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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."
This page/site already does it.
Yes. An open proxy server on a topic just mentioned by /.
I can't imagine that's abusable. I mean, nobody would embed ads in their IPv6 proxy if it became too popular, right?
Just a thought.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
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.
--
Use your VPS proxy powers for the powers of good
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
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.
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.
Okay, I'll answer my own question. They have them for www.ipv6.org, but not for ipv6.org itself.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
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.
40% of the IPv4 address space is unallocated, and much of the allocated space is probably unused.
The intention with IPv6 is that you won't have "unroutable" networks, like we do with private nets such as 10.x.x.x and 192.168.x.x. Everything will have a globally unique IPv6 address. There was in the original spec what were called a "site-local" addresses, which were private addresses not routed to the outside much like their IPv4 analogues, but those have been deprecated.
However, you'll have plenty of addresses because, in the current incarnation, you're not allocated a single address, but rather you are allocated a subnetwork, which is currently 2^64 addresses. So the first 64 bits are assigned to you by your ISP, and then the second 64 bits are yours to do with as you like.
So that addresses the question of NAT: there won't be any lack of IP addresses necessitating its use. I am only addressing the use of NAT as a way around limited address space, and not any of the other uses for which NAT has.
But what about DHCP? IPv6 comes with something more elementary, called "stateless autoconfiguration." Basically, the router constantly broadcasts your "prefix" to the subnetwork, which is the first 64 bit half of your 128 bit address your ISP assigns you. The machine then takes its subnetwork ID (the MAC address), and sets the second 64 bits to a function of that. In the case of Ethernet, it isn't the 48-bit Ethernet MAC address verbatim, but a published function of it. It's called stateless because it's always a function of whatever the network's prefix is plus some kind of subnet ID, and there's no concept of leases, or any of the state a DHCP server maintains.
There is not yet an equivalent mechanism for "stateful autoconfiguration," which is more what DHCP is, where you can automatically assign an arbitrary address to a client. You can of course statically configure an interface to have a specific address, but there is no automated mechanism to always assign a particular autoconfigured client a particular address you designate. There are proposed standards for an IPv6 version of DHCP, however, and I expect eventually such a beast will eventually come around.
Oh, yeah, I forgot one more point:
Whether or not your "prefix" changes each time will be much the same as whether or not your single IPv4 address changes each time you connect. Either your ISP statically assigns you one (perhaps for an extra fee), or it doesn't. But that 64-bit prefix will be your global identifier that gives you an address space, much as the single IPv4 address is your global identifier now, except your address space is only 1 address.
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)
I don't even have internet on my mobile phone yet, let alone my watch. I bow to your uber-geekiness.
Language students: Don't try to learn English here. This ain't it.
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.
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
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.
Bah, that's nothing. My proxy converts first posts on slashdot into insightful comments!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.