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Accelerating IPv6 Adoption With Proxy Servers
jgarzik writes "IPv6 presents a catch-22: the most popular web sites on the Internet
don't have any incentive to switch to IPv6 until a large portion
of their userbase is on IPv6, and their user base does not have a
large incentive to switch to IPv6 until many of the popular Internet
destinations support IPv6. My proposed solution is simple: Configure a proxy server that
serves IPv6 requests, passing those requests through
to underlying IPv4-only servers that not have yet been transitioned
to IPv6.
This article describes how to configure Apache's proxy server to fill this role, and suggests a few ideas for use."
Make sure they're open to the public too. You don't want to be a stingy admin right? You should share your proxy server with the world.
This page/site already does it.
By having an open proxy anyone can send/receive data via your proxy server (duh). There are implications: e.g. I've seen someone's server bandwidth being used to serve images in a spam (pr0n) email.
If you don't want people hiving off your bandwidth and potentially using your server's bandwidth for puposes you wouldn't normally approve of, then consider controlling your proxy access.
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Use your VPS proxy powers for the powers of good
Is it just me? I can't see any AAAA records for ipv6.org itself. I would have thought they would be the FIRST to change.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
An extra hop to go through on my web surfing adventure...NOT ON MY WATCH!
IPv6 was primarily designed to solve a *problem*.
That problem was IPv4 address space exhaustion.
If the problem isn't hurting people on either side (client or server), then there is no reason for them to migrate to IPv6.
For people in certain heavy net using countries (such as Japan and S. Korea) which have received a smaller slice of the IPv4 pie, then there is more incentive to move; for the vast bulk of the world there is very little incentive to move to IPv6.
The solution is more ISP support. This is where you vote with your wallet. If your ISP doesn't support IPv6, find another. Same goes if you're hosting a Web site. They will eventually catch on and begin offering IPv6 more widely.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
IPv6 will take over just like anything else. When it reaches critical mass and demand forces it. Probably starting in SE Asia and moving westward.
I'm not drunk, I just have a speech impediment. And a stomach virus. And an inner ear infection.
Silly people.
A reverse proxy server (http accelerator) must be open to the public.
However, that does not mean the server is an "open proxy"... the proxy configuration only proxies for the specific web sites listed in the configuration file.
It seems to me that it would be really useful if the little off the shelf linksys/dlink/netgear/etc. routers did ipv6. I don't see it really being used until hardware starts using it.
On top of that it's my understanding that NAT should go away with ipv6. What is everyone with an internal network to do for IPs then? I've heard you can get free ipv6 blocks right now but they can be revoked once everything goes "live" but I don't want to deal with that.
Ultimately I guess I really want NAT ipv4 for inside my network until my hardware can hand out ipv6 addresses that I own forever.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
From there:"
Why does this service exist?
There appears to be a chicken and egg problem in deploying IPv6; ISP's serving endusers don't want to do it yet because there isn't any need for it from their clients, Hosting companies don't do it yet because there isn't any demand yet either from clients... Thus, we made this gateway, which allows users who do have IPv6 to get to all the content in the IPv4 world. If you don't have IPv6 connectivity (yet) you can of course try the SixXS Tunnel Broker.
This is essentially the same observation and the same solution except that it focuses on getting ISPs (clients) to support IPv6 rather than servers.
Nice try, but that's not a Catch-22.
A Catch-22 is when the solution creates the problem. From the book (yes, there was a book) if the doctor diagnosed you as crazy, you didn't have to fly any more bombing missions. The catch was that you would have to be diagnosed crazy by a doctor to want to fly more bombing missions. Thus, by achieving the status of "unfit to fly", you were actually certifying yourself to fly.
What we have here with IPv6 is two parties with no immediate reward for an investment. If one of them stepped forward, the other would step forward, and the world would enjoy IPv6. There is nothing about this that is remotely close to a Catch-22.
That killer app may be VoIP. If everyone wants their own IPv6 phone number.
Or that killer app may be someone coming up with an awesome spam/virus/security solution that requires features found in IPv6.
But just wanting people to switch for no good reason will never work. Market forces...
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
A reverse proxy or http accelerator with IPv6 on one side and IPv4 on the other.
That is mightily impressive and you certainly are a genious of our time.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
And get me some IPv6 addresses? Which, if any, ISPs/hosting companies support IPv6? Who do I talk to to reserve me a chunk of space so when my bacasswords ISP gets in line, I can get me some public IPs for my boxen at home?
40% of the IPv4 address space is unallocated, and much of the allocated space is probably unused.
Sounds like a funny solution to me. Why not just multi-home the webservers? No extra hardware, extra point of failure, simpler, less dependency, etc.
The issue with ipv6 adoption is not an issue of servers or clients, it's an issue of routers.
ISP's need to adopt ipv6.
Tunnelling won't push adoption, but it might help YOU if you need to work with someone who is using ipv6.
Sure, China and Korea would like billions upon billions of addresses, but that's because they've spammed their IPv4 address space into every blacklist on Earth.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Isn't this just 6to4 which has been around for ages?
The IP numbering allocation in IPv6 is hierarchal, which they are not in IPv4. The first 16 bits are the FP and Top Level Address (allocated to "trunk" cos like MCI), the next is a 32 byt "Next Level Addres" allocated to ISPs, and finally "Sight Level Address"es allocated to people like you and me.
At the moment many routing tables on the trunks have thousands of entries, increasing as allocation of IPv4 becomes more and more fragmented, significantly slowing down the trunks. IPv6 will mean considerably fewer routing table entries there, increasing performance.
Although the raw IPv6 header is larger than the minimum IPv4 header, a system of, in effect, encapsulating parts of the headers in the data packet that are not needed in routing exists where it does not in IPv4 (such as those needed in TCP). The savings there should more than make up for the degregation in increasing the minimum size of 20 to a fixed size of 40.
It is a misconception that IPv4 produces 4 billion IP addresses for the world to use. By the time all the university's Class A addresses and all the wasted IP addresses of those who have networks with machines missing are considered, all the network and bradcast addresses and so on are also considered you will be lucky to see 3 billion. In fact I would not be surprised if the figure was nearer 2. This may be enough for the Western World but not for Asia as well.
IPv6 is also neccessary to adopt the up and coming internet technologies, such as those that use MultiCast (IPv4 implementation of this will NEVER get adopted). I agree with you that it is the routers that are holding this back - but once an area is enjoying the benefits of IPv6 then I believe it will rapidly spread.
My 2c worth....
Web Sig: Eddy Currents
This may be a bit OT, but I'm reading many people talking about NAT like it's some horrible thing.
As a longtime NAT user I like the fact that just one of my computers is hooked to the real internet and the others can't be diddled by outside computers.
Even if I had unlimited IPs, I'd still probably do it this way.
vk.
Most people know that IPv6 delivers a bigger address space, and IPSec security. But what ever happened to its multicast tech? Is anyone sending a single multimedia stream over IPv6 to multiple recipients, without having a separately addressed packet stream like in IPv4? That feature would be the most timely, arriving just as large audiences are developing for online streaming multimedia content.
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make install -not war
Of course, we now know that NOT having proxies has been a disasterous mistake. I can only hope the IPv6 community in general can accept that.
IPv6 is more than just addresses. You have utterly transparent mobile IP. You have automatic network configuration. Anycasting allows you to request a service and have the closest server respond, without you needing to know where that server is. You have almost-mandatory IPSec - which is more than just encryption, it authenticates that the machines are who they say they are.
IPv6 is a valuable tool. Back in the early days, I ran the first registered IPv6 node in Britain. At its peak, I had 10 tunnels running across Europe and the US. That was using IPv6 under Linux 2.0.20, using the-then VERY experimental IPv6 patches that existed. It started with static routes, but I later moved to MRT and finally Zebra.
MRT and Zebra are now fast-decaying abandoned project, as far as I can tell. The only Open Source software router I can find is Click, and whilst it's good, it doesn't have the developer- or user-base to be confident that it can really do more than be a nice experimental project.
(Any distro authors out there SHOULD put it in their distro, if for no other reason than the fact that Linux will cease to be useful as a router platform, if the last remaining projects don't get adopted.)
IPv6 would benefit from having an IPv6-over-IPv4 protocol defined, much in the same way that SIT defines IPv4-over-IPv6. Again, I've argued this from the start. The idea of a migration to IPv6 will NOT be realised or realisable until the average person can plug in an IPv6 address into a browser or some other network software, without having to care about the fact that it is IPv6, and see a result.
Once IPv6 is truly transparent to the "unwashed masses", you'll start to see people adopting it. After all, it IS easier to configure and maintain. That would make people like ISPs very happy. Less time wasted on network maintenance means more profit for them. And nobody is averse to getting a little richer, a little quicker, when it costs nothing to do. You even have the bonus that it's legal and ethical (though some wouldn't care about that part).
Because IPv6 supports host authentication, it's great for Joe/Jane Average, too. It's harder to spoof mail addresses, when the mail server can validate the transmitting machine. That won't eliminate spam, but it will make using fake addresses slightly harder, which will give people a little more confidence that the sender is who they say they are.
Because multicasting is part of the standard, it also means that video streaming to multiple recipients will be less savage on the network. Once people realise that you can get damn near TV-quality reception by multicast, versus 5 seconds a frame (with tiny, low-grade frames) via a typical webcast, who in their right minds will go back to that worn-out way?
(And by near-TV standard, I'm talking NTSC or PAL resolution at 15 to 20 frames per second. The bandwidth would be impossible to maintain, if the server had to do point-to-point to every recipient, but it's very doable over a multicast transmission, and it's very normal for any of the multicasts advertised using SDR or similar tools.)
The technology that people have, right now, versus the technology researchers have had for decades is pathetic. What you can buy as top-of-the-line off-the-shelf today was commonplace in most research labs 10-15 years ago. Some of the slow adoption comes from wanting to really test the technology. Most comes from corporations dragging their feet and exploiting the time-lag to squeeze their victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers for every penny they h
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Network folks at Brown actually have a clue. You do not. NAT is network address translator, and the common MTU is around 1450.
People will use IPv6 when they need it; when every device you have needs it's own internet connection, and routing/NAT will no longer do- providers will switch to IPv6, it'll happen basically overnight, though the use of a consortium.
And even then most people will just take there shiny IPv6 address, NAT it and use IPv4 internally.
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post
After creating these gateways what is the incentive for users to switch? What is the incentive for popular destinations to switch? In both cases I think the answer is none.
No. The answer to rapid IPV6 deployment is for someone to create an IPV6 only P2P network with a ferocious amount of free porn and mp3s. The next day everyone will be upgraded to IPV6.
MOD me up this is both funny and the truth!
Okay, I won't argue with you there.
It's deliberate overkill. It allows things like 64-bit subnets, which in turn allow for stateful autoconfiguration. It also allows for large chunks of address space that won't be allocated at all; if it turns out in the future that our current allocation method is inadequate for our needs, we can simply devise a new allocation method in this empty space, rather than having to migrate to a whole new version of IP.
Yes, if an IPv6 router had to hold nearly 150,000 routes in memory like it does in the current IPv4 world, it would be massive. Fortunately, IPv6 is designed to have properly aggregated addresses, so that things are much more hierarchical, and routing tables can be stored much more efficiently.
Aside from the fact that more and more connections are using much larger MTUs these days, IPv6 also supports more aggressive header compression than IPv4 did, often resulting in similarly compact headers.
\\'
ISPs do provide IPv6 addresses for free when they provide IPv4 addresses. Every IPv4 address has a corresponding IPv6 address. One of the points of moving to a huge address space is that you can assign each old address a new address and not use up a significant portion of the new address space.
What would be interesting is if ISPs would assign a static IPv6 address to customers who have dynamic IPv4 addresses. If the ISP has IPv6 at all, they have a huge block of addresses, which they could trivially assign to their customers by account number. And then there would be people who would set up IPv6-only sites or sites where the IPv6 address was more reliable, because the address was free.
Please, correct me if I am wrong.
Isn't the internet IPv4 only and IPv6 is archieved thru
encapsulations like The 6Bone ?
If so, what's the point of worring about sites not being in the 6bone?
If I am wrong, can you post some links please?
Thanks
If you're so confident that your dissertation has academic merit, why don't you put your name to your post?
1) No arguments, mainly because I don't know about the architectures of the Cisco and Juniper PEs used.
2) For a post-grad student, you don't seem to know much about IPv4. Almost 17 million addresses taken by each of 127/8 and 10/8. Another million gone with 172.16/12. 192.168/16 rounds that all out to about 36 million. Almost one percent of the address space gone, just on reserved ranges. The experimental ranges take some more space again. Then there're all the network and broadcast addresses, with CIDR making that problem worse, even while it does solve the issue of giving organisations blocks of space that're wildly in excess of their requirements.
3) I dunno who makes your NIC, but all mine have a 48-bit MAC.
IPv6 does nice aggregation. Routers only need to know about their immediate network, everything else they see as an aggregation. So rather than knowing about every
Plus, RAM's cheap. Even the Kingston stuff you need for Ciscos. Couple cheap memory with the very good route summarisation in the IPv6 spec, and it's a non-issue.
4) The current IP network has these restrictions. With jumbo frame and the various other techniques now in existence, you don't think it's possible that part of the migration to IPv6 will be to throw a few more bytes into the packet size?
I can't belive you got a +4 (Informative) for that load of tripe. No wonder people have no respect for the moderators!
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
"Cisco routers suck at IPv6."
Actually, you could probably just shorten this to "Cisco routers suck."
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
A few quick issues with your points, just be glad I'm not on your review board, it wouldn't be pretty.
Oh, and if you actually read said RFC you would learn that it is not a solution, it is a bandaid. Just read the abstract:
Seriously, what problem is this solution solving?
:)
I run ipv6 here at my site, every PC ont the LAN is using it.
Inside the LAN its almost totaly native IPv6. Only the printers are IPv4 only. When surfing the web, the users browser does a AAAA DNS lookup, if it succeeds, then it does a native IPv6 connection. If you try to connect to IPv4 only site (very common), then the PC initiates an IPv4 connection. Our Internet router provides the IPv6 tunnel and does NAT'ing for IPv4. Its all totaly transparent, requiring no end-user setup or mucking around with.
I regularily use IPv6 websites, and I don't notice that they are IPv6 unless a) the website notifies me I'm connecting over IPv6 (eg http://www.ipv6.org/) or b) i look at the traffic going through.
The only thing I could do to "improve" the situation here would be to have my ISP IPv6 aware, so I didn't need to use a tunnel broker.
The way that would work would be the ISP would issue a single IPv4 address and a IPv6 prefix on connect. Then the would would be a great place
All my applications I write are IPv6 aware, infact they are primarily IPv6 applications with fallback to IPv4.
Most applications you use today are IPv6 aware. The next step for IPv6 is hosting companies and ISPs proving IPv6 natively. This will happen once the backbone routers are fully IPv6 aware.
Nick
I use to have a funny sig, but slash cut it off, and I forgot what the punchline was.
At the current rate of non-progress, IPv6 will never reach critical mass. IPv6 needs a jumpstart.
IPv6 is getting its jumpstart. From the upcoming mobile IP vendors. They want IPv6 for tracking their phones/modems (for which they can't buy enough IPv4 address space to be confident of not hitting a wall). So they have made it a checkbox on equipment acquisition (i.e. you don't sell 'em a router unless it has IPv6 - period).
Since they're talking equipment purchase totaling into the billions this is NOT something the equipment vendors are ignoring.
Once there's a bunch of endpoints out there that can only be reached by IPv6 (or NAT/tunnel servers bridging to it) there will be a lot of pressure to migrate the rest of the net.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Subject line says it all.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
i remember my professor introducing me to ip6 a few years ago, and one of the major things he touched on was tunneling through ip4 networks. soooo what was the problem, and why does this article make it seem like it needs more software? did that not end up implemented by default?
BGP currently shows roughly 1.3B addresses as being routable. That represents a little more than 25% of the IPv4 space.
/8's around and a ton of academic institutions (MIT) and large corporations (Eli Lilly, etc.) that received /8 assignments back in the day.
/8 recipients from that time wont either.
e
There are alot of special use
I can not imagine MIT utilizing 16.7M IP's, and most other
For more information see http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-spac
Just as a comment: "some people" probably amounts to 0.01% of paying customers, and is therefore totally insignificant. Even networking professionals - who understand well why IPv6 is better - realize that IPv6 can not happen overnight, and there is really no clear need for it today. Majority of people just buy a $99 wireless router (NAT) from Linksys, and they are all set on their own Class A network. What else is there for them to ask for?
It is also understood that IPv6 shines in a lot of areas (which were mentioned more than once in this discussion.) However none of them are mission-critical, or even noticeable to the average customer. For example, IPv4 NATs are not VoIP friendly - so there are software and hardware solutions already (UPnP, STUN, TCP etc.) and they work on existing networks just fine.
If you want my guess, the star of IPv6 will never rise. It is past its time already. People were concerned about address spaces many years ago, but now it seems everyone is happy, and nobody wants to buy into IPv6.
"But," one says, "the IPv4 address space will be exhausted!" Yes, it will be. A new protocol will replace IPv4. But it may not be IPv6 at all. Who knows? I think IPv4 will be firmly with us for 10 to 20 years from now. Then we shall see. IPv6, after all, is a souped-up IPv4, and it is not all that different from its parent. Maybe something else, something better, will be needed? I'd say so. Maybe they will dump fixed 128-bit addresses, and make them variable length instead, so that new addresses may be allocated where they are needed... Maybe some other crazy scheme will be devised. But IPv6 at this time solves no real problem, and that's why it is not popular.
And if telecoms want IPv6 on their mobile phones... by all means, please do. It's just very likely that the IPv6 will terminate at Verizon's 6->4 proxy, and that's the end of it. This would be practical anyway to cache the data, since I guess majority of users access relatively small number of sites (CNN, Yahoo, MapQuest etc.) and they are mostly cacheable - and the telecom wants to insert their own ads too!
Subject line says it most, anyway.
how to invest, a novice's guide
I would guess that the killer app for IPv6 would be instant messaging. A lot of people use it, and a lot of them use it to send files. Configuring a client to be able to receive files from behind a NAT can be a pain (how many home users know enough to set up port forwarding?). The same is true, although to a lesser extent, of peer to peer file trading clients (which are certainly popular amongst the less technically competent). Anything that requires the user to be able to accept incoming connections is trivial with IPv6, and complicated with IPv4+NAT (even with UPnP, which is by no means universal).
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Maybe they will dump fixed 128-bit addresses, and make them variable length instead, so that new addresses may be allocated where they are needed...
This is really a terrific idea... Picture higher-level routers that only recognize the first IPv4 part of the address and pass packets on to the leaf routers. Such a protocol would require only minimal and thus cheap upgrade of firmware for most hardware on the Internet, not to mention that their 32-bit CPU's would still perfectly do the job.
And so the whole address space would become a tree, just like the domain name system.
(After all, for simplicity of the user-end routing devices, each node's MAC address can be appended to the 4-byte IP address, for example, which will turn IPv4 into the forgotten IPX... The first 2-3 bytes of the MAC address can be changed in each node to reflect the local tree structure in your LAN/WAN. Something like NAT, but with a bit more complicated IPX-like structure in your private network... TCPX?)
As for other "benefits" of IPv6... Autoconfiguration is dangerous since it can be spoofed in large and weakly controlled LAN's. I never really trust DHCP, UPnP and other "smart" guys and try to avoid them whenever possible.
Did anyone else wonder, "whatever happened to IPv5?"?
Well, this seems to be the answer...
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny