduces the available range down to such a (relatively) small number?
As a Comcast customer, I resemble that remark! :) Anyway, there aren't any other options in this area for something reasonably cost effective, for the bandwidth that I get. There's a large wireless network in the nearby area, but they won't deal with individuals, and barely offer better than 56k dialup speeds.
As someone who wishes they weren't supporting Comcast, and is reasonably technically-oriented, what alternatives could anybody suggest?
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Sorry but MIT, Apple, etc, as much as I respect their contributions to the human race, do not need a Class A. Allow for the redistribution of the IPs and we should be good to go for quite some time
last time i checked, there were only 4 class A's left (stanford was the fifth, but they gave theirs up a few years ago i believe)... so thats ~70mil addresses to give back. i dont believe that would makes us "good to go for quite some time"
I thought it amazing that the designers of IP carved out a 32-bit address rather than 16. When there was just a couple of universities on the internet, who woulda though 4 billion addresses would eventually be needed? But our author says with IP v6, we get enough addresses for every person on the planet to have 10 of their own. Let's see... 5 billion people, 10 addresses each... 50 billion? IP v6 only offers up 10 times the address space? I don't think so!
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
Actually 6to4 Just Works(tm) in most cases. You can't get much easier than that. That is the purpose of 6to4: the special anycast prefix guarantees that you do not need special configuration or special ISP support.
Putting up an IPv6-only website would be pointless. The idea is for IPv6 transition to be seamless: a web server admin adds IPv6 to an existing website, and nobody except the IPv6 users will notice a difference.
My own website supports IPv6, and it gets a few hits daily from IPv6 users. It also supports IPv4, of course. And neither set of users ever need know, or care, about my web server setup. It Just Works(tm), and will continue Just Working as the world moves to IPv6.
Apache does proxy caching and http acceleration quite nicely, and has stable IPv6 support.
I agree that squid lags behind, but overall you picked a poor example. Most of the core Internet software, both client and server, either has production-stable IPv6 support, or is close to it.
Almost. I got a /64 from Hurricane Electric into my FreeBSD firewall/router. The problem is that I have three distinct subnets from that router:
- My LAN
- A DMZ
- My WLAN
Autoconfig seems to require aSo, I'm stuck with using DHCP6 or static configuration to assign IPv6 addresses at hope. I wish you could universally say that IPv6 autoconfiguration works, but there are some relatively common circumstances that give it fits.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The current network providers have little incentive to move to IPv6 because they make money through the artificial scarcity of IP addresses. They like the current situation because they have an advantage - new ISPs have trouble entering the market due to the lack of large contiguous IP blocks. When we start falling behind the rest of the world (since countries without enough IPs to go around have no reason to stick with IPv4), maybe they'll start switching to IPv6.
NAT is a solution, and it may be usefull in IPv6 networks as well as IPv4 for security reasons, but it shouldn't be forced on people (it interferes with the end-to-end philosophy of the internet). Also, not all countries have enough IPs for a one NAT per household policy.
-jim
There is one small thing that the the article leaves out; where the 64-bit "Interface ID" that is the second half of the address will come from. It isn't going to be some essentially random number assigned to that computer as it is for IPv4 (e.g *.001, *.027, *.145). The first 64 bits of the IPv6 address is routing information to get you to the right subnet, like the first 24 bits in IPv4 (e.g. 145.67.56.*). But unlike IPv4, that has only 8 bits left to identify the particular machine on the subnet, IPv6 has 64 bits available.
This vastly larger space doesn't just allow for larger subnets, it is so big that it allows the values to unique, not just on the subnet but globally. So how are these unique values to be chosen? From the unique IDs embedded in the NIC hardware of course (i.e. your ethernet cards MAC address or the EUI-64 standard that will eventually replace it). So the two halves of the IPv6 address will contain routing information (where you are) and a unique ID (irespective of where you are).
As wireless becomes more unbiquitous in the future, using IPv4 addresses to track people will get more difficult. IPv6 provides the solution. As someone connects with a wireless device at different locations only the first 64 bits of routing information will change, the second 64 bits, the unique ID will stay the same. Who you are (or at least what NIC you are using) and where you are is plastered one every IPv6 packet you send.
Spliting public addresses (Internet routable) and private addresses (non-Internet routable) addresses from each other is a good idea. NAT is the main way to do that.
As a system administrator, you probably know that your networking equipment is aware of this public/private split, and that this makes your job of configuring everything easier and more secure.
As a system administrator, you know how to route ports from different machines through 1 IP. You pick gear that can do the work for you, so having 1 port isn't much of an issue.
So, as a system administrator...why do I have to even mention this?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Sysadmins and regular Slashdot readers are in the minority. Personally I'd rather have the Comcast weenies behind a single firewall... Then I wouldn't have to block entire /16's to stop their worms from hammering me.
IPV6 will stop this as its almost impossible to write a worm that would fine many machines to hit.