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Federal Agencies Must Use IPv6 by 2008
MoiTominator writes "The White House Office of Management and Budget announced on Wednesday that all federal agencies must deploy IPv6 by June 2008. So far, Defense is the only agency which has made any progress toward implementing the new protocol." From the article: "While we know that IPv6 technologies are deployed throughout the government we do not know specifically which ones, how many there are, or precisely where they are located...For cost, the agencies must report on estimates for planning, infrastructure acquisition, training and risk mitigation."
While IPv6 fixes many problems in IPv4, the developed world will not
embrace IPv6 until many shortcomings in the protocol are addressed.
1. Cisco routers suck at IPv6. Many of cisco's routers use the
router's CPU to process IPv6 packets instead of the fast-path. The
reasons for this are explained in the next few points. While Juniper's
routers are substantially better at IPv6 than cisco's, IT managers are
often restrained by insane corporate policy that dictactes the use of
cisco.
2. There are too many addresses. There are 16.7 million addresses per
square metre of the earth's surface, including the oceans. This is
overkill. The world does not need more than the 4 billion addresses
available with IPv4, and I challenge you to come up with an
application that requires that many. Assuming that you can actually
come up with one, it could easily be solved with Network Address
Translation, or NAT as it is commonly known.
3. IPv6 addresses are too large. An IPv6 address is 128 bits in size -
64 bits of which are reserved for addressing hosts, and 64 bits of
which are reserved for routing. One thing that is cool with IPv6 is
address autoconfiguration. Take your 56-bit MAC address on your
ethernet card, ask for 64-bits of network prefix, bang it together
with EUI-64 and you are set. The problem with a 64-bit network prefix
is that routing tables become massive. Just do the math and you'll see
that extreme amounts of memory are required to hold routing tables.
4. The IPv6 header is too large. An IPv4 header compact at 20 bytes in
length, while the IPv6 is bloated at 40 bytes. That's right people,
each one of your IP packets has twice as much overhead as before.
While this may not sound much, IP networks have a requirement that the
minimum MTU supported must be 576 bytes. That means that where you
might have got 556 bytes of data in your IP packets, you now get 536
bytes. This means that downloading stuff will take 3.4% longer.
Sure, IPv6 allows for nice hacks like those described in this article,
but is it really ready for prime time?
NAT should take care of any lack of IP-space.
Its nice to see that government is implementing IPv6, but I'm more curious as to when it will be implemented by the private sector and widely used. (Is there an FCC ruling or guidelines for transition time somewhere or are we just oozing towards it?)
Those who study history are doomed to watch others repeat it.
Which nerd lobbied hard and sucked enough cock to get that announcement?
You'd think out of all the things that are important, IPv6 would not be one of them. Good on them though. It takes one hell of a push to get people out of the mediocre and onto something better because it offers no immediate benefit to them.
Another choice quote: Microsoft's next operating system, dubbed Longhorn, will be "fully IPv6-capable," Khaki said. That should really be: Microsoft's next operating system, dubbed Longhorn, will be "fully IPv6-capable, unless that gets dropped too..." Khaki said.
Although there has been alot of noise around it, actual progress hasn't been so convincing and the 2008 date appears highly unlikely. In many cases its more a matter of "here's how we'd do it if you gave us X dollars" than a funded plan forward.
This has appeared all along like a deliberate attempt to force a "technology refresh" that would be beneficial to major US networking companies than any real response to technical superiority of the IPv6 protocols.
If the technical merit were really there (many of the supposed IPv6 improvements have been backported to v4), my guess is a specific mandate wouldn't be necessary. Business would take care of it.
You are all fucking retards. Lunix is a shit operating system, and BSD is dead. Apple is for closet homos. Get with the times, use Windows. Open Source is for losers. What other industry is so stupid as to work for free?
Before people jump and say that we don't need IPv6 because NAT is good enough: No, NAT is not good enough. While I am grateful for NAT (and I am sure every other pood sod stuck with a single address only is grateful too), NAT has some serious shortcomings and limitations which increase the need for sometimes ugly, drastic or awkward workarounds for many things. It would be nice to be able to communicate with machines behind routers directly, though the security aspect that NAT provides really is useful.
Especially "anycasting". But what about SCTP ? Now that would be worth wide support.
Page 46, CCNP Self-Study, Paquet Teare
...all desktops in the US Federal Government will have unique IPs, making it even easier for the bad guys to exploit a machine many layers deep in a network. After all, why secure the routers when your department managers just keep complaining that they can't connect from home?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Mac OSX has had great IPv6 for a while (10.2)
http://evanjones.ca/macosx-ipv6.html
And the feds moved back their deadline so many times that even 2008 will be pushed back.
Apple even had a demo of ipv6 in OS9 once, and a long while back was big on it.
Most people, who enjoy semi-anon IP addresses from defacto forced reissue taht I know are against IPv6 and see it for all its regretful faults, despite its wonderful goals and alleged benefits.
In an IPv6 world... there will be no more anononymity except at a WiFi cafe lacking video cameras.
In a tough situation, send it the military to sort it out. They take some casualties, and the large contracting companies make a bundle. (They've been hurting since Y2K went away. Semper-Fiscus.)
If you dont belive me, just search the tech support online. Then call TAC.. notice how they have REAL 24x7 support all around the world???
2 Ok now you just said you know NOTHING about applications. Do you have any idea how much NAT has held back application development? Yea that right, what about VOIP, video conferencing?? IM shouldnt need a centeral server, clients should be able to contact eachother, my cellphone should have an ip, hell even my car. Mobile ipv6, and the 2^24 ip address will fix this hands down. Belive me stupid thinking like this has stagnated real app development in the last 10 years. Just ask any CORBA application to nat.
3 What kind of routers are you using? Gee get on the clue train, its 2005, and I can get 512MB dimms for 43$ USD! With the advent of 64bit cpus (cisco loves MIPS, which are 64bit) a router with 512 or a couple of gigs isnt un heard of. Not to mention have you seen any papers on how ipv6 is layed out? Its not ipv4 with /17 split horizon nonsense. This isnt ipv4, and its not 1970!
4 What the hell are you worried about 20bytes for? What are you using dialup?? If so please cancel your AOL account, and go back to watching American Idol. Please for the sake of the internet.
..Just declare it part of the metric system. Or is that the other way round?
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
Intelligent use of NAT can get a lot of users into one IP. 9 out of ten surfers only need outgoing-initialed connections (web surfing, email, instant messaging, IP-based broadcasting and legal music download software).
Most surfers are considerably safer behind NAT anyway, as shielding incoming TCP connections on ports 135-139, 445 and 593 kills 9 out of 10 Windows remote exploits stone cold dead. Deploying technologies like uPNP in the ISP routers can negate the inability to accept incoming packets nmany low-grade server style apps (Messenger, VoIP)
In an ideal world yes, every device could be addressed by its own IP address, but in this world I don't want some cracker port-scanning my fridge and getting a backdoor through a butter overflow exploit.
I don't trust any modern operating system enough to run it without a hardware firewall device, and I always keep that (it's a linux-based consumer router) well-patched up to date and with all remote admin functions disabled and locked down.
As a regular fixer of friends PCs, I would love to see ISPs provide the option of fully-NATted connections. I'd recommend them. It'd save me so much time trawling eBay for bargain routers for my friends.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
.... You can kiss goodbye tor reliable IPv6 IP Address tracing, that you can do with IPv4.
~The TwoTailedFox posts again....
Is there any nat-pt solution for linux?
I don't think anyone wants go through the
pain of double stacks. So to run a ipv6
only network, and connect it with both
v4 and v6, you would need a v6tov4 nat
device (nat-pt). I haven't seen anyone
offering that, at least no linux based solution
(some *bsd might be able to do that, not sure).
IPv6, to me, was a bit of a disappointment because it lacks two features that I find important:
A) A protocol between the ordinary level2 and IP(level3) (Could be named layer 2.5) that takes care of error-corrections via retransmissions. Not replacing TCP's error-correcting retransmissions, but in addition to those. The reason is that most lost packets are lost packets on a single link because of load issues and such, and not because a whole link falls and breaks a route. In those cases, it is very inefficient to retransmit the whole route, and to add a huge latency-overhead to the packet transmission.
B) Get rid of the silly "port" concept. Ports are just internal-computer addresses, and as such, should simply be part of the address itself. There should be no reason to distinguish between the network address and the host address and thus subnets were created, and that separation no longer exists. Just the same, there should be no reason to distinguish between net/host address an application addresses. Removing the "port" concept and placing it as part of the IP address itself has the following benefits:
I) UDP becomes redundant to IP itself, the whole protocol is about adding the port address and can be discarded.
II) DNS entries can point to applications and not hosts. This would allow www.server.com and www2.server.com to point to different webservers in the same computer. This would allow to discard the "virtual web hosts" feature. It would also allow to support multiple servers of any type (ftp, smtp, etc) on any host, all pointed by dns, without messing with the port supplied to the user.
III) An internal network can route the same application address to any host it chooses, easing the distribution of load. It would also not expose to the external world how applications are served on which hosts.
Anyhow, I look forward to seeing those features in IPv7.
The #1 reason the private sector isn't picking is up is the vast majority of the big isps don't offer it, as long as they remain on ipv4, ipv6 isn't going anywhere fast.
did you forget to take your meds?
I've seen this sort of first thing first-hand. Here's how it goes down:
Consultant: Hey, buddy o'mine in the White House Budget office, lets do lunch.
WhiteHouse: OK
Consultant: You know, if you dont use IPv6, you're obsolete.
WhiteHouse: Really?
Consultant: Yep. You wouldn't want the (Commies|Al-Qaeda|Chinese|French) to be ahead of us, would you?
WhiteHouse: Hell no!
Consultant: Nobody is going to deploy IPv6 w/o a reason. It's hard to do.
WhiteHouse: Hmm, we need to do this, its a matter of Homeland Suck-your-ity. Can you help?
Consultant: Why sure, but you should make sure that only me and a few others are approved for this gig, you wouldn't want any incompatibilities, would you?
WhiteHouse: Damn straight, I think I'll have another Scotch.
Consultant: Go ahead, its on me. *evil cackle*
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
that their ipv6 installation is working
http://www.whatismyipv6.net/
Will they still be possible? Will this be the end of the script kiddies fun?
_________
The world doesn't just disappear when you close your eyes, does it?
That's funny - this exact article was rejected, when I attempted to post it, while it was still "hot", a few days ago ... but, of course, it couldn't have been accepted, coming from Nanog mailing list professional subscribers ;)
If you are a network engineer type, and you want to make some money, this is maybe some very good news. Most government agencies contract out this type of work. And I know there is a severe shortage of good network types out there who can grok ipv6. I am actually glad about this. It is kinda like Y2K all over again.
-- Bryan
I remember the "successful" deployment of the OSI model, after another, similar directive from the government, in the '80s ...
== With enough Will Power, one could move mountains. With enough Brains, one would just leave them where they are ==
Looks like they're finally gonna have to upgrade all those Windows 95 computers.
omfg! people, get a clue!
go with IPV8 already!
sheesh... ipv6 has been dead for years!
you can try www.ipv8.org or do a google search.
oh ocme on ipv6 sucks rocks.
go check out ipv8 already and be done with it
fuck you cdbee!!!
eh0d is EVERYBODYS daddy now. TekMonkey (649444): Can a moderator or admin ban this guy? Just look at his record.
You get a swimming turtle if you are IPv6 connected.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
What is stopping the implementation of IPv6 are those pesky legacy devices, legacy operating systems (ie Windows) and legacy hardware accelerated routers, and the fact the Internet being as big as it is - it's basically impossible to do a clean switchover, and there ARE problems when combining the two systems - even though you can have both on the same network, they won't be interoperable (=really bad).
Of course IPv6 has been designed to work around these issues as well as possible, but there will be issues eg getting a IPv4 machine to connect to a IPv6 one. And NAT has been the easier-to-implement short-term-solution for home 'puters etc...
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
I'm old enough to have lived through the GOSIP debacle two decades ago. I see a replay.
GOSIP (Government OSI Profile, and the acronym was used separately by the US and UK) was a requirement to implement the OSI protocol stack by some date in the 1980s. It was a procurement requirement: Every system bought by the feds as of a certain date had to have OSI. Unless it got a waiver.
Some people took this to mean that the government would transition from TCP/IP to OSI by then. And this would lead the world to OSI. And so they invested heavily in OSI. (Remember DEC?) Come to think of it, the way the lead story is written here, you get the same impression, that by 2008 the feds really will be using IPv6.
But that's not what GOSIP meant. It meant that the equipment had to have OSI available, not that the government would actually use it. Having OSI was a checklist item. And eventually it got discarded, because nobody would actually use it; TCP/IP did the job well enough, and some of the early OSI implementations were, to be polite, a pile of crap. But a pile of crap still meets the checklist for an option that won't be used!
IPv6 is somewhat dumber, protocol-wise, than OSI. It has been around for well over a decade, solving non-problems with non-solutions, ignoring problems of the public Internet that developed since then, while promising higher overhead, obsolesence of equipment, difficult management and transtion, and more money for Cisco. So unless you're Cisco, there's no reason to go there. And nobody is going there.
Microsoft will meet the checkoff, as will other vendors, but I predict that in 2009, IPv6 will still see little use, even by the feds. Perhaps if we're lucky somebody will be talking about really fixing the problems in the current protocol stack, rather than going with a hack that was created for internal political reasons at IETF before the Internet was even open to the public.
Before the military purchases anything, it has to be first tested. The main goal of testing is to make sure that the system does what the vendor claims it does. There are entire organizations within the military that do nothing more then test new systems before they are purchased.
When a new system has a computer and is attached to a network, the computer security of that system has to be tested. This includes doing a vulnerability assessment and in some cases, penetration testing.
Unfortunately, there's not much out there that can be used to do a vulnerability assessment or penetration test against an IPv6 system or network. Nmap supports IPv6, but not much else. This presentation does list a number of tools and their status for support of IPv6:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=2&q=http://ww w.hacksonville.org/presos/ipv6_attack_tools.pdf&e= 10053
Commercial vendors of vulnerability scanners all claim that IPv6 support is on their TODO list.
You just kicked cdbee's teeth in so hard that they look even WORSE than a regular english person's teeth. that's right, FUCK YOU CDBEE!
eh0d is EVERYBODYS daddy now. TekMonkey (649444): Can a moderator or admin ban this guy? Just look at his record.
For maybe the 3rd time in 4+ years, I've seen an article about something the Bush Administration planned to do and thought "Hey! Thats a good idea!"
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Oh, yeah - I actually studied the schtooopidttt OSI model at university. Who woulda thunk that a simple three layer protocol would take the world by storm?
Oh well, what the hell...
One thing that I like about NAT, for my home network is that I don't need buy an address range for my own use. By having address ranges reserved for use within a NAT, by specification, I know that they are mine to manage and assign, without having to refer to an external authority.
Of course I don't know enough about IPv6 to say that it doesn't provide an equivalent solution. What I am saying is that I have not seen anything about an alternative yet. If you know anything about an IPv6 equivalent to an internal address range, then I would love to hear about it.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
From the article: "While we know that IPv6 technologies are deployed throughout the government we do not know specifically which ones, how many there are, or precisely where they are located..
weapons of mass destruction, IPv6 technologies, misappropriated credit card numbers. Funny, the govt has NO TROUBLE finding me to collect taxes.
The US Federal government has a long history of imposing on itself mandates
for new computer technology, mandates that are ignored and never enforced.
They all set a date after which every agency may buy only computer equipment
or software that contains some new not-yet-mainstream technology.
The dates come and go, and agencies continue to buy what works for them.
Examples:
1979: mandated no more RS-232, only RS-449, for modems and computers that
connect to modems. Today: have you ever HEARD of RS-449?
1989: mandated every new computer that communicates with other computers must
use OSI protocols. Today: TCP/IP rules.
2000: mandated end of use of RSA (the PKCS#1 form used in SSL) by August 2001,
and the adoption of a new form of RSA (ANSI X9.31). Today, PKCS#1 rules.
The standards bodies haven't even considered switching.
2005: mandate IPv6 by June 2008. We'll see.
Regardless of the RFCs, some Governments and/or some major ISPs will be able to assign a permanent IPv6 address to each person. And though it will have nothing to do with your actual MAC address, it will work. And if you try to connect to your ISP with a different address, it will be completely blocked by the ISP firewall.
I was looking at my SOHO router's MAC filtering table the other day and I was shocked at just how many addresses I had recorded in there over a 2 year period... I had filled up the 32 address table completely, between things like my PDAs, vbrick, PVR, serveral computers, laptops, web cams, etc. I'm no uber geek, but if I'm already into a /26, I can just imagine what other people are up to. ...and all of this was behind NAT and off of my primary "production" network ( 6 IP address subnet connected via 100mbps fiber).
Now it occurs to me that that only reason I'd actually *SWITCH* to IPv6 is if I could save some money some how. Having everything on a globally reachable IP address would be nice, but I would want portablity between ISPs and essentially anonymous assignment of the address space for life.
Until that happens, I'm taking whatever the cheapest ISP is slagging off on consumers for the next 6 months... and that means IPv4
what will though is the fact no one can connect to an ipv6 address..
I just read through way too much drivel about IPv6 vs. NAT just now.
:: when dialing, so the above number would be dialed as "233*67*94*199#0*0*0*2". And if I wanted to connect to her webserver, I'd point my browser at "233.67.94.199::0.0.0.3".
:: x.x.x.x :: x.x.x.x)
Here's the way things really should go. There are two possibilities, and they're not mutually exclusive.
1) For mobile devices:
Mobile devices should be addressed by a hardware address. This hardware address shouldn't be tied directly to the device, however, as mobile devices can be broken or lost easily. This is do-able right now with SIM cards. They have a SIM ID that could be used in place of an outdated phone number system. (Let's face it, POTS is ancient and crufty, and so are its numbering systems.) If you drop your cell phone and break it, move the SIM card to the new one.
One thing to watch out for here, though: All cell phones must use the same protocols, and all cell providers must use the same protocols. This ends their convenient lock-in semi-monopolies on their customers. This is a practice that isn't going to end without a fight.
2) Wired devices:
Wired devices should use an assigned address. IPv4-style 4-octet addresses are fine. But the arrangement needs to be a bit more logical. They need to be arranged in a hierarchy. From 0.0.0.2 to 255.255.255.255, every address should be valid. 0.0.0.0 should be reserved as a null address (duh) and 0.0.0.1 should be the localhost address (or "self" or "this" or "me"). Any other address can be a node. Any node can serve as a gateway to a COMPLETE subnet.
So if I want to reach grandma's wired VoIP phone, her number is "233.67.94.199::0.0.0.2". A phone keypad wouldn't have to be changed, as you could use * for . and # for
And there would, with only a two-level hierarchy, be more addresses than IPv6 offers(*). With more levels in that hierarchy, there would be no such thing as an address shortage. And to top it all off, I'm guessing the top-level routing equipment wouldn't have to be substantially changed. It's still just routing from one IPv4 address to another. The gateways would all have to change, though.
Notice another thing about this IPv4^n idea: Hierarchical NAT bypass. Notice how it resembles a C++ (and copycats) scope-resolution operator and how it resolves the scope of the actual device address and how it could easily be extended to multiple levels beyond what I've suggested.
(*)If you don't believe me, do the math:
IPv6:
2^128 = 3.402823669e38
IPv4^2 (IPv4-sqared)
32^32 = 1.461501637e48
IPv4^3 (x.x.x.x
32^32^32 = 1.461501637e1536
With those IPv4^n address spaces, you have to remember that you don't get quite that many addresses, as you lose 0.0.0.0 and 0.0.0.1 from each range and subrange. In IPv4^2, you lose 8-billion-something addresses - 2 main-range addresses plus 2 addresses from each of the 4-billion-something-minus-two subranges. That's a trivial loss in the scope of this scheme, and yet is almost twice as many addresses as we have available right now.
In telecom it is used all the time. I work day in, day out on a 3G network product that uses IPv6, even for its internal communications between sub-units.
If there was more traffic on IPv6 enabled networks like Internet2 we would definitely see more apps written for it (chicken and the egg problem).
What I would really like to see is Azureus written to support Ipv6 without any additional work for the user. I would imagine IPv6 on Internet2 would explode if Azureus had IPv6 support. This would be a good thing because the increased traffic would test v6 code more significantly than now (among other things).
???
The more we hand private sector technology development jobs oversea's, the more and more our technologies will become obsolete, which will assure our own demise.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
While we know that IPv6 technologies are deployed throughout the government we do not know specifically which ones, how many there are, or precisely where they are located..
Sounds like the typical US gov't to me.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Cisco better fix EIGRP quick....it doesn't work with IPV6
I dont know of the DoD, but some organizations will have to simultaneously use ipv6 to push the rest of the net over the hill.
Specifically the carriers (sprint, bell etc), the ISPs and the most popular websites like google should use the protocol.
If certain ISPs provide ipv6-only addresses, that will be a force.
This is best achieved if a government uses ipv4-only tax, but setting a tax on the Internet is a bad precedent anyway. Another idea is ARIN stopping to provide IPv4 addresses, forcing the use of ipv6, while some of the bigger sites simultaneously use it too.
Its a bit like the bringing about of communism, it'll take a forceful revolution, cant do it gradually.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I think that the only reason the White House is pushing this so hard is that Bush thought they were talking about a TV station.
Do you have any idea what the routing headaches to make that happen would be like?
You must be talking about lifelong IPv6 addresses.
They are not needed to break anonymity.People who want to be anonymous can have big problems now with ISP that only offer permanent IPv4 address (yes they do exist, most of them in western countries, especially europe).
And by the way, offering a permanent IPv4 address is not technically difficult. Firewalling all other IP adresses from using the same link is not difficult either.
Interesting screen name. Do I know you?