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The exhaustion of IPv4 address space

FireFury03 writes "Cisco has an interesting article talking about estimates for the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space, and the inevitable move to IPv6. It predicts that the IPv4 address space will be exhausted in 2 - 10 years and suggests that it isn't worth trying to reclaim old allocations. With the mainstream use of IPv6 now potentially within the ROI period of many products the manufacturers need to start including support, but will the ISPs roll out native IPv6 networks before they absolutely have to? IMHO, ISPs providing native IPv6 support would be a Good Thing since it opens up the door for peer-to-peer technologies such as SIP without needing nasty NAT traversal hacks, but a major stumbling block seems to be a complete lack of IPv6 support on current consumer-grade DSL routers (tunneling over IPv4 is an option but requires more technical know-how from the end user)." Of course, Cisco may have some vested interest in driving up the IPv6-compatible router sales *cough*, but the bottom line is that the transition will have to happen at some point in the near future.

589 comments

  1. Interesting by Legendof_Pedro · · Score: 4, Funny

    Interesting, but is 2 - 10 years as precise as they can be?
    8 years seems to be a long time, to me...

    1. Re:Interesting by sanyasi · · Score: 1

      thats what the coders thought in 1990 when they contemplated y2k as well...

    2. Re:Interesting by Psiolent · · Score: 2, Informative

      is 2 - 10 years as precise as they can be

      In the article, this range comes from the fact that the data can be fitted to different curves, resulting in a different timescale. Some of the curve fitting I saw in the article used polynomials, exponentials, and linear functions.

    3. Re:Interesting by Profane+MuthaFucka · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Good eye. That's a huge range. When you're talking about small numbers it makes a bigger difference too. When they say 2-10 years, that's much more fuzzy than a prediction of, for example, 102-110 years.

      It's almost like me saying that any random new car model from Detroit will get between 20 and 100 miles per gallon. We all know how fuzzy EPA figures are, but even those are more precise than Cisco is here.

      --
      Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
    4. Re:Interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Do you hear something buzzing over your head? That is the sound of the joke flying over really really (not just once) fast.

    5. Re:Interesting by kihjin · · Score: 5, Funny

      2 - 10 would be -8 years. So this already happened, 8 years ago.

      Welcome to Slashdot.

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      This slashdot-related signature is a stub. You can help kihjin by expanding it.
    6. Re:Interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Maybe they were just being obtuse. 2 - 10 = -8, so what they really mean is that we needed IPv6 eight years ago.

    7. Re:Interesting by 'nother+poster · · Score: 2, Funny

      And nobody did a thing about it until about 1997.

    8. Re:Interesting by rubycodez · · Score: 3, Interesting

      yup, 8 years ago they were saying the ip4 space would be exhausted in next 5 years. Heck, I sat at a presentation on IPng in 1994 where that was said. At least such a statement is more true now than it was then, but I'll bet reclaiming old absurdly huge allocations of IP space could push this out beyond 10-12 years.

    9. Re:Interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      The REAL question is whether IP drilling operations in ANWR, Alaska will buy us any time. What about our strategic reserves? I believe our goal should be to reduce dependence on foriegn address space.

    10. Re:Interesting by LilGuy · · Score: 2, Funny

      Just imagine a world where all the address space is shared and free... we could go back to not thinking about Alaska *EVER*.

      --

      You're nothing; like me.
    11. Re:Interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      2-10 years?? Sounds like a Microsoft release timeline.

    12. Re:Interesting by jacksonj04 · · Score: 1

      There is no need to reclaim old IP space allocations. If people request new IPv4 addresses, simply fob them off and tell them to use IPv6. Harsh but effective.

      --
      How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
    13. Re:Interesting by FireFury03 · · Score: 1

      but I'll bet reclaiming old absurdly huge allocations of IP space could push this out beyond 10-12 years

      TFA does talk about reclaiming old IP allocations and concludes the return is not worth the investment. It also seems the Microsoft IP stacks cause problems (as usual) by not allowing people to use the experimental networks, which means those can't be reassigned.

    14. Re:Interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And nobody did a thing about it until about 1997.

      You mean, the media didn't cover it and you didn't know about it until 1997.

    15. Re:Interesting by HunterZ · · Score: 1

      Except that we obviously didn't, since we're still doing okay right now.

      --
      Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
    16. Re:Interesting by AuMatar · · Score: 1

      Except that existing IPv4 networks then won't be able to access them. Making an IPv6 address absolutely useless. Unless you have an IPv4 as well to do tunneling, which brings us back to needing a v4 address.

      --
      I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
    17. Re:Interesting by Hizonner · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yeah, they said the address space would be exhausted AND THEY WERE RIGHT. The only reason we're not out of addresses now is that people made a fundamental change in the network architecture by deploying NAT (primarily because IPv6/IPng wasn't ready), and using RFC1918 private addresses. NAT is a nasty kludge that breaks all kinds of things. Furthermore, NAT has been done, so it's not going to save us again.

    18. Re:Interesting by Cramer · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's "not worth it" simply because of the greedy bastards hoarding those /8's. Let's see who is hoarding all that space...
      003/8 - GE
      004/8, 008/8, 046/8 - BBN
      009/8 - IBM
      015/8 - HP
      016/8 - DEC
      017/8 - Apple
      018/8 - MIT
      019/8 - Ford ...
      045/8 - Interop Show Network !!

      And then there's the US GOVERNMENT with 8+ /8's -- more if you count the number of big contractors holding /8's.

    19. Re:Interesting by jacksonj04 · · Score: 1

      Thereby forcing people on IPv4 to implement tunnelling, or upgrade to IPv6 equipment/software.

      All it takes is a couple of big carriers to go IPv6 and the rest will fall into place through necessity. That which simply cannot will be assimilated using IPv6's backwards compatability.

      --
      How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
    20. Re:Interesting by SteveAyre · · Score: 1

      Except that we did, but NAT was invented as a bodge to get around it for another decade.

    21. Re:Interesting by AuMatar · · Score: 4, Interesting

      But no buisness will ever implement a v6 address when v4 users can then not access them. It would incredibly stupid. Thats why we can't just stop handing out v4 addresses.

      Its not like there aren't plenty to go around still- HP owns 2 class As now, and a handul of universities own a full A as well. Reclaim a major portion of them for reuse.

      --
      I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
    22. Re:Interesting by mrogers · · Score: 1
      TFA does talk about reclaiming old IP allocations and concludes the return is not worth the investment.

      If I was trying to sell IPv6 routers I'd probably come to the same conclusion.

      I think Ran Atkinson hit the nail on the head when he asked, who's going to run the first service that's not accessible using IPv4? The answer, as far as I can see, is nobody. People might use IPv6 for their internal networks, they might use IPv6 opportunistically and fall back to IPv4 where necessary, but *nobody* is going to want an IPv6-only connection to the rest of the world until *everybody* supports IPv6. That means the people using IPv6 will still need IPv4 addresses for the forseeable future, so IPv6 won't solve the alleged address space shortage even if it's widely adopted - it will need to be *universally* adopted before it even starts to solve the problem, and I don't see that happening any time soon.

    23. Re:Interesting by pclminion · · Score: 1

      Sorry, they meant to write 2^10. Your IPv6 will be ready in 1024 years, sir. Hell, that's probably more accurate anyway.

    24. Re:Interesting by OrbNobz · · Score: 1

      Who the hell is Bolt, Beranek, and Newman Inc. and why do they need 50331648 routable IP addresses??
      If this isn't an anti-trust or cybersquatter case, I'll eat my /32!
      I think a /16 is more than enough for any one corporate entity.

        - OrbNobz
      Wolfie's just fine... where are you?

    25. Re:Interesting by Cramer · · Score: 3, Informative

      BBN... currently known as Level 3 Communications.

      They were one of the first movers and shakers in the internet industry 20 odd years ago.

    26. Re:Interesting by leathered · · Score: 2, Funny

      More worrying is that Iran are now believed to be in posession of a /24 subnet and are seeking to enrich it to a /16.

      --
      For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
    27. Re:Interesting by jav1231 · · Score: 1

      And can this finally be the last word? What about the countless predictions 2-10 years ago? By now I'm supposed to have been on IPv6 5 years ago and have been speaking Spanish as the number one language in the U.S. for the past 20 years. My refigerator is supposed to have been able to order my groceries by now and my phone is supposed to replace my laptop. OH! And why hasn't the PC replaced my TV? Our modern day prophets are about as usefull as a Jehova's Witness prediction.

    28. Re:Interesting by Legendof_Pedro · · Score: 1

      And shouldn't we be all living on the mmon, in moon-colonies, drinking moon-juice, with moon-pets and moon-friends, and moon-VoIP?
      Moon.

    29. Re:Interesting by netkid91 · · Score: 1

      Either way, IPv6 outdoes IPv4 in the fact that every device can have its own static IP address. Finally no more need for a Dynamic DNS service to access a VNC server on your home PC, and no need to "buy" a static IP from your ISP, people can start hosting more stuff from their home PC's, the idea of actually having a OS run off a LiveCD or USB device and saving your docuemnts via SFTP, SCP, etc.. to your home PC sounds great. I can't wait for IPv6, roll it out already.

      --
      NO~, I read Slashdot because I think it's stupid.....
    30. Re:Interesting by Detritus · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Greedy bastards? I'd call them pioneers. They helped create the Internet.

      Your comment reminds me of the people who will buy a house next to a rural airport and then complain about the noise and try to shut it down.

      --
      Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
    31. Re:Interesting by wildsurf · · Score: 2, Funny

      The REAL question is whether IP drilling operations in ANWR, Alaska will buy us any time.

      Yes, the range could certainly be extended by adding a few drill bits.

      --
      Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
    32. Re:Interesting by Cramer · · Score: 1

      Greedy certainly applies. Go ask one of them to return their address space in exchange for one more suitable to their network. Apple certainly has no need for that much address space. MIT? I think every other university on Earth is evidence they don't need a /8.

      Most places/networks have more address space than they use (will ever use.) In my experience, this appears to be universal.

    33. Re:Interesting by Sepper · · Score: 1

      With flying moon cars...

      --
      I live in Soviet Canuckistan you insensitive clod!
    34. Re:Interesting by Pii · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Couple things...

      First - Hearing people talking about Cisco, and other companies, drumming up hype so that they can start selling new-fangled IPv6 capable routers is getting old... The Cisco router you already have will do IPv6 today. It's a software change.

      Second - Why do people seem to insist that by turning on the IPv6 website, somehow that will prevent people from accessing the IPv4 website? So many ways to address this: Enabling a second network stack on the existing host; Standing up an additional server to host the IPv6 version; putting a 4to6 gateway in front of the website...

      IPv6 is coming. It's going to be a difficult transition, but the sooner it happens, the better for us all. Doing it sooner means less "transition work," because the installed base continues to swell.

      --
      For those that would die defending it, Freedom
      has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
    35. Re:Interesting by Ernesto+Alvarez · · Score: 2, Informative

      yup, 8 years ago they were saying the ip4 space would be exhausted in next 5 years. Heck, I sat at a presentation on IPng in 1994 where that was said. At least such a statement is more true now than it was then, but I'll bet reclaiming old absurdly huge allocations of IP space could push this out beyond 10-12 years.


      The address space in 1994 really was almost exhausted. What you saw at that conference was 100% true. They made a plan consisting of a long term solution, and a short term one.

      IPv6 was the long term solution, and the idea is to eventually start using it.

      What you seem to have missed is the short term solution, CIDR. The idea behind it was to take all the unused address space (and reclaim another addresses too) and allocate them in a less wasteful manner.

      And yes, IANA should reclaim those /8 assigned, nobody has that many hosts. They probably will if the situation gets desperate enough.
    36. Re:Interesting by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      Ok, while clearly most of these companies don't need a /8, envision yourself as the CIO of said company.

      Underling: The public just called and wants to trade us a /16 or two for our /8.

      CIO: Doesn't sound bad on the surface we don't have nearly that many systems. What is the downside.

      Underling: Well, we gave every worldwide site their own /12. They gave each building a /16, those buildings gave each floor a /24 or two. Plus, we have a bunch of /16s and /12s for various testing purposes and dedicated private networks. We'd have to reprogram every router in the company - we only have about 500 of those. Then we'd have to do all kinds of software testing, and a bunch of systems with static IPs would need new ones.

      CIO: That doesn't sound too hard. Get started on it.

      Underling: Uh, how do you want to parse the IPs out - with the /8 we had space to spare and could just parse out large blocks to site heads, who could delegate it as they saw fit. With a /16 we need central management of all addresses so that we don't waste too much space. We need some system for keeping track of our addresses now...

      CIO: Uh, I wasn't too good at this stuff in school - I was better at the marketing classes and learning how to go to dinner with vendor sales reps. Go on...

      Underling: No problem, we just need a new web-based application that will use a database to...

      Secretary: Excuse me, CIO, your golf appointment with the CEO is in 5 minutes.

      CIO: Oh, I gotta run. How much money will we make by completely revaming our whole network?

      Underling: Nothing.

      CIO: Then why are we worrying about this again...?

      You can see why big companies would rather not redo their entire IPv4 space.

      For those who suggest just using NAT and a non-routable/8 - what do you do when you have your first merger with another company that has done the same thing? If Ford merges with Pfizer, they have completely compatible networks already since they are both using their own /8s. If they both use the 10 Class A then they'll have a huge mess.

      Frankly, I think the solution is just to go to IPv6 and let anybody who wants to have a class A. Sure, it isn't efficient, but sometimes it is better to have a little virtual waste than to have to plan everything down to the last IP...

    37. Re:Interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      and of course, everyone's favorite...

      034/8 Mar 93 Halliburton Company

    38. Re:Interesting by YttriumOxide · · Score: 1

      My PC has replaced my TV (MythTV, fairly nice box and a projector).... and my fridge does order my groceries when I'm running low (LG Internet Refrigerator)...

      Don't live in the US, so can't comment on the Spanish thing. And my phone is nowhere near the power of my laptop. But 2 out of 4 is a good start!

      Roll on IPv6!

      --
      My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
      Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
    39. Re:Interesting by some+guy+I+know · · Score: 1

      And now that DEC is part of HP, they can return 016 as well.
      HP doesn't need two /8s.

      --
      Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
    40. Re:Interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > yup, 8 years ago they were saying the ip4 space would be exhausted in next 5 years. Heck, I sat at a presentation on IPng in 1994 where that was said.

      ???

      2005-1994 = 13, not 8. Can't you add?

    41. Re:Interesting by mrogers · · Score: 1
      Why do people seem to insist that by turning on the IPv6 website, somehow that will prevent people from accessing the IPv4 website? So many ways to address this: Enabling a second network stack on the existing host; Standing up an additional server to host the IPv6 version; putting a 4to6 gateway in front of the website...

      All of these require an IPv4 address, and thus do nothing to alleviate the "address space shortage". My point was not that nobody wants IPv6, but that nobody wants to drop IPv4 compatibility, so IPv6 cannot fix the problems of IPv4.

    42. Re:Interesting by 'nother+poster · · Score: 1

      Nope. I knew about it years earlier. Most companies didn't do squat about it until about 1997, with most of the actual remediation not happening until late 98 and through 99.

    43. Re:Interesting by werewolf1031 · · Score: 1

      wow...

      2005 - 1994 = 11, not 13. Say, you didn't by chance attend East Juniata high school in PA, did ya?... er, nevermind.

    44. Re:Interesting by Cramer · · Score: 1

      Your contrived example is BS. All of these /8's have been allocated for years. The organizations holding them have had a decade to implement best practices and move away from such large, unnecessary utilizations of address space.

      Your "underling" fails to mention how much that /8 is costing the company per year. NO ONE gets address space for free. Granted, for the companies holding /8's, the cost is down in the noise of the operational budget.

      what do you do when you have your first merger with another company...

      The same thing companies have been doing for YEARS... plan for it and build a migration plan. You seem to think mergers are a simple flip of a switch for people and machines alike. Such a notion is laughable. Renumbering every computer in both companies is simple in comparision to all the other tasks in consolidating two companies. In fact, there may be no need at all to renumber either network. NAT will handle private transformations, too.

      Also worth noting is the possiblity of a company divesting into two or more independant companies. If they were built within one public network, breaking them up can be an even bigger mess. If they're using private addressing, the process is simple.

    45. Re:Interesting by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      er, the numbers 8 in the first sentence came from the parent post to which I was replying. I then in the second sentence make reference to something that happened even further in the past. Doing random arithmetic on numbers in various sentences (and coming up with an incorrect answer as you did) does not a good rebuttal make. I swear, the quality of the trolls and AC posting in slashdot has certainly declined in the 21st century. You could all be earning large salaries architecting Bush's foreign and economic policy with the randomly disconnected firings of your addled neurons, but instead you're here. tsk, tsk.

    46. Re:Interesting by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      a mixed net of existing ip4 and new ip6 would have huge routing issues, as in, no route to places.

    47. Re:Interesting by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      Your contrived example is BS. All of these /8's have been allocated for years. The organizations holding them have had a decade to implement best practices and move away from such large, unnecessary utilizations of address space.

      You make a value statement that it is better to not "waste" space.

      If you look at the homes on your street (if you live in the US) they are probably not numbered sequentially. They probably skip every 10 numbers at least. This is so that if somebody puts up a new house you don't need to renumber the entire street. Sure, it is a waste of numbers, but numbers don't cost anything. It is more of a waste to not design for expansion.

      In the same way these corporations are being smart in using their address space heirarchically, leaving room for growth. They are using a resource that is very cheap and plentiful (address space on a /8 network) to avoid investing in complex address assignment schemes.

      These companies would care no more about renumbering their networks than a town might care to renumber their street addresses, even if it were practical to do so. Numbers are free - why not use them?

      Staying with IPv4 is like solving the Y2K crisis by going to 99 month years, 99 day months, 99 hour days, 99 minute hours, and 99 second minutes. Sure, it prolongs the agony, but it makes no sense and ultimately doesn't solve the problem. Why not just start rolling out IPv6 where it is easy to do so? Design OS'es so that they obtain IPv6 addresses automatically via DHCP if they are available and use them, design routers so they give them out automatically, and eventually as stuff is replaced everybody will be running on IPv4 and IPv6. Then you can simply stop using IPv4 and nobody will notice. There is no reason to make some grand proclaimation that on 31-DEC-2007 we'll suddenly stop using v4 and start using v6.

      Often the best solutions to problems are non-central ones. Sure, it isn't efficient in terms of address-space usage, but when you have more addresses than electrons in the universe should we really be concerned with that? To me it sounds like a bunch of IT guys standing in ivory towers saying that 32-bit addresses ought to be enough for anyone...

    48. Re:Interesting by Cramer · · Score: 1

      What you're call a "value statement" is in fact resource efficiency. IPv4 address space is a finite, non-renewable resource. Once it's been divided up, there isn't anymore. Unlike an empty cookie jar, you cannot go to the store to get more.

      They are using a resource that is very cheap and plentiful (address space on a /8 network) to avoid investing in complex address assignment schemes.

      This is wrong in so many ways. First off, a /8 is not cheap; those companies are paying a huge wad of cash for that space. Second, that space is not "plentiful". That /8 is all they are going to get. Ever. There's no way they will be able to meet the (IANA) requirements for further address assignments. (without lying.) If they really do have a reason for using a /8 internally, there's a private /8 reserved for such applications. And lastly, a /8 is a huge amount of address space to manage. There will certainly be some form of "complex scheme" used to keep up with it. Whether that's anything from metasolv to a bunch of text files/spreadsheets, there's something tracking address assignments.

      It is, again, very highly unlikely they have any real (read: IANA acceptable) need for 16 million world accessable IP addresses.

      These companies would care no more about renumbering their networks than a town might care to renumber their street addresses...

      Be careful of one's examples.... I'm 33 years old. My parent's house has been renumbered twice in my lifetime. (And no, it's hasn't moved an inch.) Just because most cities don't, doesn't mean none ever do. Renumbering houses is simple -- tell people their address is now Y instead of X and leave it to them to change the number on their box/house/etc.

      (And btw, street addresses are calculated by linear distance from some reference point. What number a house gets depends on the location of the driveway, mailbox, and/or entryway. For example, if 3 houses are numbers 10, 20, and 30, then they're pretty much equidistant apart. This is a USPS mandate, btw.)

      Companies care deeply about renumbering because IPv4 addressing isn't exactly as simple. Most computer users just aren't that bright when it comes to the network they use everyday. Getting them to change their address is an exercise in headache generation. In the places where DHCP handles the assignments, migration is quick and easy (and "self healing" if the lease times are low enough -- change the DHCP server Friday @ 5 and all the desktops will have new addresses by Monday morning.)

      But, I'll grant you there's little point in renumbering an IPv4 network... Today. If the future is IPv6, then one's energy is better spent on moving forward. However, moving to IPv6 is significantly more involved than changing an address. In this, Y2K is a good parallel. With y2k, the problem was space; years were stored as 2 digits instead of 4. Everything that dealt with dates had to be re-tooled to deal with "00" being "2000" instead of "1900". That ended up requiring changes in numerous places: data structures, file formats, displays, conversions from the old 2 digit format, etc. The exact same thing is true of IPv4->IPv6. Every application with any IPv4 knowledge at all will need re-work. In the simplest cases (which are, sadly, few), recompiling the application will make it IPv6 capable. In all other cases, the application(s) will have to have sections rewritten to handle the increased size of the address field(s), printing IPv6 addresses, determining when to use IPv4 vs. IPv6, etc., etc.

      But all this still comes down to a "chicken and the egg..." Nobody will want to use IPv6 until everyone is using IPv6. And there are lots of ("legacy") IPv4 networked gear out there that no longer has anyone supporting them to make them IPv6 capable. Don't expect people to run out to replace dozens of appliances, that honestly, aren't tha

    49. Re:Interesting by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      What you're call a "value statement" is in fact resource efficiency. IPv4 address space is a finite, non-renewable resource. Once it's been divided up, there isn't anymore. Unlike an empty cookie jar, you cannot go to the store to get more.

      Which is why we should switch to v6 rather than whine about people wasting addresess in v4...

      It is, again, very highly unlikely they have any real (read: IANA acceptable) need for 16 million world accessable IP addresses.

      And most people in any kind of a position to make a difference in the real world (ie judges) are unlikely to care what the IANA considers acceptable.

      My point is that it should't be the job of some big committee to make you prove you've used up 90% of your current addresses before asking for more.

      First off, a /8 is not cheap; those companies are paying a huge wad of cash for that space.

      I looked it up at ARIN - looks like the fee is about $18k/yr. Compared to their bandwidth costs that is VERY minimal.

      30 years ago when this whole system was being dreamed up, 32-bits was brain damagingly HUGE. Today, 128-bits does the same thing for us. In another 30 years, people might look back at IPv6 and think we must've been idiots to use such a "small" address space. Going back to a resource efficiency view, we're falling into the same "/8 trap" again. Just look at how the IPv6 address space is being sliced up... it looks a lot like the same classful slicing that's led us to the current day mess we have in IPv4.

      I couldn't agree more. My complaint wasn't the folks who designed the 32-bit system. It is the folks who seem bent on perpetuating it past its usefulness (arguing that everybody should just use NAT, that normal people shouldn't be able to run servers, etc). When the time for IPv6 passes I hope I'm not some old geezer saying that people should just learn to live within the bounds like we did in the old days.

      When you think about it, there really isn't any reason that ISPs need to hand out globally-routable addresses at all - only web hosting companies really need them (if you are of the broadcast-model crowd). Companies like yahoo would get routable addresses, and everybody else would be buried behind 4 layers of NAT - beyond any hope of receiving any kind of incoming connection. Such a model eliminates many of the potential benefits of the net, although I'm sure the likes of AOL and MPAA would love such a world, which is just TV over ethernet...

  2. Already rolled... by jamesgamble · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Most of the major ISPs have already rolled support for IPv6. They started the rollout about five years ago when the lack of IP address began to be a problem. I know for a fact that Sprint is ready to roll it, they are just waiting for other networks to support it. T-Mobile is also ready to roll it as is AOL. It's not really a big deal. It's already been done. Everyone is just waiting to push the big red button and turn on the support. Hell, even Windows supports it.

    1. Re:Already rolled... by FireFury03 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Everyone is just waiting to push the big red button and turn on the support

      Why do you need to wait to turn it on? IPv4 and v6 can run side by side. I've been running v6 for a few years using 6to4 tunnelling to provide connectivity since my ISP doesn't do native IPv6... infact I haven't seen *any* ISP (in the UK) offering IPv6 connectivity over DSL. Just providing a 6to4 anycast gateway on their core network would be a start.

    2. Re:Already rolled... by jamesgamble · · Score: 2

      Of course they can run side by side, but why turn it on now when it isn't absolutly necessary? We can still use IPv4 until it reaches critical mass. There's really no point in causing more headaches for support groups it's really needed. Right now, companies really don't need to. They can still wait a year or two to perfect their infrastructure.

    3. Re:Already rolled... by Spetiam · · Score: 3, Interesting

      All I know is that if, once my broadband ISP serves up IPv6, they want to charge me extra for a static IP, I'll be pissed.

    4. Re:Already rolled... by jguthrie · · Score: 2, Informative
      What DSL routers or CableModems work with IPv6? It doesn't matter if I can buy a OC-512 with IPv6 if "Joe Sixpack" can't get it through his cablemodem. Sure I can get (and, in fact, have gotten) an IPv6 tunnel for my network, but that means that my IPv6 throughput sucks.

      Since demand for addresses necessarily comes from the leaf nodes of the network (where the bulk of them are consumed) rather than the backbones, I think it is disingenuous (to say the least) to claim that IPv6 is already "rolled out" because it is available from various backbone providers when the reality is that it is not available directly to the end users.

    5. Re:Already rolled... by jamesgamble · · Score: 0

      There isn't any reason it needs to be avaliable to end users yet. The old scheme is still working. You don't replace a tire that is rated for 80k miles when it only has 40k on it...

    6. Re:Already rolled... by comcn · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Try Andrews and Arnold. I've had IPv6 (via a tunnel from their network) for the last two years with them. Native IPv6 (without a tunnel) is integrated into the new router they are developing, and should be live by the end of the year (only problem is finding an ADSL router that will support it, but you can use an ADSL modem and Linux, for example).

    7. Re:Already rolled... by fm6 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Why do you need to wait to turn it on? IPv4 and v6 can run side by side.
      If they run it, they have to support it. Not an extra expense they'll want to bear before they need to.

      Everybody seems to think that the added costs of a new software product end with deployment. Not so.

    8. Re:Already rolled... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      blackcat in the UK offer ipv6 DSL.

    9. Re:Already rolled... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      hey moron, the reason you get charged for a static ip is not because of the lack of ip's, but because of the extra labor required to manage your static ip. It's nice to be able to move around networks without having to worry about all the people who have static ip's with a bunch of dns ties. DHCP is not about conserving IP's, it's about managing networks.

      what does someone as dumb as you need a static ip for anyways? (rhetorical insult)

    10. Re:Already rolled... by joeljkp · · Score: 1

      Anyone know anything about Northland Cable? Broadband Reports doesn't seem to know it exists.

      --
      WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
    11. Re:Already rolled... by FireFury03 · · Score: 1

      Of course they can run side by side, but why turn it on now when it isn't absolutly necessary? We can still use IPv4 until it reaches critical mass.

      Well you have to have some kind of overlap period. If you just suddenly tell people "you're not getting an IPv4 address, but here have this shiny new IPv6 address instead" when very few people are actually on the v6 network then you'll get lots of angry people. The way to do it is to hand out both v4 and v6 addresses side by side so by the time you can't hand out anymore v4 addresses everyone's using v6 anyway. (And yes, I'm aware that it's possible to do some translation between v4 and v6 but it's nowhere near as versatile as the real thing).

    12. Re:Already rolled... by FireFury03 · · Score: 1

      All I know is that if, once my broadband ISP serves up IPv6, they want to charge me extra for a static IP, I'll be pissed.

      What kind of freaky ISP charges for IP addresses? I get a subnet of 8 IPv4 addresses for free.

      In any case, IPv6 addresses won't be handed out singley - they'll be handed out in /48 and /64 subnets.

    13. Re:Already rolled... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ..or whatever absurd argument works in the ISPs favor for the given discussion.

      I doubt the network my DSL is on moves around all that much.

    14. Re:Already rolled... by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 2, Interesting
      hey moron, the reason you get charged for a static ip is not because of the lack of ip's, but because of the extra labor required to manage your static ip

      No it's not. The reason they charge more is because they're charging what the market will bear. They figure if you want a static IP, you're trying to run some kind of server, and you're probably willing to pay more for it.

      If IP6 effectively gives every device in the world a static IP, then the upsell oportunities associated with the witholding of static IPs by the ISPs go away. That's why I don't see many ISPs supporting IP6 any time soon.

    15. Re:Already rolled... by oliverthered · · Score: 1

      but because of the extra labor required to manage your static ip.

      What, a sales rep clicking yes on the static IP button and a perl script picking up the next free one and assigning it to you. Or maybe like me I have can get a static IP from my ISP over the internet, there's no labor required to manage it. (except for support calls and bugs in their software)

      --
      thank God the internet isn't a human right.
    16. Re:Already rolled... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Black Cat Networks (http://www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk/ offer native IPv6 ADSL.

    17. Re:Already rolled... by whathappenedtomonday · · Score: 1
      Most of the major ISPs have already rolled support for IPv6.

      depends on where you are I guess. I saw a list of AS connected to Germany's DE-CIX today, and it states that only some of the peering ISPs support IPv6. btw, DE-CIX was down today, and hardly anyone noticed ;)

      --
      I hope I didn't brain my damage.
    18. Re:Already rolled... by jsight · · Score: 1

      What kind of freaky ISP charges for IP addresses? I get a subnet of 8 IPv4 addresses for free.

      At the consumer level? Virtually all of them.
    19. Re:Already rolled... by fyonn · · Score: 1

      I'm still sure that's not allowed in europe at least, by RIPE-181. An admin charge can be applied, which I would see as a one off, but I don't see how they can justify a recurring charge for IP addresses, esp as they don't cost anything.

      of course, I only thought to ask RIPE itself after I stopped being a RIPE admin, hence they don't feel the need to answer my questions anymore :)

      dave

    20. Re:Already rolled... by sickofthisshit · · Score: 1

      Let's see: there's development and maintenance of the Perl script, and the backing database of IP addresses, which has to be linked to the subscriber database, so that they can find when numbers become available again, there's the training of the sales guy to click the right button to execute the Perl script.

      That's ON TOP OF the cost burden because all the network maintenance and upgrades have to be compatible with your fixed IP configuration.

      That all sounds like labor to me. Things don't run themselves.

    21. Re:Already rolled... by jayminer · · Score: 1

      Mine does. 3 TL/month. Approximately 1.84 Euro or 2.2 USD. When I signed the agreement, it was free. Is this legal? I wonder what if RIPE has warned them..

    22. Re:Already rolled... by oliverthered · · Score: 1

      Yeh, fine if I'm the only one with a fixed IP but I'm not and my ISP probably uses many of the same scripts for managing their fixed IP's, so in effect there is no extra administration over that which the ISP already requires to manage themseves.

      So, the things don't run themselves, but they are aldready runnning regardles of whether I have a fixed IP or a dynamic one.

      --
      thank God the internet isn't a human right.
    23. Re:Already rolled... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Black Cat Networks do v6 DSL in the UK (www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk).
      Obviously, you need a router to support it... but you can make a Linux box with a DSL modem inside, and it works fine.

      You also get a v4 address, of course.

    24. Re:Already rolled... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're forgetting something. They still need to store a lot of information about you anyway. When the salesman enters your information, what extra cost is it if a script stores a generated IP in a field next to your phone number?

      Not to mention all the administration required for dial-up (nodes, passwords, usernames). The "cost" of adding an extra function to an already existing script is almost non-existing.

    25. Re:Already rolled... by norfolkboy · · Score: 1

      You didn't notice www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk in that case - they've been doing IPv6 for a while - http://www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk/services/adsl

      "Our ADSL service is IPv6 enabled; all customers will get a single static IPv6 address allocated to them by default if their equipment can support it. We can also allocate a /48 of IPv6 address space if a customer wishes to deploy it on their internal network.

      This is native IPv6 not IPv6 over an IPv4 tunnel"

    26. Re:Already rolled... by richlv · · Score: 1

      damn. i'm wasting modpoints for this article ;)

      i found ripe-181, but it is mentioned as obsoleted on rip website. not mentioned by what, though.

      additionally, which part of the document denies charging for ip addresses ? fast scan-over did not reveal anything.

      --
      Rich
    27. Re:Already rolled... by julesh · · Score: 2, Informative

      If they run it, they have to support it.

      Not necessarily. Many ISPs provide non-core services that they don't offer support for; for instance, my ISP runs an NTP server, but the only support they provide is a single web page giving details of its address; if you phone up the tech support people and ask about it, they don't even know it exists.

      Because it isn't advertised as part of the provided service, they don't have to support it. An IPv6 gateway would be similar -- all they need to do is put some text somewhere telling you how to access it, and warning you that it's an experimental service. If it stops working sometimes, that's your problem for using an experimental service.

    28. Re:Already rolled... by julesh · · Score: 1

      Usually it's not that they explicitly charge extra for the static IP address: it's just that they offer a 'home' service and an 'office' service, the only difference between the two is that 'office' has static IP, and there's a price difference between the two services.

    29. Re:Already rolled... by fyonn · · Score: 1

      hmm.. can't find it anymore. might have been a different doc, not 181. it's been a few years since I did RIPE work but I'm sure I saw something about simple admin one-off charges being okay, but that IP addresses were effectively leased and thus should not be regularly charged for.

      maybe when I've got some spare time I'll try and look for it again :)

      dave

  3. I can't understand why... by saskboy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Why don't more routers that are sold today tout their IPv6 compatibility? Are they not compatible with the new protocol? If not why not?

    NATs at home can only hold IPv4 together for so much longer. Soon a killer ap will come out that just doesn't want to be NATted, and the whole Internet using public will demand direct addressing [at least they'll demand a solution that requires direct IP addressing].

    --
    Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
    1. Re:I can't understand why... by pete6677 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Why don't more routers that are sold today tout their IPv6 compatibility?

      Because IPv6 isn't yet a buzzword that non-technical buyers are looking for. This will probably change in the next few years when the business world becomes concerned with it. Once a company CIO hears that his internet connection will die without IPv6 support, there will be a huge marketing effort on the part of Cisco and other router makers.

    2. Re:I can't understand why... by JoshDanziger · · Score: 1

      NATs at home can only hold IPv4 together for so much longer. Soon a killer ap will come out that just doesn't want to be NATted, and the whole Internet using public will demand direct addressing [at least they'll demand a solution that requires direct IP addressing].

      I don't think that's really true. With the current state of uPnP aware routers, I can't imagine a scenario when this would be a problem. (Unless there is truly a need for a well defined service port, and even then I can imagine several workarounds). I know that Azeurus happily opens up a few ports on my router every time that I start it up. Whether this is a good idea security wise is another story...

    3. Re:I can't understand why... by xappax · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I know that Azeurus happily opens up a few ports on my router every time that I start it up. Whether this is a good idea security wise is another story...

      NAT is not a security tool.
      NAT is not a security tool.
      NAT is not a security tool.
      Network Address Translation was never intended to function as a firewall or a packet filter, it was designed exclusively to allow multiple computers to share the same IP at once. That's it.
      The fact that NAT has some side effects which are similar to a firewall has been a big problem for network security, because it leads users and even administrators to believe that their network does not need a firewall because they use a NAT system.

      We are finally, after many years, starting to see real firewall use become commonplace, and a XP even has an automatic software firewall now, but if it hadn't been for NAT, I bet people would've been implementing real, security-focused firewalls a lot earlier.

    4. Re:I can't understand why... by petermgreen · · Score: 2, Informative

      afaict most home nats are similar to the most basic config of a statefull packet inspection firewall. That is they let you connect out but don't (at least easilly) allow connections in.

      the problem is of course that you wan't some connections coming in but not others (because of chronically insecure lan protocols etc). UPNP helps to some degree as generally only internet orientated applications use it leaving stuff thats only safe for lan protected. another option is to manually open the holes but this is a pita for experianced people and basically impossible for the masses.

      the final possibility is software firewalls. Theese work good at controlling what apps can be accessed from the internet but running on the pc you are trying to protect leaves them vulnerable to interferance from malware.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    5. Re:I can't understand why... by rdenisc · · Score: 1

      I've heard UPnP implementations were not so consistent among the various vendors, resulting in huge headaches for any app vendor considering its use. Also, in many case, UPnP is not enabled by default, unlike Joes computer configuration (which runs XP, or maybe 9x or Mac OS X), you can't make a step-by-step guide on how to enable it because they are so many different vendors. Finally, many NAT boxes simply don't support UPnP. Or they might be multiple layers of NAT, UPnP is not really meant for (e.g. someone plugs it's Wireless-NAT access point behind its embedded switch-DSL-NAT-router).

      --
      Remi Denis
    6. Re:I can't understand why... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      NATs at home can only hold IPv4 together for so much longer.
      Can you elaborate? It is not like some limit is approaching on home use and routers where the use of NAT is suddenly going to crumble. It does not matter if 10 people or 10 trillion people are using NAT at home and it does not matter if I have 2 or 2000 machines behind that NAT router. At work we have over 5000 machines with internet access and less then 100 real internet addresses. Our NAT setup is at no risk of suddenly crumbling and we are not in any need of individual real world IPs for each device even if we had them to use. Running out of real IP addresses may be an issue but claiming NAT is failing, not working, or about to quit working and v6 will save us is simply not a realistic or true statement.

      Soon a killer ap will come out that just doesn't want to be NATted
      What is your definition of killer app? An ap can only become a killer ap if a lot of people can use it. You will not see any killer v6 specific apps until almost everyone has v6 access.

    7. Re:I can't understand why... by mrchaotica · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Why don't more routers that are sold today tout their IPv6 compatibility? Are they not compatible with the new protocol? If not why not?
      You know what's really ironic? Not even the Linksys WRT54G, which is made by Cisco, supports it with the default firmware.
      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

  4. Is NAT Better? by HugePedlar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I remember reading a while ago that NAT actually turned out to be better than IPv6 by virtue of it "solving" the limited number of addresses problem and simultaneously providing a defence against simple hacking attempts by hiding your real IP address.

    Can anyone explain whether this is true or not and why?

    --
    Argh.
    1. Re:Is NAT Better? by pixelpusher220 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      There's no technical reason you can't 'NAT' your IPv6 address is there?

      The majority in new IP address growth comes from all the future gadgets, your house, the washing machine, fridge, etc. So PCs can still 'hide' behind a NAT if they need protecting.


      --
      People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people :-D
    2. Re:Is NAT Better? by amalcon · · Score: 4, Informative

      The one "benefit" of NAT over IPv6 is that you can't access ports which aren't forwarded to that computer. i.e. it basically acts like a firewall, but potentially a little weaker because it isn't designed to be a firewall. As IPv6 doesn't keep you from having a firewall, this is almost moot. It's not entirely moot because home users who have NAT would not always consider having firewalls. The benefits of IPv6 are numerous, however.

      --
      -Amalcon
    3. Re:Is NAT Better? by stillmatic · · Score: 1

      A home DSL router with NAT turns your unpatched Windows XP box into a bastion of security compared to having it sit out in the open directly attached to your cable modem.

    4. Re:Is NAT Better? by phoenix.bam! · · Score: 4, Informative

      NAT is not defense. The stateful firewall is defense. You can use stateful firewalls on IPV6 also and there is no reason that consumer grade routers would not include the firewall.

    5. Re:Is NAT Better? by FacePlant · · Score: 1

      NAT the gadgets!

      --
      My Heart Is A Flower
    6. Re:Is NAT Better? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It can be better for the computer-illiterate - the NAT acts as a hardware firewall for them.

      What we'll need to see, instead, is routers that use IPv6 and tout a "easy-to-use" firewall.

    7. Re:Is NAT Better? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      WTF? NAT is a great defense for home users.
      I'm not saying it's ideal, or that more isn't needed, but it sure stops internet worms in their tracks.

    8. Re:Is NAT Better? by jafiwam · · Score: 1

      Care to explain how a statefull firewall makes one piss of difference to Grampa Pamade and Granny Goldbond over NAT? Either of those two needs to configure a proxy server to cache and control web sites accessed?

      For a business or school, or advanced home networker sure... (Heck, I have never worked for a buisness that did anything beyond simple DMZ with their PIX, blocking outgoing traffic just isn't done.)

      But the ordinary Linksys is a good enough hardware fireall via NAT for the average user.

      So gimmie a break will ya? Start on a new pointless geek-detail. That one is old and tired.

    9. Re:Is NAT Better? by fyonn · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I remember reading a while ago that NAT actually turned out to be better than IPv6 by virtue of it "solving" the limited number of addresses problem and simultaneously providing a defence against simple hacking attempts by hiding your real IP address.

      well, it's not "better" as such, just a different solution. NAT is not a golden bullet though. Yes, it does, by and large prevent random machines on the internet directly contacting your unpatched windows desktop at home, but a firewall will do that too, and virtually every dsl router has a firewall these days too. I would like to see home dsl routers supporting native ipv6 but I don't know of any.

      I think that ipv6 is a good thing to go for, but it's not finished (but then, is ipv4? :). there's lots of advertised features for ipv6 (mandatory encryption, mobile ip etc) that are good on paper, but aren't all that in the real world.

      Mandatory support for ipsec is great.. except how many of us would use it? as there is currently no support for mndatory ipsec encryption to unknown strangers. you've got to be pre-configured for crypto. I'd like to see something like ssh. if you know the key then great, if you don't then you can accept and save one and then while you may not have verified the destination, you're at least protected on the wire. yes, they also need to sort out authentication and perhaps some form of certificate distribution, but lets make a start on something useable.

      mobile IP. sounds great! I can be using my ipv6 pda via my mobile phone and as I walk into my house, it picks up my wireless net and my downloads speed up instantly, all the while not dropping the voip call I'm making. or I'm using a laptop on the train and as it flits from hotspot to hotspot I don't lose any of my connections. sounds great! how does it work? you tell me, details are not easy to find. ots of talk, few working implementations (if I'm wrong, please tell me, I'm genuinely very interested).

      working with networks as part of my job, I know how useful and really annoying NAT can be, and I really think it should be an option, not a requirement. I'd love to see ipv6 rolled out and see what changes it brings, but I also think it needs a fair amount of work still.

      dave

    10. Re:Is NAT Better? by Gilk180 · · Score: 1

      NAT is definitely NOT BETTER than IPv6. That is not to say that IPv6 is better. They are two different technologies that operate in two different ways and solve different (but intersecting) sets of problems.

      However, it does mitigate the address space problems. Basically, the reason why it prevents attacks is that when home users put a NAT router between the internet and their machine, the nature of NAT means that they also have the equivalent of a sanely configured firewall there as well. Same goes for larger scale NAT, which is less common.

      I may be wrong, but not having the real IP address is not where the real advantage comes in, it comes from the fact that internet hosts cannot connect to you without you contacting them first. Any well configured firewall (network or host) will do the same thing.

      IPv6 provides many other benefits, and some drawbacks.

    11. Re:Is NAT Better? by theCSapprentice · · Score: 2, Informative
      It is true that NAT can hide your IP, but it depends on how it is configured. The whole point of using NAT is to route un-routable Ip addresses, like 192.168.0.1, on the internet. Depending on what you want and need, NAT can be done in three different ways:

      STATIC: this is when the router assigns one routable address to one non-routable address. This 'hides' your IP address, but as the new address always points to your real one... Well you get the idea

      DYNAMIC: this selects a random routable address from a 'pool'. The assignment is temporary and this will hide where your requests are coming from. But as the pool is a range of addresses given to you offically, it wouldn't be hard to find who was using them.

      DYNAMIC-PORT: this uses only one routable IP, but translates all of the non-routable IPs onto different ports for each connection. The appearence is of one computer making many connections.

      I hope this helps.

    12. Re:Is NAT Better? by FireFury03 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I remember reading a while ago that NAT actually turned out to be better than IPv6 by virtue of it "solving" the limited number of addresses problem and simultaneously providing a defence against simple hacking attempts by hiding your real IP address.

      NAT in itself doesn't provide any extra security - the connection tracking needed by NAT is what provides the security (and you can do this equally well without using NAT). I wrote an article on this subject a while back.

      Whiles NAT does to some extent "solve" the limited number of addresses problem, it also creates many more problems. The Internet was designed to be peer to peer but NAT turns it into a client/server model. Whilest client/server works fine for "traditional" applications such as web surfing, it's a major stumbling block for peer to peer services such as VoIP, which have to employ various hacks to trick NATs into letting the peer-to-peer traffic through (with varying degrees of success). The likes of Skype are designed to hijack the connections of random Skype users who don't have NAT and use them to route traffic between peers who do have NAT when the NAT traversal hacks fail.

    13. Re:Is NAT Better? by Parity · · Score: 1

      It's only 'sort of true'. Using private network address space and NAT means that your box is 'unreachable' from the point of view of any outside machines, even if you had no other firewall rules whatsoever. However, if you have a firewall that denies all incoming connections, you have the same protection that NAT gives you.

      Also, of course, if you use a port redirect to have a server in your private ip space, you'll have a situation where you are -actually- reachable even though you -appear- unreachable, because the NAT is forwarding the packets to you. (It looks to the outside as if the NAT box is what is being reached).

      So in this sense NAT gives you nothing. OTOH, when you have a tremendously complicated firewall ruleset, NAT does provide a kind of safety net, in that in many cases opening up huge holes in the firewall will not create any exposure.

      So whether or not NAT is 'better' from a security point of view depends on whether or not you are (or your sysadmin is) capable of putting a correct firewall ruleset in place.

      --
      --Parity
      'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
    14. Re:Is NAT Better? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Thats like preventing STDs by amputating your penis. Effective, but there are better solutions available!

    15. Re:Is NAT Better? by ryanvm · · Score: 2, Insightful

      NAT is not defense. The stateful firewall is defense.

      NAT *is* a stateful firewall. That's how it works. It has to keep track of outgoing connections to remap those ports on the external interface. No outgoing connections == no port remapping on the external interface.

      If you disagree, then explain to me how one could connect to a machine behind a NAT device if said machine has initiated *no* connections to the Internet. Sounds like stateful filtering at work.

      Now, stateful firewalls are just as easy to implement on IPv6, so NAT is certainly not a valid reason for sticking with IPv4. But NAT is indeed a stateful firewall.

    16. Re:Is NAT Better? by Kadin2048 · · Score: 0

      This was going to be my exact point as well but you beat me to it. :)

      People think that NAT is superior because they're using it instead of a firewall (or as a firewall of sorts) by only forwarding certain port ranges.

      There's nothing inherently more secure about NAT, it's just the way it's set up on most home routers. As a little experiment you can take a Windows box and put it in the "DMZ" of a normal home NAT box, which means that all ports and protocols get forwarded to it, just as if it was sitting on the public internet itself. It should end up getting owned by viruses and spyware just as quickly as if you plugged it into the modem, even though it's subject to NAT. The point being: the address translation isn't providing any security itself, its only because it's being applied selectively.

      With IPv6, you could get the perceived security of NAT by actually using a firewall (either a hardware one or a software one), and you'd have the benefit of each device being issued a globally unique IP address.

      --
      "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
    17. Re:Is NAT Better? by LordSnooty · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The majority in new IP address growth comes from all the future gadgets, your house, the washing machine, fridge,

      Ah yes, the fabled "Internet Devices". When will the companies realise that I have no need to control my washing machine from the other side of the world, or from work, for that matter. I survived this long without the useless feature, I think I'll manage. For nearly a decade I've heard about IP-enabled white goods, in that time I've seen precisely one device, an IP fridge. And it still can't ring up Tesco's & place your order.

    18. Re:Is NAT Better? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But NAT is indeed a stateful firewall.

      This is so wrong. Send from the outside a packet to a NAT box that claims to come _from_ the inside. Guess where the answer goes? Right, inside. A NAT device is just a router doing some special magic on _outgoing_ packets only. I doesn't do antispoof or anything else. You always need an additional filter with a proper ruleset.

      With IPv6, the NAT part goes away and the filter stays, making for a much cleaner solution.

    19. Re:Is NAT Better? by MSZ · · Score: 5, Funny

      The benefits of IPv6 are numerous, however.
      Cisco marketing rep:
      NOBODY expects the IPv6!
      Our chief benefit is length... greater length of the packet header and and unrememberable addresses...
      Our two benefits are greater length of packet header and unrememberable addresses... and rewrite of all network apps....
      Our three benefits are length of packet header and unrememberable addresses... and rewrite of all network apps.... and an almost fanatical devotion to some broken standard....
      Our four... no...
      Amongst our benefits... Amongst our array of benefits... are such elements as greater length of packet header and unrememberable addresses...
      I'll come in again.

      But seriously, if IPv6 was so good, it would not require so much pushing. If the IPv4 exhaustion was real and imminent, it would not rquire so much pushing.

      --
      The moon is not fully subjugated. I demand a second assault wave preceded by a massive nuclear bombardment.
    20. Re:Is NAT Better? by fm6 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      ...[NAT] basically acts like a firewall, but potentially a little weaker because it isn't designed to be a firewall.
      Weaker how? If you can't address a node, how can you attack it? Not having your systems in the public IP space may limit your functionality (such as not being able to run P2P applications), but I don't see how it's less secure than the complicated (and thus fallible) filtering rules in a "real" firewall.
    21. Re:Is NAT Better? by freidog · · Score: 2, Insightful

      IPv6 implements some nice features that aren't aimed at a larger address space.
      IPv6 provides for priority and quality of service information in the packet, allowing for better priority based routing.
      It also doesn't permit for fragmenting packets, which makes life easier for both routing and stitching it back together at the destination.
      And distrobution of the addresses is done more fairly. It's not the US and western Europe (to a lesser extent) grab the address space they'd like and the rest of the world can scrounge for what's left.

      NAT does blur the line between Network layer and transport layer somewhat. NAT uses TCP or UDP ports to do routing. Good design would dictate that independant modules of a system should stay indepedant, NAT doesn't do that. Not that it's really a big deal here, there's not much change of a new transport layer protocol grabbing hold anyomre.

    22. Re:Is NAT Better? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      NAT is not defense. The stateful firewall is defense.

      really? no ports forewarded... go ahead and try to attack one of the boxen behind my nat.

      unless you do a man in the middle on traffic that I requested (webpage request) you can not even get a packet past the nat.

      NAT is a damn good defense, not as goot as a stateful firewall but damn good. and BTW, the attacks you can use against a NAT work against a firewall.

    23. Re:Is NAT Better? by MSZ · · Score: 1

      Yeah! Connect everything, fridge, washing mashine, toaster, vacuum cleaner, microwave, just everything. Then get it 0wn3d next day... as the manufacturers of these devices have zero experience in network security.

      --
      The moon is not fully subjugated. I demand a second assault wave preceded by a massive nuclear bombardment.
    24. Re:Is NAT Better? by saikatguha266 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Actually, NAT is better because it provides address space isolation. If your organisation has 500 computers that all have a public IP address, it is harder for you to switch providers (500 IPs is too small to get your own address space for). When you switch your provider, you have to renumber all hosts, fix config files, fix DNS servers etc -- a royal pain in the ass. A NAT allows your to keep your internal structure exactly the same while you switch providers. That address isolation is very important for small-mid sized companies.

      Second, NAT helps multihomed corporations. For large companies, your 10k hosts are going to be distributed over many states/countries/ISPs ... and each site advertising its own address space is expensive for the ISP's because they cannot perform route aggregation (since your address space may not line up with the address space of each ISP). NAT solves this by having each site be NAT'ed behind that ISP's IP address (convinient for the ISP, cheaper for the company). The internal company network runs in the private space and when traffic crosses to the public internet, it gets an IP from the ISP it came out of ... consequently replies come back in through the ISP. Read: If you send a packet out of India, the response won't come back inthrough America ... which would otherwise require you to then forward it to India through your company's routers.

      It is this address isolation and multihoming support that drives NAT use in small and large companies. Address space depletion has nothing to do with it. IPv6 does not fix these problems; companies will continue using NATs because NATs do.

    25. Re:Is NAT Better? by millette · · Score: 1
      From a 2003 article titled "In 2005, all Sony products will be IPv6-enabled":

      "Sony attempts to meld its consumer electronics products with networking. The company has a definite plan to start shipping IPv6-enabled products in the fall of 2003. We asked Mario Tokoro, Sony's Co-CTO, on its IPv6 strategy.

      [snip]

      I can also point out that we need to devise ways to secure sufficient IP address space in coping with the Internet explosion is Asia. Japan may not be so miserable in terms of the IPv4 addresses we have got allocated. Well, up until now, only computers have spoken IP. But we will soon have digital electronics products, mobile terminals and mobile phones, all connected with IP. Even in Japan, current IPv4 address allocation is insufficient. Other Asian countries will face more serious situations. China has smaller IPv4 address space than Sony Group has. We need to make sure that these people will have enough IP addresses for the future. When electronics products and mobile phones become always connected, you can't dynamically allocate IP addresses to cut down address consumption. Therefore we at Sony have internally discussed the undisputable necessity of IPv6 for a long time. Since latter 1990s, our chairman Nobuyuki Idei and I have often discussed that we needed to always keep IPv6 in our mind. In 2000, Idei became the chairperson of IT Strategy Committee of Japanese government, and listed IPv6 as one of strategic focuses, which became widely known. With such background, we take IPv6 seriously and committed to commercialize it."

    26. Re:Is NAT Better? by Eli+Gottlieb · · Score: 1

      It's especially moot because some NAT-based home routers come with firewall software built in.

    27. Re:Is NAT Better? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      well, you can connect to the machine even it has not initiate any connections to the Internet, that is, you are using non-masquerading NAT..

    28. Re:Is NAT Better? by glesga_kiss · · Score: 1
      Weaker how? If you can't address a node, how can you attack it?

      You attack the device doing the NAT. And as NAT is more complicated than straight forwarding, you have far more points of failure to go for. Most of the work will be done in software. At the very least, you'd likely be able to DoS every box behind the NAT by DoS'ing the NAT.

      The firewall aspect of NAT is a quirk. I wouldn't rely on it alone.

    29. Re:Is NAT Better? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "And distrobution of the addresses is done more fairly. It's not the US and western Europe (to a lesser extent) grab the address space they'd like and the rest of the world can scrounge for what's left."

      We built it, we can take what we want.
      Death To women's Rights.
      Fuck head.

    30. Re:Is NAT Better? by glesga_kiss · · Score: 1
      But the ordinary Linksys is a good enough hardware fireall via NAT for the average user.

      Sure. Until you want to run services or VoIP. Using your connection in only one direction is soooo 20th Century.

      NAT and port-forwarding requires a little bit of thought from even the most experienced tech. You can forget your Grampa Pamade and Granny Goldbond scenario there...

    31. Re:Is NAT Better? by Armour+Hotdog · · Score: 0

      One benefit that comes to mind is the ability to automatically download firmware updates.

    32. Re:Is NAT Better? by mrmagos · · Score: 2, Informative

      A modern firewall (including consumer-grade routers) use Stateful Packet Inspection, which will help defend against varoius man-in-the-middle attacks, while NAT does not. NAT alone will still be susceptible to replay and injection attacks, while a SPI firewall will be able to detect and block such an attack. Besides, you can have a very effective firewall that only has a couple rules, as long as you aren't running any boxes you want accessible from the Internet.

      --
      Never start vast projects with half-vast ideas.
    33. Re:Is NAT Better? by Gr8Apes · · Score: 3, Insightful

      NAT and firewalls (FW) are 2 separate things, as you can have NAT without a FW, and you can have a FW without NAT. Now, NAT, by its nature, inherently has some features in common with FWs, such as that it effectively hides ports unless they're mapped.

      A second item is that moving to IPv6 will not necessarily remove NAT or the current 1 router many PCs setup so many of us have. ISPs in general have charged per IP connection/computer, considering each IP a separate computer. Do you honestly think that will change with IPv6? That ISPs are going to be nice and just let you wire up however many systems you want to their network?

      I don't think they'd give up that type of revenue stream. (Besides, think of the security nightmare of locking down and managing security for all those items, like your refrigerator! You'd want some sort of appliance FW/NAT box, both to secure you and keep you from paying extra each month. The latter would be the selling point for most normal users.)

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    34. Re:Is NAT Better? by ePhil_One · · Score: 1
      This is so wrong. Send from the outside a packet to a NAT box that claims to come _from_ the inside.

      Exactly. What the H*ll is a packet with a source or destination IP address of the private address space doing on the public internet? Why don't ISP's filter this crap at its source, the networks edge, instead of making me deal with this fluff.

      And for the record, have you actually tried this little experiment? most devices I know of would just drop that clearly troubled packet in the old bit bucket, not carefully move it to the "right side of the fence".

      --
      You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
    35. Re:Is NAT Better? by michrech · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You, sir, are a moron.

      There's nothing inherently more secure about NAT, it's just the way it's set up on most home routers. As a little experiment you can take a Windows box and put it in the "DMZ" of a normal home NAT box, which means that all ports and protocols get forwarded to it, just as if it was sitting on the public internet itself. It should end up getting owned by viruses and spyware just as quickly as if you plugged it into the modem, even though it's subject to NAT. The point being: the address translation isn't providing any security itself, its only because it's being applied selectively.

      Of COURSE the Windows machine will get "owned" (as it were) if you TELL your FIREWALL/NAT device to forward all unexpected incoming connections to it!

      Here. I've got one for you. Here's a condom. You can wear it while you have sex with whatever partners, but there is one particular partner for which I'm going to poke a hole in it for you.

      Geez..

      --
      bork bork bork!
    36. Re:Is NAT Better? by Armour+Hotdog · · Score: 2, Funny
      Login: kenmore
      Password: admin

      Welcome to your Kenmore Refrigerator administration console! Please choose from the following options:

      1. Refrigerator compartment configuration
      2. Freezer compartment configuration
      3. Ice maker configuration
      4. Fault generator configuration
      >4

      Kenmore Fault Generator (tm) configuration menu. Please choose from the following options:
      1. Enable random grinding/creaking/moaning noises
      2. Enable random blowing/dripping noises
      3. Enable random refrigerator temperature fluctuations
      4. Enable random freezer temperature fluctuations
      5. Enable strange odor generator
      6. Enable random faults from all categories (recommended)
      7. Disable faults when human detected in proximity to refrigerator (recommended)
      >
    37. Re:Is NAT Better? by mrmagos · · Score: 1

      True, you cannot connect to a NAT'd machine that has not initiated a connection. However, you are overly underestimating the capabilities of a stateful firewall.

      With NAT, you are much more susceptible to man-in-the-middle than with a stateful firewall. In fact, stateful firewalls were more or less created to block replay and packet injection, which a NAT alone will not stop.

      --
      Never start vast projects with half-vast ideas.
    38. Re:Is NAT Better? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      NAT is not defense.

      BS! That is a blatantly WRONG statement.

      NAT is the first line of Defense for the majority or consumers out there. To justify it as an end all solution would be dangerous, but it is A defense.

      ANY HOME networking router (see:Linksys) that does some sort of additional firewalling increases security by some measure.

      I agree that a stateful firewall should be included on all consumer networking equipment available.

      My question is this: are the ISP's/Corp's necessarily going to be the ones determining when IPv6 goes full swing. I am aware of many ISP's who provide both, but I can't see them not supporting IPv4 for +5 years after EVERYONE has IPv6 on line... Why should I replace my functioning IPv4 router??? Cause THEY say so??

      Que the AOL goodbye ring, cause I'm off to another ISP. Consumers will control, to a point, when IPv4 is deemed dead!

    39. Re:Is NAT Better? by Frank+T.+Lofaro+Jr. · · Score: 3, Interesting

      IP address exhaustion is like Peak Oil.

      There is a time where the problem is looming, but taking action then will mitigate a lot of the damage.

      Or one can wait until it is having severe impacts, and then we will all be hosed very very badly.

      --
      Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
    40. Re:Is NAT Better? by FireFury03 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Weaker how? If you can't address a node, how can you attack it?

      Well, ignoring the fact that there _are_ ways to defeat NAT (although they usually require cooperation from hosts behind the NAT anyway), one notable weakness is that you're relying on your ISP to get things right, and relying on someone else's cluefulness is always bad.

      What I mean by that is, given a network like:

            PC (192.168.0.1) ------ (192.168.0.254) Router (1.2.3.4) ------- ISP

      Assuming 1.2.3.4 is a global scope address and 192.168.0.0/24 is site-local. The router is doing NAT, all well and good. However, if the ISP somehow ends up routing traffic destined to 192.168.0.1 to your router (for exacmple, a routing cockup on their end) then most consumer grade routers will just let it right through because they don't explicitly block incoming traffic.

      Admittedly it's unlikely this would happen, and only nodes reasonably close to you would be able to take advantage of the routing. However, I still maintain that trusting a third party as part of your network security is a Bad Thing.

      but I don't see how it's less secure than the complicated (and thus fallible) filtering rules in a "real" firewall.

      Firewall rules don't have to be especially complex - a firewall that does the same job as a NAT (security wise) but provides protection from the above problem is simply a connection tracker configured to drop incoming connections. Infact, since a NAT is basically a connection tracker with some more stuff shoved ontop it could be argued that the NAT is more complex and thus more fallible.

    41. Re:Is NAT Better? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The ISPs don't care, but I know almost all off the shelf NATs already do simple packet filtering like that.

    42. Re:Is NAT Better? by MattyCobb · · Score: 1

      Or a cable mobem into a rounter... I have no idea why you included DSL vs cable there unless you have no idea what NAT is...

      --

      Matt
      You have 1 Moderator Point! Use it or lose it! Is that a threat? -vapid
    43. Re:Is NAT Better? by macslut · · Score: 1

      I have a small 1 bedroom cottage. In it, I have 12 "internet devices", only two of which are computers.

    44. Re:Is NAT Better? by michrech · · Score: 1

      It's amazing to see how many people just don't "Get It" (TM)

      Nat prevents unexpected incoming connections from hitting your internal machines. This is *exactly* what a "firewall" does.

      When you open a port to a particular machine in your internal lan, you open THAT PORT, not every single port. If you, for example, open port 80 in order to run a web server, ALL OTHER TRAFFIC IS STILL BLOCKED! Strangly enough, JUST LIKE A FIREWALL.

      The ONLY time you could "open up a huge hole" in your NAT Firewall would be to DMZ a machine, as I had previously mentioned to another moron, and in that case you deserve what you get.

      --
      bork bork bork!
    45. Re:Is NAT Better? by SquadBoy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well yes. But, security, like ogres, onions, cake, and parafait should have layers. NAT provides a, yes rather weak, layer. But it is still a layer. So doing both is a good thing.

      --

      Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
    46. Re:Is NAT Better? by SquadBoy · · Score: 1

      Exactly. And those who complain about "nasty NAT traversal hacks" seem to always forget that their code has no business caring about layer 3 stuff. If you feel the need to have your code care about layer 3 you need to design better code. That's all there is to it. The fact that it's easier to write borken code is no excuse to write said borken code. And it will still be borken under 6 it'll just be easier to mask. Better to fix the code rather than depending on 6 to mask the borkeness.

      --

      Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
    47. Re:Is NAT Better? by FireFury03 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Mandatory support for ipsec is great.. except how many of us would use it?

      Well, all those businesses that currently shell out rediculous amounts of money for VPN solutions I suppose. Things will get more interesting if DNSSEC (shoving X.509 certificates in DNS records) gets widespread and easier to use - at the moment it's horrendously complex to set up.

      I think in the long run it'd be nice to use IPSEC with DNSSEC instead of SSL, etc. There are some advantages - for one thing, once the keys have been negotiated between 2 hosts then that's it (until they expire), no having to renegotiate the encryption for every connection with the associated multiple round trips needed. Of course it'll cause firewall administrators a headache since they can nolonger filter packets by port number.

    48. Re:Is NAT Better? by FireFury03 · · Score: 1

      Actually, NAT is better because it provides address space isolation. If your organisation has 500 computers that all have a public IP address, it is harder for you to switch providers (500 IPs is too small to get your own address space for). When you switch your provider, you have to renumber all hosts, fix config files, fix DNS servers etc -- a royal pain in the ass. A NAT allows your to keep your internal structure exactly the same while you switch providers. That address isolation is very important for small-mid sized companies.

      IPv6 supports network migration quite easilly. Basically the idea is that you change your prefix but leave the rest of the address the same. Since you had a clue when you set up the network (right? :), all your addressing is done through DNS and your machines are configured by DHCPv6 or the native IPv6 router discovery protocol (which is part of the IPv6 stack), so just changing the prefix on your router and in DNS will cause your entire network to migrate over to the new network automagically.

    49. Re:Is NAT Better? by asdfghjklqwertyuiop · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Exactly. What the H*ll is a packet with a source or destination IP address of the private address space doing on the public internet? Why don't ISP's filter this crap at its source, the networks edge, instead of making me deal with this fluff.


      They do. That doesn't save your ass in these situations:

      Scenario 1: ISP gets hacked. Attacker sets up routes to your internal network. Attacker now has full access to your network and never even needed to lay a finger on your "firewall".

      Scenario 2: Broadband ISP has everything set up such that the outside IPs of all customers in the area look like they're all on one big ethernet. Road Runner (Time Warner's cable ISP) works this way. Other customers in the area can set up routes to your LAN right on their own routers.

      And people who consider the security of their own networks "fluff" are better off not being connected to the internet at all. They're just providing connectivity to that many more spam/ddos zombie hosts.


      And for the record, have you actually tried this little experiment?


      Yes.


      most devices I know of would just drop that clearly troubled packet in the old bit bucket, not carefully move it to the "right side of the fence".


      Most devices you know of (ie, cheap consumer broadband routers) are not capable of being confiugred to perform NAT without filtering, at least not through the idiot proof web interface (and that's certainly a good thing).

    50. Re:Is NAT Better? by QuantumRiff · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Actually, while not directly connected to the internet, a College I work with has started to move all of their classroom flouresent lights to IP addressable dimmable balasts. This enables them to adjust the light, depending on the ambient light coming in from the windows, having certain lights dim when the network gets a broadcast saying the networked projector is turning on, alert maintenance when a light burns out, alert someone to the fact that the lights have turned on at 3 am and maybe security should head over and check it out, and other fun stuff.. Also, all their sound is now over IP. I know, this is not "over the internet" and does use private IP address space, but still, there are more IP devices coming out than you would think..

      --

      What are we going to do tonight Brain?
    51. Re:Is NAT Better? by asdfghjklqwertyuiop · · Score: 1

      Care to explain how a statefull firewall makes one piss of difference to Grampa Pamade and Granny Goldbond over NAT? Either of those two needs to configure a proxy server to cache and control web sites accessed?


      Sure. The firewall actually protects them from attacks. NAT doesn't. It just rewrites the addresses on certain packets. If a packet comes in to the outside interface of their router addressed to an internal host and thus not applying to NAT, it will go right on in. A firewall will block it.

    52. Re:Is NAT Better? by ikegami · · Score: 1

      The goal of NAT is not to restrict connections, it's to allow them. As such, NAT boxes become weaker firewalls as they become better. The introduction of DMZ and UPnP illustrates this. When DMZ is used, the NAT box loses all firewall capabilities for one machine. When UPnP is used, the NAT box loses all firewall capabilities for all machines.

    53. Re:Is NAT Better? by bcmm · · Score: 1

      That's XP's fault. You are using a piece of hardware to stop your machine receiving incoming connections. That's insane; you should be allowed to just close all ports somehow in software. I cannot believe that there is any feature of NAT which could not be implemented easily in software.

      --
      # cat /dev/mem | strings | grep -i llama
      Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
    54. Re:Is NAT Better? by quantum+bit · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Since you had a clue when you set up the network (right? :), all your addressing is done through DNS and your machines are configured by DHCPv6 or the native IPv6 router discovery protocol (which is part of the IPv6 stack), so just changing the prefix on your router and in DNS will cause your entire network to migrate over to the new network automagically.

      Hahahahahahahaha, yeah right!

      DHCP has been a internet standard RFC for what, 8 years now? DNS for over 20? And yet there are still brand new devices (copiers, network timeclocks, etc) that don't support either standard correctly. Devices which don't even work correctly with DHCP and IPv4, which have to be statically assigned and addressed by IP address because the vendor's crappy software won't do DNS lookups for some unknown reason. Or that claim to support DHCP, but in reality request a lease once and never try to renew it.

      As much as I'd like it to be true, corporate networks are not in any way ready to go fully dynamic. Renumbering, whether with IPv4 or IPv6 will always be painful. IPv6 makes it worse since it strongly discourages private address space.

    55. Re:Is NAT Better? by m50d · · Score: 1

      It's worse, far worse. It's hard to run a server from behind nat, which borks the internet (no servers=no internet). Also, there are services which expect the IP they're sending from to be their real IP.

      --
      I am trolling
    56. Re:Is NAT Better? by rdenisc · · Score: 1

      IPv6 includes private provider-independant addressing too, in two different flavor: the old obsoleted on which is very much like a v6-ified RFC-1918, and the shiny new one which also facilitates merging two private networks (what do you do if you must merge two companies both using 10.0.0.0/8 ??) by using pseudo-random prefixes. If you want to remain ISP-independant, you could use private IPv6 addresses internally, in parallel with public (changing) addresses for outgoing traffic.

      --
      Remi Denis
    57. Re:Is NAT Better? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Could you explain that a bit more? I'm fairly certain that I agree but would like some clarification.

    58. Re:Is NAT Better? by Dun+Malg · · Score: 1
      At the very least, you'd likely be able to DoS every box behind the NAT by DoS'ing the NAT.

      And you can't already do that with any other gateway server?

      --
      If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
    59. Re:Is NAT Better? by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Wrong. Firstly, IPv6 provides support for automatic network renumbering, which solves the real problem instead of hacking around it with a band-aid that ultimately changes the network architecture. Switching ISPs with IPv6 is easy. Secondly, your multihoming example doesn't require NAT at all; why would it? Each site uses its ISP's address space, and you can set up your internal routing however you like.

      --
      main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
    60. Re:Is NAT Better? by hpa · · Score: 1
      IPv6 supports network migration quite easilly. Basically the idea is that you change your prefix but leave the rest of the address the same. Since you had a clue when you set up the network (right? :), all your addressing is done through DNS and your machines are configured by DHCPv6 or the native IPv6 router discovery protocol (which is part of the IPv6 stack), so just changing the prefix on your router and in DNS will cause your entire network to migrate over to the new network automagically.
      ... and it drops all your connections in the process. Had the protocol had proper abstraction between endpoints and routing paths, this would not be a problem. Unfortunately the router vendors pushed for IPv6 to be as similar to IPv4 as possible, which meant lots of baggage, which we only now are learning how to deal with.

      There is another aspect to this. Memory is getting to the point where a router can handle the entire IPv4 address space as a linear table, which eliminates a huge bunch of tricks that Cisco has made a business from, lowering the barrier to entry. Cisco needs IPv6 to take off in the core Internet, in order to keep out competition.
    61. Re:Is NAT Better? by jafiwam · · Score: 1

      NAT and port-forwarding requires a little bit of thought from even the most experienced tech. You can forget your Grampa Pamade and Granny Goldbond scenario there...

      Agreed.

      THEREFORE, it's not relevant if the "firewall" is a NAT Linksys or a stateful firewall... for those old folks the NAT box IS a firewall.

      Which leads back to my original point; yapping about "stateful firewall is better" in the context of most users is useless as it's a point in search of an argument.

    62. Re:Is NAT Better? by ePhil_One · · Score: 1
      They do. That doesn't save your ass in these situations:

      Actually, in my experience, they don't. I filter everything that does not belong explicitly at the gateway, and I dump a lot of packets with a private IP source address. I dump a lot of traffic in general, and it bugs me. (and don't misquote me, I never called my network security fluff, I called packets that would never see the light of day again, could not possibly be return routed, and could harm me no more than a rodent that dines on alligator eggs could hurt a 20 year old swamp vetran, "fluff"

      Most devices you know of (ie, cheap consumer broadband routers) are not capable of being confiugred to perform NAT without filtering, at least not through the idiot proof web interface (and that's certainly a good thing).

      Perhaps your point isn't clear. The cheap NAT gateways (actually PAT, see below) everyone else is talking about don't do this (ie are secure), but I assume you are refering to a larger scale Cisco Router that a begining network admin might activate NAT on thinking it will secure him.

      Honestly, your concerns sound like a seriously broken NAT implementation. If the "device" is not explicitly listening for the private IP address on the outside interface, why the heck isn't it dropping the packet thats not meant for it? Instead, this implementation sends the mystery packet to the routing engine! Maybe if it were a broadcast packet, then it might be jusified in routing it inside, but thats still a far cry from having routes into a private network.

      An insecure NAT implemenation would be inside system gets NAT'ed to external IP a.b.c.d; I then connect to random port of a.b.c.d and this connection gets forwarded in to the inside system, which might have a vulnerablility. But the reality is that most of those little home routers are actually doing PAT, or Port Address Translation. This allows multiple internal boxes to share a single external address, but breaks any notion of non-explicit forwarding of a connection inside (which box should it forward the connection to?).

      --
      You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
    63. Re:Is NAT Better? by adavidw · · Score: 1

      You really should only wear a condom once, and then throw it away.

    64. Re:Is NAT Better? by Tatarize · · Score: 1

      IPv6 would stop worms too. I'm sorry but if the worm actually finds a hit in as many IP addresses as IPv6 gives, it deserves to infect that machine. Current worms just guess IP addresses, and go figure they find them all the time.

      --

      It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
    65. Re:Is NAT Better? by shreak · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Here's one that's not layer 3, and isn't an application bug and NAT takes a huge crap all over it.

      I have a control stream (TCP/UDP doesn't matter) that I can successfully set up from within my NAT'ed network to an external machine. This control stream signals that we're going to set up two media streams, one from me to him, and one from him to me. They're over UDP.

      I send him the port # I'm opening on my machine to receive the stream he's sending.

      I never get the media he's sending. Want to know why?

      Because I opened port 20057 on my machine but nothing happened on the NAT machine who is refusing to relay the media.

      Many protocols use this technique and have to jump through hoops to get it to work through NAT.

      NAT good riddance!

      =Shreak

    66. Re:Is NAT Better? by glesga_kiss · · Score: 1
      And you can't already do that with any other gateway server?

      Well, you can max anyones pipe out and DoS anything. However, with NAT the device has to cache stateful information in tables about the active connections. Fake a few million connections and a badly hardened NAT will fall on it's arse well before you max out the wire. The more complex something is, the easy it is to subvert.

    67. Re:Is NAT Better? by fm6 · · Score: 1
      Well, ignoring the fact that there _are_ ways to defeat NAT (although they usually require cooperation from hosts behind the NAT anyway),
      That's a weakness that NATs share with firewalls. So you're hardly making a case for NATs being weaker than firewalls.
      one notable weakness is that you're relying on your ISP to get things right, and relying on someone else's cluefulness is always bad.
      Especially an ISP's — most of the ones I've dealt with are not particularly clueful. But NATs managed by ISPs is not what we were talking about. We were discussing home routers.
    68. Re:Is NAT Better? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Stateful firewalls can allow oddball protocols better. When you are blocking everything inbound it doesn't matter if you are stateful or not. Blocked packets are blocked whether you remember them or not...

    69. Re:Is NAT Better? by SquadBoy · · Score: 1

      Either you left out one *very* big detail or we have a case of pilot error. I'm guessing pilot error.

      --

      Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
    70. Re:Is NAT Better? by quarkscat · · Score: 1

      Of course NAT and IPv4 are better if you are interested in fragmenting the internet (eg. the upcoming TLD war between the USA and EU/UN). The same old Clausowitz (sp?)/Sun Tzu principle of "divide and conquer" applies to IP address space just as much as to conflicts between nation states. And what better way to control the flow of information than to fragment the internet?

      The PRC may have the "Great Firewall of China", but at least they are well on the way to full support internally for IPv6. One billion potential customers in the PRC, and another billion in India, all needing (at some point) a Class C network address space to cover all their personal internet-attached devices -- what is the biggest holdup for IPv6 implimentation?

      It wouldn't/couldn't be the USA's US Patriot Act, Echelon, "MATRIX", or the 1994 Telecommunications Act? More address space means a big jump in the size of the government's databases to keep a watchful eye on its' citizens.

    71. Re:Is NAT Better? by michrech · · Score: 1

      What if you are part of an orgy, though? :)

      You really know how to suck the humor (no pun intended)(well, mayhapps a little) out of a joke!

      --
      bork bork bork!
    72. Re:Is NAT Better? by illegalien · · Score: 2, Insightful
      But seriously, if IPv6 was so good, it would not require so much pushing. If the IPv4 exhaustion was real and imminent, it would not rquire so much pushing.
      Haven't you learned anything from GWB: being proactive is better than waiting for "real and imminent".

      Seriously... it is better in this case to be proactively preparing for the transition than to one day realize we *really* need IPv6 and are not capable of making it happen effectively. No one is saying it has to be a hard and fast cutover today. I don't see anything wrong with getting some momentum going and starting to work out some unexpected kinks before the need is *real and imminent*.
    73. Re:Is NAT Better? by asdfghjklqwertyuiop · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Perhaps your point isn't clear. The cheap NAT gateways (actually PAT, see below) everyone else is talking about don't do this (ie are secure), but I assume you are refering to a larger scale Cisco Router that a begining network admin might activate NAT on thinking it will secure him.


      Yes, that's right. But most of the cheap NAT gateways probably function that way interally also. It is just the web interface that prevents you from setting it up in that way.

      For example, a number of linksys routers run linux. Linux can definitely be configured to NAT and NAT only, and it won't drop a thing. It is just the linksys web interface that prevents you from configuring it that way.


      Honestly, your concerns sound like a seriously broken NAT implementation. If the "device" is not explicitly listening for the private IP address on the outside interface, why the heck isn't it dropping the packet thats not meant for it?


      It isn't broken. It just isn't a function of NAT to decide to drop or accept packets. NAT just rewrites or does not rewrite. In just about every type router there is, NAT and firewalling are separate and distinct things. The NAT standards don't specify dropping packets if they can't be rewritten, and it is just good design to keep those things separate. It gives you more flexibility and power and makes debugging easier.

      The decision wether to drop or accept is a function of the firewall.

      There's nothing broken about a NAT implemenation that only Translates Network Addresses. It would be broken if it ever did more than that.

    74. Re:Is NAT Better? by Dolda2000 · · Score: 1
      But seriously, if IPv6 was so good, it would not require so much pushing. If the IPv4 exhaustion was real and imminent, it would not rquire so much pushing.
      Are you kidding? If one standard is in use and it works "good enough", people (other than those who explicitly want to try, like early adopters or other tech freaks) will keep from switching just because it takes too much effort (that is, more effort than none). The same thing goes for a great many other things, such as 3G cell phones, USB keyboards or VoIP.

      Not until IPv4 really does not work anymore will average people start looking towards IPv6.

    75. Re:Is NAT Better? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I want to monitor the laundry room machines from my apartment, so I don't have to climb the stairs over and over only to find they're still all in use. I want to be notified when the loads are done. I want the door to lock so nobody else can swipe them.

    76. Re:Is NAT Better? by Dolda2000 · · Score: 1
      how does it work? you tell me, details are not easy to find. ots of talk, few working implementations (if I'm wrong, please tell me, I'm genuinely very interested).
      You are correct that there aren't exactly very many working implementations of it (mainly because it's so new), but I believe that USAGI is working on one. However, there are lots of details. I think that it's not considered fully finalized quite yet, but it's finalized enough to have reached the status of RFC: RFC 3775.

      I haven't read the RFC myself though, but here's my impresson on how it works: The device attempts to connect to whatever network is available at its location (be it a WiFi hotspot or 3G cell phone connection or anything) and does all the normal IPv6 negotiation stuff so that it gets at least a link-local address and a globally routable unicast address. Using that unicast address, it contacts the Home Agent (HA) to get a "Home Address". In other words, the device will have at least two globally routable unicast addresses. The normal source address selection algorithm has provisions that say that the Home Address should always be preferred (see RFC 3484). IPv6 mobility then uses an IPSec tunnel between the device and the HA. When you leave the current network or just want to use another network, the tunnel is renegotiated with the HA.

    77. Re:Is NAT Better? by asdfghjklqwertyuiop · · Score: 2, Informative

      That's a weakness that NATs share with firewalls. So you're hardly making a case for NATs being weaker than firewalls.


      No it isn't. No correctly set up firewall will be susceptible that type of attack where the ISP makes your network routable.

      On the other hand, if you aren't using a firewall, every kind of NAT will be susceptible to that because NAT alone doens't drop any packets, ever. It just translates or does not translate.

    78. Re:Is NAT Better? by asdfghjklqwertyuiop · · Score: 1

      Well yes. But, security, like ogres, onions, cake, and parafait should have layers. NAT provides a, yes rather weak, layer. But it is still a layer. So doing both is a good thing.


      Not really. At best, it allows you to place the security of your network into the hands of your ISP by assuming that the ISP will never ever send packets addressed directly to your internal hosts to your router's external interface. I don't call that a layer of security, let alone one that is worth the inconveniences NAT provides.

    79. Re:Is NAT Better? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      All of our network printers have webservers in them. I even had to make a scanner to find all of the damn things (too many to keep track of, most of which were set up before I got here), and discovered a number of other random internet-enabled thingys on here.

    80. Re:Is NAT Better? by jbellows_20 · · Score: 1

      IAX is a VoIP protocol that does well over NAT and also (at least when used with Asterisk) has a trunking function which when used to connect two sites conserves bandwidth for multiple calls between the sites.

    81. Re:Is NAT Better? by Ernesto+Alvarez · · Score: 1

      NAT means serious problems when you're using ipsec.
      AH can't go thru NAT (by design) and ESP has problems too.
      Although we have an ipsec vpn running at work that accepts connections from NATed hosts, there are always minor problems. You also have port forwarding issues and such.
      I'd rather have all public addresses and use AH for all connections. Besides, any admin worth his salt can set a stateful firewall and have a similar degree of protection than NAT.

      I'd rather use protocols that were designed to provide security for that role instead of kludges (unfortunately I cannot, as we do not have public addresses for the office workstations).

    82. Re:Is NAT Better? by SquadBoy · · Score: 1

      WTF lets their ISP control *anything* about their firewall and wtf nats on a router.

      Oh wait. Lamers who don't know networking.

      --

      Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
    83. Re:Is NAT Better? by asdfghjklqwertyuiop · · Score: 1

      wtf nats on a router...
      Oh wait. Lamers who don't know networking.


      Ummmm... speaking of "lamers who don't know networking", do you even know what NAT is?

    84. Re:Is NAT Better? by CaveMike · · Score: 1
      The example that Shreak gave is the exact issue SIP has with NAT. If endpoint A signals the address/port that it is listening on, then that address/port needs to be reachable from endpoint B. NAT typically decouples the internal and external addresses/ports and breaks the reachability. Work-arounds for SIP include: a) making the SIP app aware that it sits behind a NAT and using the external address/port, b) making the NAT SIP-aware so that it can do packet inspection and replace the internal address/port with an external address/port.

      If you constrain yourself to sessions that are always initiated from behind the NAT, then you are probably OK. But whenever a protocol signals its address/port (without initiating a packet over that same address/port), then you end up with NAT troubles.

    85. Re:Is NAT Better? by DarkTempes · · Score: 1

      As long as some females get hosed along with me, i'm up to the challenge!

    86. Re:Is NAT Better? by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      Ok, you're assuming your IP addresses will change in the first place.

      If you are a company with 50 computers, then you're just getting your IP space from your ISP, and that will be the case. As long as you have DHCP you'll still be fine. And for those two office copiers that don't support it you'll only need 2 minutes to fix them.

      Migrations are only a headache when you have thousands of computers. In that case, you probably don't need to use your ISPs address space, but instead you can just get your own /16 or something like that. If you switch ISPs you can just keep the same IPs since you own them.

      Here is a problem with NAT - mergers. What happens when two companies merge that have private networks? You suddenly have thousands of networks with the same addresses to remap. If on the other hand each company had a /16 you just need a router between them and no extra setup.

      In an ideal world, one machine = 1 IP, globally routable. Sure, we use tricks when this isn't easy to implement (you can't very well have home dialup users taking their IPs with them when they switch ISPs unless you want the top-level routers to have to track every individual IP on the planet). However, NAT is really just a hack and is rarely the best solution to a problem...

    87. Re:Is NAT Better? by fyonn · · Score: 1

      so basically when roaming, all your connectivity goes via your own home? the problem is, that sucks. you're on holiday in states and your connection to load up anything has to go home and then out? using up your home bandwidth cap maybe? surely a better option would be for you to negotiate a connection with your HA and sort out a home address, and then initiate connections from your remote address but with a header of "if you lose me, send packets to my HA", then if you change IP, you renegotiate with your HA (who remembers your keys etc so he knows who you are). Your HA now knows where you've moved to, forwards any packets it has stored and you, the HA and the website re-negotiate your connections to your new address (without dropping them).

      that way, you get the latency and bandwidth advantage of your current location while still able to roam. less requirements on your home dsl (ipv6/mobile ip capable) router and bandwidth.

      does that make sense or am I missing something here?

      dave

    88. Re:Is NAT Better? by Basje · · Score: 1

      With IPv6, port scanning becomes infeasible. The number of addresses is so large, that blindly portscanning gives you virtually no chance of even finding a host. You have a bigger chance of winning the lottery.

      While that is security by obscurity, and may be cirumvented by isp's allocating dense clusters of IPv6 addresses or other means, it's a better measure than relying on NAT for your protection. When your NAT device is compromised, your whole network is compromised.

      --
      the pun is mightier than the sword
    89. Re:Is NAT Better? by julesh · · Score: 1

      If you can't address a node, how can you attack it?

      Source routing.

    90. Re:Is NAT Better? by julesh · · Score: 1

      If you disagree, then explain to me how one could connect to a machine behind a NAT device if said machine has initiated *no* connections to the Internet.

      Send a source routed packet with the destination in the private range and an intermediate host set to the IP address of the NAT device.

      Most NAT devices will drop such a packet, but this is only because they have a firewall integrated and most firewalls drop source routed packets as a potential source of trouble.

    91. Re:Is NAT Better? by Dolda2000 · · Score: 1

      Indeed you are right. I had just forgotten about that part. The home address is used "normally", but once a connection to another node is established, there is some kind of protocol (again, I haven't read the RFC in any detail) that can be used to renegotiate that connection so that it doesn't need to go through the HA.

    92. Re:Is NAT Better? by FireFury03 · · Score: 1

      1. You still need port forwarding set up on your NAT to accept inbound calls
      2. Since with NAT you only have a single global-scope address you can only have a single end-point for incoming calls (i.e. if you have multiple phones you would _have_ to run your own asterisk server inside your LAN)
      3. Whilest it's a friendly protocol, it is not the industry standard (for good or bad, SIP has pretty much won as the standard with it's adoption into IMS, etc).

    93. Re:Is NAT Better? by fm6 · · Score: 1

      OK, that's informative. Thanks.

    94. Re:Is NAT Better? by runderwo · · Score: 1
      NAT is not a golden bullet though.
      Actually, since a golden bullet would look menacing yet hit its target with a dull thud, it sounds like quite an apt metaphor for NAT.
    95. Re:Is NAT Better? by Parity · · Score: 1

      Uhhm, yeah. Oddly enough, I knew all that, despite your assumptions about my ability to 'Get It (TM)'.

      Let me rephrase, then.
        If you have Nat + Firewall and your firewall is fucked up, nat does mean that you still are probably not exposed.

        The most likely source of fucking up your firewall is doing your firewall rules wrong, so if you can write a -correct- firewall ruleset, then you don't get much security benefit from nat.

        (There is the possibility, though, that your firewall has a bug in it that allows packets to be routed through it despite your rules. This is pretty damn unlikely, and in the iptables case your nat and your firewall are pretty much the same software system anyway so if one is compromised, the other probably is too. Still. Give this hypothetical bug, it means you still wouldn't be able to get through because you can't route private ip packets across the internet. It's not a likely scenario, but it is at least a slight increase in security. Very slight.)

        Mostly, though, what I meant was that nat + firewall makes it harder to shoot yourself in the foot. With a default-accept firewall, it's easy to open up more than you meant to with a foolish rule (or lack of rule). With a default-reject it's a lot harder to hurt yourself, but can still be done.

        NAT means that opening up some ports in your firewall doesn't actually hurt you (unless those ports are running -on- your firewall box, of course, then it does, and that's actually worse than exposing anything inside since if the firewall is compromised you're toast). But, assuming your firewall doesn't actually run any services (it shouldn't!), you'd have to manage to fuck up in a coordinated way in order to actually expose something inside the firewall. It's really hard to accidentally create a rule that forwards an external port to an internal machine that's actually running the service on that port.

        If you already are or hire a competent system administrator, of course, NAT doesn't really get you anything. But I already said that, you just didn't read it the first time.

        Example of shooting yourself in the foot might be, put in an accept rule for port 22 in your firewall. SSH is the preferred secure connection after all, right? Of course, network devices might have configuration over ssh... did you really want to expose your network printer? When's the last time you upgrade its firmware?

        A competent sysadmin will, of course, make a rule to open up port 22 only for those hosts that actually -need- it, of course, but my -point-, if you'd bothered to listen instead of kneejerking off about who doesn't get it, was that NAT makes it harder for those who happen not to be competent professional sysadmins to shoot themselves in the foot by fucking up their firewall rules. (Like, say, home computing enthusists with a toy intranet at home to play with. Not that anyone like that would read slashdot, nosir...)

        There, now I've explained myself in full detailed complexity that nobody will read anyway because the article was posted yesterday. (Why didn't I explain this before? I was trying to answer -simply- for someone who was obviously considerably clueless about how this stuff works.)

      --
      --Parity
      'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
    96. Re:Is NAT Better? by bedessen · · Score: 1

      You may have all those problems if you don't qualify for PI space and are stuck with PA, but everything you describe above is precisely the reason why PI allocations are available, with justification. You don't need NAT to achieve any of that.

    97. Re:Is NAT Better? by bedessen · · Score: 1

      And by the way, 500 hosts is more than enough to qualify for PI space. As long as you multihome you can qualify for anything down to a /24.

  5. Love that quote by Matey-O · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "and suggests that it isn't worth trying to reclaim old allocations."

    Isn't worth it to whom?

    --
    "Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
    1. Re:Love that quote by convolvatron · · Score: 1

      certainly there are some old a and b allocations that might be worth it,
      but the old /24 allocations (the swamp) are too fragmented to route
      globally. even getting back those /8 assignments would be difficult,
      there was no legal or contractual framework governing them. in fact there
      was a somewhat notorious incident where the ex-head-administrator of
      fix-west took an allocation with his name on it to a certain
      ip-over-cable startup and solving their addressing problem in
      one fell swoop.

    2. Re:Love that quote by Cheeko · · Score: 2, Insightful

      HP? IBM? MIT? Or anyone else who has a nice class A all to themselves ;) HP I belive actually has two (the original HP 15, and the old DEC 16). These companies/institutions will never run our of v4 addresses, so they likely will only push as hard as they are made to by their partners/customers.

    3. Re:Love that quote by Kadin2048 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Well if you look at the List of Class A address allocations you'll see some possibilities of people who might not be interested.

      In particular, Level 3 Communications has not one but two Class A blocks, the 4.0.0.0 and 8.0.0.0 blocks; "Comcast IP Services" has another one.

      There are some oddball Class A assignments on there too. Who would have guessed that Ford has one? The US Postal Service? The Defense Department has something like seven, not a huge surprise given when the assignments were made. Halliburton even has one.

      Anyway, reading down the list you can see that the people who already have their own Class A blocks are unlikely to care too much about how quickly v6 gets rolled out, at least for their own use. But some of the newer big-time tech companies who aren't on that list might have more of an interest ... Cisco, for instance, is not on there.

      --
      "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
    4. Re:Love that quote by FireFury03 · · Score: 1

      Isn't worth it to whom?

      From TFA: Another debate occasionally resurfaces about reclaiming some of the early allocations to further extend the lifetime of IPv4. Hopefully this article has shown that the ROI for that approach is going to be extremely low. Discussions around the Internet community show there is an expectation that it will take several years of substantive negotiation (in multiple court systems around the globe) to retrieve any /8s. Then following that effort and expense, the likelihood of even getting back more than a few /8 blocks is very low. Following the allocation growth trend, after several years of litigation the result is likely to be just a few months of additional resource added to the pool--and possibly not even a whole month. All this assumes IANA does not completely run out before getting any back, because running out would result in pentup demand that could immediately exhaust any returns.

    5. Re:Love that quote by rand.srand() · · Score: 1

      There is a story/legend that a guy goes into the DMV to renew the registration for his car, and when the guy gets the bill, it's missing a discount for $20 as he is a veteran. When he asks them to correct the bill, the person behind the counter says, "It's only $20, don't worry about it." To which the veteran asks the DMV worker, "Okay, how about you give me $20 from your wallet?" The DMW worker objects and reacts in shock. The veteran says, "So when it's my money it's nothing, but your $20 is a whole different matter."

      I suspect we are in a similar situation here.

    6. Re:Love that quote by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Who the hell is Interop Show Network?

    7. Re:Love that quote by Kadin2048 · · Score: 1

      Who the hell is Interop Show Network?

      Took me a few minutes of Googling, but the only thing I could turn up is that it was literally a network that was constructed for the 1992 Interop networking trade show.

      According to this site, "the Interop Network consisted of approximately 33 miles of Unshielded Twisted Pair, one mile of Shielded Twisted Pair, four miles of Fiber Optic cable, and three T1 links to the Internet via regional carriers. In addition there are three separate off-floor terminal clusters." It's fate is described at the end of the article: "Built by 40 professionals in less than one week, the network was disassembled at the end of the show."

      Why the heck are they still listed as owning an entire Class A allocation? No idea. The best theory I can come up with is that whoever got ahold of the allocation in preparation for the show held on to it afterwards and either Wikipedia is using some very old information, or they never bothered to change the name on the allocation afterwards to reflect whatever it's (not) being used for now.

      I've seen some pretty startling graphs showing the utilization of address space as measured by packets flowing through major Internet Exchange Points, and the Class A space is largely a wasteland. I don't know whether that's indicative of the fact that the addresses actually are not being used, or that they're just being used on private or semi-private networks (e.g. Defense Department or Military networks) which don't send or receive much traffic on the public net. Either way, it's a lot of globally routable addresses not being used.

      --
      "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
    8. Re:Love that quote by Cheeko · · Score: 1

      Well you can be fairly certain that those being used by major corporations are being used extensively, but very likely a huge portion of that traffic is masked from the outside world behind firewalls, NATing, tunnels, and any number of other things.

  6. Dupe. by haeger · · Score: 5, Funny
    I know I've read this statement atleast yearly for the last 2-10 years.

    .haeger

    --
    You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
    1. Re:Dupe. by Capt+James+McCarthy · · Score: 1

      Naaa, your just stuck in a while loop.

      --
      There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
    2. Re:Dupe. by ArsonSmith · · Score: 1

      while (sleep 31536000); do echo IP addresses are going to run out; done

      --
      Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
    3. Re:Dupe. by Black+Cardinal · · Score: 1

      I was listening to some old Geeks in Space episodes last week and in one of the earlier ones Hemos and CmdrTaco had some funny comments about "The Great IP Crunch of 2010." This was back in 1999, I think.

      Ah, here's a link to the CNN story from 1999: CNN.com

  7. It's a race! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Will *BSD die before the switchover to IPv6? Maybe a good Slashdot poll:

    [ ] Yes
    [ ] No
    [ ] Microsoft
    [ ] I don't know what IPv6 is, but I'll post anyway
    [ ] Cowboy Neal encodes my packets

    1. Re:It's a race! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      [ ] Depends on if Duke Nukem Forever supports IPv6

    2. Re:It's a race! by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 2, Funny

      [] Profit!

      --
      "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
    3. Re:It's a race! by aurb · · Score: 2, Funny

      [ ] Only if Netcraft confirms it.

    4. Re:It's a race! by ichigo+2.0 · · Score: 1

      [ ] Only if Soviet Russia makes a beowulf cluster of it, because my spoon is too big.

    5. Re:It's a race! by dema · · Score: 1

      [ ] Breasts

    6. Re:It's a race! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It sucks that I had to post this AC, since ever since I visited anti-slash, my posts get bitchslapped pretty reguarly. Even with "Positive" Karma, I'm banned from posting most of the time.

    7. Re:It's a race! by tyagiUK · · Score: 1

      []"IPv6? Yes, lovely, I'll take three." ~ Oscar Wilde.

      --
      Contribute to the online videogame encyclopedia: GamerWiki
    8. Re:It's a race! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      [] I use XNS, you insensitive clod!

  8. Embedded? by wlan0 · · Score: 1

    I don't think they included the fact that lots of devices are including internet conectivity, and looks like they could be TheNextBestThing, and would increase the rate IPv4 address space gets used up.

    1. Re:Embedded? by abb3w · · Score: 2, Insightful
      I don't think they included the fact that lots of devices are including internet conectivity, and looks like they could be TheNextBestThing, and would increase the rate IPv4 address space gets used up

      But will this increase the depletion of IPv4, or just result in home NAT starting to support the use of CIDR/16 chunks of of 172.16/12 instead of CIDR/24 chunks of 192.168/16? As an example, my Zyxel DSL Modem was pretty trivial to switch over to using 10/8 on the inside its NAT, and would have been easier if it was a model that the manufacturer intended to allow a normal sized NAT pool. (The Zyxel firmware tries to prevent use of spaces above CIDR/30 for non-router hardware.) While my five-year old router isn't thrilled at this sort of thing, my 1 yr old Belkin router is completely content with any IP space I want to assign it.

      So the question is, how many of these devices will have Internet (as opposed to LAN) VISIBILITY (as opposed to merely connectivity) be a feature?

      --
      //Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
  9. tunneling by convolvatron · · Score: 1

    it wouldn't have to. all that needs to be configured is a v4 tunnel
    endpoint address and after that you're all done. for nasty ethernet
    bridged networks there are all sorts of discovery options (optional
    dhcp fields, multicast announcments, etc).

    if it were important enough and multi-hop support was a problem,
    one could just burn a tiny snippet of global address space, not
    route it in the default-free world and use it as a isp-specific
    service anycast address for tunnel endpoints.

    1. Re:tunneling by David+McBride · · Score: 1

      This has been done. 192.88.99.1 is a magic address that should route towards the nearest 6to4 gateway.
      See also: RFC3068

    2. Re:tunneling by Unlikely_Hero · · Score: 1

      I will give a cookie to anyone who explains wtf that means

      --
      Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
    3. Re:tunneling by FireFury03 · · Score: 1

      This has been done. 192.88.99.1 is a magic address that should route towards the nearest 6to4 gateway.

      Sadly, "nearest" isn't always "best". I had to override the gateway I use because the anycast one had round trip times of several seconds! What we need is for individual ISPs to provide gateways rather than bouncing traffic half way around the planet.

  10. concurrent operation of IPv4 and IPv6? by pixelpusher220 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'd say this is going to be a huge test of the internet and all the various pieces.

    Can IPv4 and IPv6 coexist? When do the root servers transfer over? (have they already?) If they can co-exist, what's the motivation for *everyone* to switch?

    What happens to smaller countries that don't have the resources to make hardware changes to keep up to date.

    From a laymen's perspetive this seems a lot like Y2K in terms of the scope of changes required.

    --
    People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people :-D
    1. Re:concurrent operation of IPv4 and IPv6? by NuclearRampage · · Score: 1

      Some TLD's have had IPv6 support added according this ICANN announcement.

    2. Re:concurrent operation of IPv4 and IPv6? by Vorondil28 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Can IPv4 and IPv6 coexist?
      Yes, in fact they are expected to for around two decades. Can't seem to find the link to the RFC I read it int. Anyone?

      When do the root servers transfer over? The root servers already support name resolution to IPv6 addresses. There was a /. story about it a while back.

      If they can co-exist, what's the motivation for *everyone* to switch?
      I guess we'll see. I think it will just be up to the vendors (read: Cisco ^_~) as to when they drop IPv4 support.

      What happens to smaller countries that don't have the resources to make hardware changes to keep up to date.
      Twenty years is a long time.

      From a laymen's perspetive this seems a lot like Y2K in terms of the scope of changes required.
      When you look at how much work has to be done, your right, but in this case, there's not a moment that we're approaching when everything will blow up if it's not switched over.

      --
      This sig rocks the casbah.
    3. Re:concurrent operation of IPv4 and IPv6? by ToddFFW · · Score: 0

      ahh, evil George Bush and his root servers controlling the ENTIRE Inter-Web!

    4. Re:concurrent operation of IPv4 and IPv6? by Xarius · · Score: 1

      From a laymen's perspetive this seems a lot like Y2K in terms of the scope of changes required.

      And, to the layman, that turned out to be a big heap of no problem.

      --
      C17H21NO4
    5. Re:concurrent operation of IPv4 and IPv6? by Liver+Paste · · Score: 1

      > Yes, in fact they are expected to for around two decades.

      Exactly. The assumption that there has to be a big changeover, and therefore there won't be any changeover, is completely wrong. It's going to be much more like the transition for stiffy disk to CD. Moreover, much of the discussion here is informed by a USA perspective, where there is no shortage of IPv4 space. But in south-east Asia there is a growing shortage and it's going to get worse - ditto for Europe. Apart from address space depletion, there are reasons of both efficiency and security to adopt the newer protocol.

    6. Re:concurrent operation of IPv4 and IPv6? by Kadin2048 · · Score: 1

      Does this mean I'll get to use up the stash of survival rations and ammunition that I bought for Y2K?

      --
      "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
    7. Re:concurrent operation of IPv4 and IPv6? by FireFury03 · · Score: 1

      Can IPv4 and IPv6 coexist?

      Yes, and they do - a number of datacentres (AMIX springs to mind) run native ipv6 networks over the same cables as the ipv4 traffic. And for those of us who aren't so lucky, anyone with a global scope IPv4 address can use 6to4 tunnelling to connect to the v6 network. Turning on 6to4 is about a 5 second job under Fedora Core - you just set a couple of variables in the network config.

      When do the root servers transfer over?

      Some of them are on ipv6 already, although sadly I _still_ can't submit AAAA name server glue through OpenSRS. :(

      If they can co-exist, what's the motivation for *everyone* to switch?

      Well, obviously if you have no IPv6 address then you're not going to be able to contact someone who has no IPv4 address. The other way around is not entirely true since you can encode IPv4 addresses as IPv6 addresses and then send the traffic via a gateway (which essentially does NAT).

      I think the motivation (for the West) is for peer-to-peer applications. For example, VoIP would be much more effective if you didn't go through a NAT.

      What happens to smaller countries that don't have the resources to make hardware changes to keep up to date.

      The developing world seems to be embracing IPv6 at the moment anyway to a much greater extent than the West. There are also probably very few hardware changes needed - most routers used in infrastructure will already support IPv6 (everyone except Microsoft has been shipping IPv6 capable kit for over 10 years, and even MS is now bundling a (crap) IPv6 stack in XP). And you can always tunnel IPv6 over IPv4 in places where you *really* can't do it natively.

  11. Re:Interestingly precise by saskboy · · Score: 2, Funny

    2-12 years is as precise an answer as Rummy can give about the Iraq insurgency lasting. If it's good enough for the main stream media, it's good enough for average joe six pack me.

    Dick "Netcraft" Cheney: I think IPv4 is in its last throes.

    --
    Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
  12. This is NOT a technology problem by glengineer · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's a bureaucratic one. The manufacturers aren't going to spend time and money to make their products until it either makes business sense (Cisco, Microsoft) or they are forced to (TV stations that are having to support HDTV).

    --
    Evil Overlord Rule #86. I will make sure that my doomsday device is up to code and properly grounded.
    1. Re:This is NOT a technology problem by Red+Flayer · · Score: 1

      "The manufacturers aren't going to spend time and money to make their products until it either makes business sense (Cisco, Microsoft) or they are forced to (TV stations that are having to support HDTV)."

      Technology and economics are intertwined. Sure, the tech is available -- but if it is not cost-effective, then it won't be utilized. So, is the problem then technological (the tech is expensive) or is it economic (there's not enough of a profit incentive to change over)? Probably both.

      In both your situations, the answer is economic. "Making business sense" = profitable (Cisco, MS). "Being forced to" = unprofitable not to (TV stations). But better tech could mean that the tech is less expensive to implement, thereby changing the point at which changeover becomes profitable.

      --
      "Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
    2. Re:This is NOT a technology problem by Pxtl · · Score: 1

      Well, often it could be as simple as a firmware patch. Particularly with companies who're friendly about independants screwing with their firmware (Linksys comes to mind) I doubt it will be a problem.

      My concern is the same thing happening with IPV6. Sure, there may be lots more addresses, but who's to say how efficiently they will be dispersed. What happens when ISP's still hand out only _one_ address per user? You still end up hacking NAT crap, except that you've got worse support because people think NAT shouldn't exist anymore.

      I know it would be technically monstrous to do, but I've always felt that IPv6 should've been null-terminated or something - some case where the max IP address length could be obscenely long.

    3. Re:This is NOT a technology problem by FireFury03 · · Score: 1

      My concern is the same thing happening with IPV6. Sure, there may be lots more addresses, but who's to say how efficiently they will be dispersed.

      Have you any idea just how many 2^128 addresses is? Lets say you hand out /48 subnets - you've got 281 trillian of them to go around, and then each one of those subnets has 1.2 septillion individual addresses in it. Given that there's only about 6 billion people in the world it would take some mammouth mismanagement to allocate the whole lot.

      What happens when ISP's still hand out only _one_ address per user?

      Get a better ISP.

      except that you've got worse support because people think NAT shouldn't exist anymore.

      Well this is possibly a good point here - these days it's the norm for people to have more than one machine plugged into their internet connection (especially with modern games consoles, set top boxes, etc. having ethernet too). So they can't tell people they can only plug in a single machine like they did 5 years ago, and without any IPv6 NAT implementations around they don't have a lot of choice but to hand out subnets. It's also worth noting that the IPv6 auto-configuration system (built into the protocol) _requires_ the netmask to be /64 so it would cause hassle for everyone if you only got a single address.
      And besides, what's in it for the ISP? I get a /29 IPv4 subnet for free off my ISP because I asked for it - if there were plenty of IPv4 addresses then they'd be happy handing out /24's to anyone so it's not like they'd benefit from restricting the number of addresses available.

      I know it would be technically monstrous to do, but I've always felt that IPv6 should've been null-terminated or something - some case where the max IP address length could be obscenely long

      What's the point? IPv6 is already obscenely long. Doing variable length addresses would just increase the load on the backbone routers because they would have to have much more complex routing algorithms (I understand most of them use ASICs to do /48 netmask comparisons in hardware so that's _fast_).

  13. Black Cat are a UK ISP that do native v6... by caluml · · Score: 1

    ">Black Cat Networks in the UK provide native IPv6. Of course, as most ADSL routers don't yet support it, you'd have to put a ADSL card in a Linux/BSD/Windows box. Yay Black Cat!
    I don't work for them, but I have used their services....
    I emailed my current ISP and asked about IPv6. They said they didn't support it. I said why not? They said because no-one was asking for it. I said: How do you know no-one wants it until you offer it?

    1. Re:Black Cat are a UK ISP that do native v6... by caluml · · Score: 1

      www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk/services/adsl was the URL before I fuffed it.

    2. Re:Black Cat are a UK ISP that do native v6... by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 1

      Lack of IPv6 support on home ADSL routers really is a problem. If I bypass by Belkin router then I get to see the dancing turtle, otherwise I am just seeing a static image. The other problem is that there aren't any real work solutions for routing IPv6 over a NAT router, unless you modify the router itself.

      I have tried FreeNet6, but this does not work on my Mac, so I am out of luck.

      I am curious to see what the working solution is to allow people to have their own internal addresses, such as NAT provides, in the case of IPv6.

      Also, are there still DNS servers that ignore the AAAA entry (IPv6 address entry)?

      --
      Jumpstart the tartan drive.
    3. Re:Black Cat are a UK ISP that do native v6... by FireFury03 · · Score: 1

      I am curious to see what the working solution is to allow people to have their own internal addresses, such as NAT provides, in the case of IPv6.

      There is no solution - IPv6 originally had site-local scope networks assigned but these have been withdrawn because the people up at the top think that site-local addresses are bad and everyone should have global scope addresses (I agree with this for networks that are Internet connected but I'm really not convinced that having no allocated addresses for completely isolated networks is a Good Thing).

      In any case, changing the prefix of IPv6 networks is relatively easy, so migrating to a real global scope address when you connect to the Internet isn't much effort.

      Also, are there still DNS servers that ignore the AAAA entry (IPv6 address entry)?

      I've neither heard of nor come across this problem. In any case, you can always run your own DNS server (the assumption being that people who run broken DNS servers that can't cope with IPv6 are probably not running IPv6 networks :)

  14. for anyone who can't tell wtf is going on by s388 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    TFA didn't help me get much of a clue. I tried reading it, and I said to myself: "aren't there one trillion possible IP addresses, available in principle? (minus 1)" just because of the 12-digit IP addresses i'm used to.

    "The IPv4 address space has 32 bits, limiting it to an absolute maximum of 232 (roughly 4.3 billion) possible addresses. For both administrative and technical reasons (the latter in large part being related to routing), IPv4 addresses are allocated in blocks which are restricted to sizes which are powers of 2; this leads to many addresses being unused at any given time. In addition to this, substantial parts of the IP address space are not easily usable because of early technical decisions reserving them for private network use, loopback addresses, multicast, and unspecified future uses, which has resulted in some of these limitations being programmed into devices; working around these limitations will require substantial amounts of re-engineering to increase the amount of available address space. Finally, some of the IPv4 address allocations made early in the development of the Internet (in the 1970s), when only blocks of 224 possible addresses (called a /8 in IPv4 address terminology) were supported, led to some institutions that were involved in the development of the Internet having disproportionally large allocations. MIT, for example, has an entire /8 block allocated to it (224 addresses, about 0.39% of the whole internet address space) and various US Department of Defense agencies have several such blocks."

    THANK YOU wikipedia.

    1. Re:for anyone who can't tell wtf is going on by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You were the only person here who needed to look anything up.

    2. Re:for anyone who can't tell wtf is going on by Parity · · Score: 1

      Wtf? '224 addresses'? A '/8' or 'class A' network is a block like 10.*.*.*, where only the first number is reserved. That's at least 16516350 and maybe 16581375 addresses (depending on whether you want to risk addresses that look like 10.2.1.0 ... some devices call that a broadcast to 10.2.1.*, though most call 255 broadcast.)

      And you can't have trillions of ipv4 addresses because it's 4 8-bit fields separated by dots, not one 12 digit number.
      (0-255) . (0-255) . (0 - 255) . (0-255), just to clarify where those 32 bits live.

      (And the 255 isn't really valid in an ip address, and the 0 is difficult, and 127.*.*.* is loopback and 10.*.*.* is private IP, etc.)

      --
      --Parity
      'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
    3. Re:for anyone who can't tell wtf is going on by bitslinger_42 · · Score: 1

      At the risk of being pedantic, a x.x.x.255 address CAN BE a valid IP address in certain masks. Under the old Class C model (i.e. /24 bit netmask, network is defined by the first 3 bytes, host by the last one), you are correct, 255 is probably broadcast. However, if you switch to a /23 bit netmask, say 10.1.0.0/23, you'd find that 10.1.0.255 is a valid host address, and 10.1.1.255 would probably be the broadcast. Check out Daryl's TCP/IP Primer (http://www.ipprimer.com/bitbybit.cfm for the CIDR information, http://www.ipprimer.com/subnet.cfm for his subnet calculator).

    4. Re:for anyone who can't tell wtf is going on by Parity · · Score: 1

      Ugh. You're right, I'm sure, but I'd not count on all devices actually complying with that behaviour correctly.

      --
      --Parity
      'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
    5. Re:for anyone who can't tell wtf is going on by FireFury03 · · Score: 1

      At the risk of being pedantic, a x.x.x.255 address CAN BE a valid IP address in certain masks.

      Ah, but this is where you're defeated again by Microsoft's broken IP stacks. Certainly under Win 95/98 era windows would refuse to talk to any address ending in .0 or .255, even though it had no way of knowing if it was really an invalid address (since you need to know the netmask to determine that). I've no idea if this is fixed in modern Windows, I suspect so since they now run a ripped off BSD stack, but if you want to be sure legacy Windows systems can't talk to you then use a .500 or .0 address. :)

  15. Explanation requested by dubdays · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Besides the huge amount of fully routable IP addresses IPv6 will open up, what are the benefits to the average end-user? I mean, will anyone accessing a 4 Mb cable connection through NAT really notice any difference by upgrading? Even large corporations, who also use private IP address space, (as far as I know) don't need fully routable addresses for every machine. So, what exactly is the major benefit? Just asking...

    1. Re:Explanation requested by gr8_phk · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I've been looking forward to a time when everyone gets at least one fixed IP address. Want to run a server of any sort? No? How about a mail server built in to your cable modem? Or do you like your email getting stored at your ISP? Then there are any number of handy p2p type apps that will benefit. VOIP comes to mind - without needing to subscribe to a directory service. Fire up gnome-meeting or whatever and enter your friends IP (well the software could remember it for you) - the same IP they have every time. Actually, fixed IPs for everyone reduces the role of the ISP to simply being a network connection like they should be. Also, it takes effort from developers to get software working through NAT, so the burden on them should be reduced.

    2. Re:Explanation requested by Macrat · · Score: 1

      Not NEEDING a NAT would be nice and a benefit.

    3. Re:Explanation requested by vertinox · · Score: 2, Informative

      Besides the huge amount of fully routable IP addresses IPv6 will open up, what are the benefits to the average end-user?

      Being able to get around NAT restrictions or trying to get UPnP working each time they want to play a particular online game, video conferencing, or transfer files directly with another person behind a NAT.

      Most End Users may or may not notice it or understand it, but often when say a group of people use a NAT they are unable to connect direct to anyone else's computer who is also behind a NAT. UPnP kind of gets around this but it has limitations since it only knows what programs are expecting to be receiving and often times may or may not know which computer to forward this too.

      Say, I wanted to play Age of Empires with another person who was behind a NAT because he was sharing his internet connection with his family and I was sharing my connection with three over of my own computers. We would both have to go online and look up what ports AOE uses and then set our routers to foward request to the specific computer running AOE. Its not that hard to do, but for the average End User it can be way to complex if you don't know anything about your own router. UPnP helps but like I said its not perfect.

      IPv6 would give out of the box direct connections... End Users would be able to play direct connect games, video conference, and share files via AIM or Yahoo without having to futz with their router or call their more technically inclined friend asking why "x feature" won't work with "x program" when they bought their router?

      Oh and a side note... If you are wondering why Quake, UT2k4, NWN, and Skype and other services work out of the box, it is because the connection is going to a server that is not behind a NAT. If you want to host an online game or have some type of VoIP service then you leave the box directly connected to the internet without a NAT.

      --
      "I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
      -Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
    4. Re:Explanation requested by Otto · · Score: 1

      Say, I wanted to play Age of Empires with another person who was behind a NAT because he was sharing his internet connection with his family and I was sharing my connection with three over of my own computers. We would both have to go online and look up what ports AOE uses and then set our routers to foward request to the specific computer running AOE. Its not that hard to do, but for the average End User it can be way to complex if you don't know anything about your own router. UPnP helps but like I said its not perfect.

      Age Of Empires is one of Microsoft's games, and being such, it uses the DirectPlay stuffs. This directly supports UPnP aware hardware, so if you have any modern NAT router that supports UPnP properly, it "just works".

      Admittedly, older NAT routers had fairly crappy UPnP implementations and were buggy and such (even with up-to-date firmware). Since upgrading mine to a more recent model NAT router, all the problems I had with UPnP went away, as if magically, and it works great. Sticking with well known brands probably helps too.

      Anyway, what I'm saying is that the problem with UPnP isn't in the software or the protocol, it's mainly in crappy implementations on the routers.

      --
      - Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
    5. Re:Explanation requested by bogie · · Score: 1

      I agree with Otto. Domo arigato, Mister roboto. You can do it Otto.

      I'm hardly an expert on the subject but Upnp works pretty well for me in the few applications I need it. It didn't used to, but once I upgraded my router this year it worked perfectly. Buggy router firmware is IMHO the #1 reason why people have so many issues with Upnp.

      Making NAT users have to deal with port forwarding to get their apps to work for all these years was just a mean thing to do.
      "Are you sure xxx port is pointing at your machine?"
      "I think. Oh wait, I only UDP and Not TCP forwarded, check back in 30 minutes"

      --
      If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
    6. Re:Explanation requested by sploxx · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Will there be measures in place that prevent the massive privacy problems of a fixed IP? I mean, it sounds a bit ugly to have anything I'll ever search or browse directly and eternally linked to my name/IP, with every website operator knowing who does what when on their sites? (Apart from larger entities such as goverments, ...).
      Right now, I can in most cases hide behind a /24.

      This question is partly rhetorical, as I don't think that this will be the case. But if anyone here knows about recent developments in this area, I'd be glad to hear!

    7. Re:Explanation requested by frost22 · · Score: 1
      Besides the huge amount of fully routable IP addresses IPv6 will open up, what are the benefits to the average end-user? I mean, will anyone accessing a 4 Mb cable connection through NAT really notice any difference by upgrading? Even large corporations, who also use private IP address space, (as far as I know) don't need fully routable addresses for every machine.
      Uh, folks, seriously, puhlease, read the f** article.

      The question is not "will I get a bazillion IPv6 addresses for my 12 fridges" ?. The *real* question is, will I get an IP address for my own use at all ? The article and the included round table discussion mention a few scenarios what happens when addresses run out. The most likely is that their price will go up, substantially. Which mean the cheap end user gets the short end. Substantially short, that is.

      So, in the future, you might have to share your IP with, say, 5000 other customers of your ISP who also happen to be connected to the same broadband access router. Or, you might get then again NATted to about 10 or so outbound addresses your ISP has allocated to residential customer use, in a second or third NAT stage. And so on. (Multi stage NAT is expressedly mentioned in the article).

      Hosting with your own IP ? Pay up 10kbucks a month up front alone.

      P2P ? Forget it - at that point you will have stopped beeing a peer in any meaningful sense of the word - you are a phone device, and the ISP controls 100 percent of every service that is possible over your connection.

      Peer to peer Gaming ? (Like Counterstrike, Battlefield etc)? Forget it, you can connect to the (then) usual handfull of game service plattforms, who have to relay all your traffic. That will of course be expensive.

      "Um, Sir, right for your needs we have this excellent high value gaming plan, which allows you to connect to all 12 gaming services we have partnered with, and which will cost only 22,95 a month on top of your current IP plan. We also offer a combination plan where you get basic Gamespy platform services included, for a bargain of combined $39,95 - you save 21,95 compared to the two single plans. And for our dedicated gaming customers, we offer a Gamespy Gold account plus a Valve Steam subscription at utterly cheap $79,95/m (actual games might incur additional costs)".

      Welcome to the new world, chap.

      To put it short, we need IPv6 to keep the internet working the way it does now.
      --
      ...and here I stand, with all my lore, poor fool, no wiser than before.
    8. Re:Explanation requested by quantum+bit · · Score: 1

      UPnP helps but like I said its not perfect.

      Gah! UPnP is the devil. Seriously, read the specs for it sometime.

      Then go to securityfocus.com and do a search for "UPnP".

    9. Re:Explanation requested by FireFury03 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      what are the benefits to the average end-user?

      Well NAT is a huge pain in the arse for anything peer-to-peer - for example VoIP.

      Lets take Skype (horrible system that it is) for example. You want to make a call:

      1. Caller A places a call to caller B. This involves talking to the Skype directory server and ggiving caller A the IP address for caller B.
      2. The system realises that caller B is behind a NAT so caller A can't start a connection to B... ok, no problem, we just get caller B to initiate the session instead.
      3. Oh wait, A is also behind a NAT so B can't start a connection to A.
      4. Lots of nasty NAT traversal hacks are tried to tick the NATs on both ends into allowing the traffic through.
      5. Sometimes the NAT traversal works, lets assume in this case it doesn't. The only way to get traffic between A and B is to go via a third party server.
      6. Another random Skype user's connection (which isn't using NAT) is hijacked - both A and B connect to this Skype user and use his connection to pass the traffic. This means that not only is it sucking the bandwidth and CPU time up on the third party's connection, but that connection may vanish at any instant and there is added latency caused by going via a connection of unknown quality.

      Whereas without NAT that'd just be a case of A connecting to B and all would be good.

      Also, being about to log into my video recorder from my cellphone and ask it to record something would be cool :)

    10. Re:Explanation requested by Velcroman98 · · Score: 1

      For starters, IPSec is native to IPv6!

    11. Re:Explanation requested by jasonwea · · Score: 1
  16. In keeping with tradition by wiredog · · Score: 1

    they'll flip the switch on June 14th.

  17. New Allocation Schedule by Kadin2048 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It will be interesting (and perhaps this has already been all worked out, I haven't looked into it much) how they allocate the IPv6 addresses. It seems fairly clear now that the life of the v4 address space was definitely shortened -- although by how much is not clear -- because of the very large chunks of space that were handed out and never fully utilized. (Class A allocations; IIRC IBM had a massive one and I'm not sure ever used much of it, and I'm sure they're not the only one.) Of course this wasn't viewed as a problem at the time because there were so many more addresses than anyone imagined there would ever be devices.

    I just wonder how we're going to resist the temptation to do the same thing again, now that we have another glut of address space. On one hand we don't want to end up with vacant blocks of addresses, but we don't want to be too niggardly about it either, or else individual static addresses won't ever 'trickle down' to end users and we'll be stuck with the same mess of NAT traversals and subnets that we have now.

    I'm sure that this issue has been addressed (or will be addressed) but I'm just curious how the IANA will find the 'balance point' between assigning enough high-level blocks to make sure end users can get static global addresses, while not overassigning. Perhaps there should be some sort of a periodic review process for high-level address block assignments to see how fully utilized they are, and either assign an entity more addresses or reallocate underutilized resources.

    --
    "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
    1. Re:New Allocation Schedule by bn-7bc · · Score: 0

      quote from : http://smakd.potaroo.net/ietf/idref/rfc3177/index. html 3. Address Delegation Recommendations The IESG and the IAB recommend the allocations for the boundary between the public and the private topology to follow those general rules: - /48 in the general case, except for very large subscribers. - /64 when it is known that one and only one subnet is needed by design. - /128 when it is absolutely known that one and only one device is connecting. In particular, we recommend: - Home network subscribers, connecting through on-demand or always-on connections should receive a /48. - Small and large enterprises should receive a /48. - Very large subscribers could receive a /47 or slightly shorter prefix, or multiple /48's. end quote Hope this answer youre question

  18. Cisco has only the best interests in mind... by kenshaw · · Score: 1
    Cisco has an interesting article talking about estimates for the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space, and the inevitable move to IPv6. It predicts that the IPv4 address space will be exhausted in 2 - 10 years and suggests that it isn't worth trying to reclaim old allocations.


    And I'm sure Cisco would be happy to provide the new equipment necessary for such an upgrade, for a small fee of course.

    As far as I can tell, there are more than enough IPv4 addresses to go around -- I'm sorry but no matter how much the average slashdotter wants it to happen, my toaster does not need its own IP on the network. I haven't seen any good examples of why IPv6 is needed. As they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

    Anyone who adds that "well IPv4 is inherently broke.." will get a swift kick in the ass.
    1. Re:Cisco has only the best interests in mind... by sgar · · Score: 1

      Well IPv4 is inerently broken. (Notice the 'n') :)

      --
      If there is anything more important than my ego around here, I want it caught and shot now.
    2. Re:Cisco has only the best interests in mind... by jsailor · · Score: 1

      Cisco's routers have supported v6 for a very, very long time now - at least 4 years, but probably longer. This includes their software routers as well as those that make extensive use of ASICs. Even merchant silicon includes IP v6 support.

      Please stop assuming everyone is out to get you.

    3. Re:Cisco has only the best interests in mind... by NotoriousQ · · Score: 1

      well IPv4 is inherently broke..

      Well, not it, but the concept of NAT is. When was the last time you have set up a video conference without the aid of thrid party on the internet. I can tell you, it is not that trivial. Neither is ability to run p2p over NAT. I am sure you have seen plenty of messages about lowID on ED2K.

      Currently most of Joe Schmoes have been relying on UPNP to fix these issues for them, which is such a horrible, vulnerability prone solution that I am scared to thing of what will happen once someone figures out how to remotely abuse it.

      I say bring on IPV6 so that I can stop setting up tunnels each time I want to connect to my computers.

      --
      badness 10000
    4. Re:Cisco has only the best interests in mind... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0


      Notice the 'n'

      Ok, I see the 'n', but where's the 'h'? I assume you meant 'inherently'?

      Word of advice: if you're going to correct someone's grammar, be sure not to make any mistakes yourself. It makes you look bad.

    5. Re:Cisco has only the best interests in mind... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think IPv4 is great and all, but it needs some work. IPv6, however, is crap. Here's why I say that:

      IPv4 has a lot of baggage. You can't use 0's in the octets because some hardware uses it as broadcast. You can't use 255's in the octets because some other hardware uses it as broadcast. You can't use 10.x.x.x unless you're running a LAN. You can't use 192.168.x.x for non-LAN uses either. There's another odd range for "class B LAN's" too, whatever they may be. And most ranges above 200.x.x.x are set aside for other uses that no one has ever bothered to make happen. Oh, and right in the middle of the address space, there's a hole for localhost, 127.0.0.1. It's a clusterf***.

      IPv6, OTOH, has immense oversights in its design. Things that even IPv4 got right, but somehow went missing two versions later. Retarded. Oh, and globally unique addresses have a problem: they lose context.

      Here's what I propose instead - a cleaned up version of IPv4, with proper hierarchical structure added. So... let's see how this works. We'll start with reserved addresses.

      0.0.0.0 - null address, a.k.a. The Bit Bucket.
      0.0.0.1 - localhost (currently 127.0.0.1)
      255.255.255.255 - broadcast

      Everything else would be a unique host on the local network. A gateway is a unique host on two "local" networks. One network is your local network, the other is your provider's local network. Basically, every address is NAT-able. Then, we need to do away with the concept of "ports". They're just a software mechanism, and aren't necessary. Protocols need to identify themselves, not rely on a connection to a port where the context is assumed.

      With this setup, an IPv4-like system would be both extensible and organized, not to mention that it would quickly surpass the address space of IPv6. If the "main" level (a global "local" network) of this scheme were full, and each of those addresses had a subnetwork, that would match the address space of IPv6. But then each of those subnetworks could have 4.2 billion subnetworks, and so on. A 2-level "hierarchy" would equal IPv6's flat address space, and a 3-level hierarchy would blow it away. And in the process, a lot of software wouldn't even have to change to accomodate the new design.

      And best yet, if and when interplanetary networks happen, it could expand easily to handle that. Just make the "main" network into the "earth" network, and put a new parent network into place.

    6. Re:Cisco has only the best interests in mind... by Velcroman98 · · Score: 1

      Re: And I'm sure Cisco would be happy to provide the new equipment necessary for such an upgrade, for a small fee of course. Cisco has support for IPv6 built into IOS for years, they are waiting for everybody else to catch up. Heck even Microsoft has had support for IPv6 since Win2K.

  19. Has anyone been denied a number yet? by Puls4r · · Score: 1

    No? Well then, there you go. You see, the world is driven by the dollar. Simply saying something is a good idea for the future will not make it change. Want proof? Recyling. Gas Mileage. And of course the US moving to the larger european and olympic size hockey rinks. When it becomes NECESSARY, through inconvenience or cost, to move to 6, we'll move to 6. You're wasting your breath arguing otherwise.

    1. Re:Has anyone been denied a number yet? by thomag · · Score: 0

      Do you really suggest we not "waste our breath arguing" until the very last moment before a decision has to be made? These sorts of conversations discussing the switch-over need to be happening now.

    2. Re:Has anyone been denied a number yet? by AviLazar · · Score: 1

      When it becomes NECESSARY, through inconvenience or cost, to move to 6, we'll move to 6. You're wasting your breath arguing otherwise.

      And this is the mentality that tends to cause the most damage. When you wait until something breaks, well you wait until something bad happens. What if what breaks is the stock market, and trading is halted for a day or so. What happens if what breaks is a nuclear missile silo. The fact that someone anticipated the need for change before the change was ABSOLUTELY needed is a good thing; and waiting until the last minute should not be on our list of things to do...really, do you want people to start selling books just like they did about Y2K? I mean, we were ready (and knew about it) years in advance, and still people wrote a bazillion books of crap to create a scare. "Yes martha, I am going to withdraw our entire life's savings into cash before our toaster eat's us."

      There are plenty of other models - airplane safety/maintinance/upgrades, and preventative medicine/care are just two.

      I am sure some analyst will come to their boss and say "Spend two million now, or ten million later" and their boss will probably say "let's spend the money later" cause they are stark raving morons.

      --

      I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
  20. I predict that... by C0vardeAn0nim0 · · Score: 3, Funny

    in 2 to 10 years lots of things will happen. some people will die, some will be born...

    aw, c'mon...

    in a month europe, brasil and a few other nations will force a global netsplit, so we'll have 2 "internets". double the address space for the same price, so this prediction is not only imprecise, it's useless!

    my R$0,02.

    --
    What ? Me, worry ?
    1. Re:I predict that... by Unlikely_Hero · · Score: 1

      Yes Brazil and Europe and others will force a global netsplit...I givem 6 months before they want to rejoin once they realize they're going to have to actually pay for their own fscking infrastructure now. ---

      --
      Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
    2. Re:I predict that... by NotoriousQ · · Score: 2, Interesting

      double the address space for the same price

      No, there will not be a doubling of the address space, just the name space. Same internet, twice th ICANN. Now people will have to purchase domain names from two registrars to be listed on both DNS systems. And the moment this happens there will be a flurry of activity to develop rootless DNS systems, from which all will benefit.

      --
      badness 10000
    3. Re:I predict that... by vertinox · · Score: 1

      in a month europe, brasil and a few other nations will force a global netsplit, so we'll have 2 "internets"

      More like China... But then again, they want their own "internets" cordoned off from the rest of the world.

      --
      "I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
      -Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
    4. Re:I predict that... by smallpaul · · Score: 1

      We had "rootless" (fully decentralized) naming systems in the past. We used "bang paths" to route messages from one machine to another using names that were only unique to each machine. What a damn nightmare. Let's never, ever, ever try that again. I mean obviously the Internet had reliability problems back then that were unrelated to bang paths but I don't ever want to have to specify a location using a name that is only meaningful to some machines on the Internet and not others. I don't know why you want that either. Or are you talking about simply having a totally flat DNS namespace with no TLDs. I don't see how that would fix the war between the EU and the US. Someone still controls the assignment of those names. Paul Prescod

    5. Re:I predict that... by NotoriousQ · · Score: 1

      I can imagine that using host files is a terrible way to do things...however that is not what I mean.

      What I am envisioning is adoption of P2P based DNS system, which is based on some kind of trust/respect model. Such a system will not be as authoritative as a hierarchical system, but it can also have positive effect against domain squatters.

      Advantages and disadvantages. Who knows. Personally I think that the DNS schism (I think this is very similar to what happened to roman catholic church) is not going to happen just yet. So I am not that worried.

      --
      badness 10000
  21. All I know is by Hershmire · · Score: 5, Funny

    I have my IPv4 address. Why should I worry? Perhaps I can even sell mine to the highest bidder when the shite hits the fan.

    Hell, maybe the address shortage will create this crazy new "Road Warrior" world where IP addresses are a rare commodity and people have to fight each other with mad overclocked computers just to get some packets routed. And then Mel Gibson can play an ex-help-desk-guy-turned-hero whose Mac was killed by software pirates in the movie version.

    All I know is, I'm training my kids how to catch sharp boomerangs.

    --
    if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll); //Stupid roommates.
    1. Re:All I know is by AviLazar · · Score: 0, Troll

      people have to fight each other with mad overclocked computers just to get some packets routed

      Yea me fighting a computer dork really worries me. Hire's hacker to trace the web dorks IP address, find's out his physical address, goes to his house - beats him over the head with a cluebat(hardened), and then takes his computer, the deed to his IPv4 address, and his poster of Liv Tyler

      --

      I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
    2. Re:All I know is by Slashcrap · · Score: 1

      Yea me fighting a computer dork really worries me. Hire's hacker to trace the web dorks IP address, find's out his physical address, goes to his house - beats him over the head with a cluebat(hardened), and then takes his computer, the deed to his IPv4 address, and his poster of Liv Tyler

      Just wanted to point out the delightful contrast between the Grandparents post, which is probably the funniest thing I've read all week and your post which is probably one of the least funny things I've ever read.

      In future, please leave the attempts at humour to people who actually have a sense of humour.

    3. Re:All I know is by AviLazar · · Score: 1

      Just wanted to point out the delightful contrast between the Grandparents post, which is probably the funniest thing I've read all week and your post which is probably one of the least funny things I've ever read. In future, please leave the attempts at humour to people who actually have a sense of humour.

      Traumatic memories? I'm sorry. I will print your reply, and the next time I think to write something funny I will be sure to take the print out and wipe my ass with it.
      Your's truly.

      --

      I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
  22. Nasty NAT hacks by overshoot · · Score: 2, Funny
    Hmmm -- I wonder how many machines have been saved from being owned precisely because of NAT?

    I'd love to know the zombienet operators' take on the conversion to IPV6.

    --
    Lacking <sarcasm> tags, /. substitutes moderation as "Troll."
    1. Re:Nasty NAT hacks by NotoriousQ · · Score: 1

      Not really. The only people that have NAT routers are ones with multiple computers in their homes. Those people will have to buy IPv6 routers as well. IPv6 routers can simply have the same protection as NAT ones enabled by default. Except this time, these boxes will be real routers.

      --
      badness 10000
    2. Re:Nasty NAT hacks by marcosdumay · · Score: 1

      By the other side, ipv6 addresses are much more sparsely used, making it much harder to a worm to propagate.

    3. Re:Nasty NAT hacks by nutshell42 · · Score: 4, Informative
      I'd love to know the zombienet operators' take on the conversion to IPV6.

      United Zombienet Operators issued a press release today adressing fears about increased zombie activities following a theoretical switch to "Eye P-V6". Only one line long, it reads "Please remember the codewords are 'Klaatu Verada Snugglesworth'." Asked for an official statement a spokesdead of the Army of the p0WneD just said "Urgh...MUST...EAT...BRAIN". We will continue to report this story as it develops.
      --
      Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
    4. Re:Nasty NAT hacks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "he only people that have NAT routers are ones with multiple computers in their homes. "

      Its not just multi-computer households. What about DSL users? Verzion ships out a NAT router with every signup no matter how many computers the household has. Same goes for many other broadband ISPs. Just because someone is on NAT doesn't mean they have more than one computer.

  23. Home routers by bozojoe · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Perhaps this is an AskSlashdot, but who is making a decent(affordable) IPv6 router for the home? And where can one locate documents on SIP/RTP in IPv6 land?

    --
    lick the cancle button (at least thats what our Chinese QA says)
    1. Re:Home routers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Many routers (consumer models included) are firmware upgradeable. As such, IPv6 can be implemented on many existing routers.

      A good example is the ~$60US Linksys WRT54G which runs on GPL code. Earthlink and others have IPv6 firmware available for it now.

  24. Simple stages by mikael · · Score: 1

    Cisco may have some vested interest in driving up the IPv6-compatible router sales *cough*, but the bottom line is that the transtion will have to happen at some point in the near future.


    If they want this to happen, then it should be possible to do the transition in simple stages, rather than in one "Big Bang". Telephone services switched to digital, first by upgrading the trunk likes transparently to the user, then giving individual customers to the choice to switch from analog to digital.

    But from other comments, it seems like the cable-network supply companies are trying to maintain a monopoly on the supply of components.

    --
    Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
  25. The 800lb Gorilla in the room by jhines · · Score: 1

    http://ipv6.disa.mil/docs/State-of-IPv6-Final-7Feb 05.pdf Google found this, the US DOD review of IPv6 from Feb 2005. Once the US military switches over, a lot of others will fall in behind them.

  26. My cold, dead hands by BJZQ8 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Until I absolutely HAVE to switch to IPV6, I will keep my much easier-to-remember addresses. Try to remember something like these:

    fe80::02d0:c1ff:fe5c:0010/10

    2002:c0a8:1122::5efe:0a01:0101/48

    2001:7f8:2:c01f::2

    I mean, DNS goes a long way towards turning that hex into something memorable, but as a sysadmin it does NOT make my life easier. Let's reclaim some of those /8 blocks allocated to people that barely use them, first. Does E.I duPont REALLY need 0.39% of the internet address space? Does Eli Lily? That is 16777216 addresses, for what? Does Eli Lily even have 16 million adressable devices? It seems to me that we have plenty of IPV4's, it's just the allocation stinks.
    1. Re:My cold, dead hands by timeOday · · Score: 1
      I mean, DNS goes a long way towards turning that hex into something memorable, but as a sysadmin it does NOT make my life easier.
      I suppose all the IPv6 addresses under a single administrative domain will be in a block, just as they often are with IPv4. As now, the addresses of machines you administer will only vary in the last byte or two.
    2. Re:My cold, dead hands by Grey_14 · · Score: 1

      On a LAN you can use shortforms, things like, ::::21:20, But on the net you should probably be using DNS anyway's, Any version of IP is not meant to be easy for YOU to read, they are made for COMPUTERS, the fact that IPV4 is a little more convenient for a human to remember is just coincidence.

    3. Re:My cold, dead hands by laugau · · Score: 1

      so your mac address is 02:d0:c1:5c:00:10 ? That might come in handy. From your 2002: address, I can also tell you are natting behind private address space (c0a8 is 192.168)

      BTW ::1 is easier to write than 127.0.0.1

    4. Re:My cold, dead hands by BJZQ8 · · Score: 1

      Nah, I just copied those addresses off of the Intarweb, they're not mine. I'm IPV4 all the way, baby.

    5. Re:My cold, dead hands by Mondoz · · Score: 5, Funny
      I'm with you. This scares the hell out of me.
      Unless my host file grows to be the size of Montana...

      Do host files and IPITAV6 work together anyway?

      Besides, this is going to make my "There's no place like 127.0.0.1" shirt obsolete in 10 years!
      I'll have to get one with colons in it!
      Jeeze...

      --
      /sig
    6. Re:My cold, dead hands by TooMuchToDo · · Score: 1

      Subscribe to the NANOG mailing list [www.nanog.org]. There has been an on-going discussion over the last couple of weeks on the best way to pull back unused address space. One problem that's been cropping up is that once blocks of IPs have been identified as no flows coming from them for a long period of time, people then announce those blocks via BGP the next day.

    7. Re:My cold, dead hands by laugau · · Score: 1

      your host file will take ipv6 addresses (even if you run windows). DHCP will also resolve them (the record type is an A6 instead of a plain A).

      If you switch, noone would be the wiser, specially if you are using a proxy server.

    8. Re:My cold, dead hands by Mondoz · · Score: 1

      Stop that.

      This V6 voodoo gives me nightmares.

      --
      /sig
    9. Re:My cold, dead hands by jxs2151 · · Score: 1
      Does E.I duPont REALLY need 0.39% of the internet address space?

      Consider it their reward to taking the risk and jumping in early, which BTW pulled a lot of others onto IP and directly led to you being able to login to /. and comment about the unfairness of it all.

    10. Re:My cold, dead hands by Mondoz · · Score: 1

      For home users, a typical NAT based network might be a router (192.168.0.1) and multiple devices at 192.168.0.2, 0.3, ..0.4, etc...

      Under IPV6, if I understand it right, all those computers would/could have their own IPs, accessable to the open internet.
      I guess I don't understand the distinction anymore of what's considered on a LAN and what's not, if all computers have static IPs open to the world.
      How does the LAN shortform come into play if all the computers on all the home networks have their own static IPs?

      "Any version of IP is not meant to be easy for YOU to read, they are made for COMPUTERS"

      The XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX format was not only easy for people to read, but it was also (under NAT networks) the same everywhere. Everyone's home routers are 192.168.0.1, which makes troubleshooting easy... I really don't know how all this is going to work under V6 if every device can have unique IPs.

      --
      /sig
    11. Re:My cold, dead hands by waamaral · · Score: 1

      Well, 0 is easier to write than ::1

      --
      What, do I need a sig now?
    12. Re:My cold, dead hands by GigsVT · · Score: 1

      people then announce those blocks via BGP the next day.

      What people? The owners?

      --
      I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
    13. Re:My cold, dead hands by Frank+T.+Lofaro+Jr. · · Score: 1

      I thought the DNS record type was AAAA, not A6.

      Or was that what it was last year?

      Looks like the standard is too much of a moving target if they are changing DNS record types.

      --
      Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
    14. Re:My cold, dead hands by TooMuchToDo · · Score: 1

      "Owners" is the wrong term for it, as ARIN has made clear that no one owns the IP address space, they merely have a license to use it. I would say the "licensed user" of the space.

    15. Re:My cold, dead hands by Urusai · · Score: 1

      I consider it my reward that my ancestors immigrated to the USA before your'n, and git off my land, you!

    16. Re:My cold, dead hands by mindriot · · Score: 2, Informative
      2001:7f8:2:c01f::2

      Why don't you try to remember v6-tunnel34-uk6x.ipv6.btexact.com instead?

      I mean, that's why you have the DNS. You don't have to remember any addresses. Honestly, how many public IP addresses do you know and actually use? Even as a sysadmin, I think you'll manage. Seriously, the "difficult to remember" argument isn't really an argument. 99.9% of the Internet-using population couldn't care less if their address had 32, 128 or 1024 bits or were written using Babylonian numerals. Heck, most don't even know what this "IP Address" thingy is. And sysadmins will for the most part be clever enough to work with any notation.

    17. Re:My cold, dead hands by Perky_Goth · · Score: 1

      nitpick.
      i have one (home) router with 192.168.1.0/8 and another with 192.168.1.64/7.

    18. Re:My cold, dead hands by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 3, Funny
      Besides, this is going to make my "There's no place like 127.0.0.1" shirt obsolete in 10 years! I'll have to get one with colons in it!

      Good point. Imagine the joy:

      Cute girl: There's no place like... colon?
      You: *sob*

      Think maybe I'll pass on that one.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    19. Re:My cold, dead hands by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Besides, this is going to make my "There's no place like 127.0.0.1" shirt obsolete in 10 years! I'll have to get one with colons in it! Jeeze...

      Those IP6 shirts already exist... they simply say:

      There's no place like ::1

      (And yes, I do own one of those shirts.)

    20. Re:My cold, dead hands by BJZQ8 · · Score: 1

      It's not that I am opposed to the notation solely because of its complexity...but why do we need enough addresses for every molecule in the universe? Go read the Y10K RFC sometime, and it seems remarkably similar to the reasoning for IPV6. We have a solution now, IPV4, that, if utilized properly, would alleviate the need for an additional IPV...X solution. If there were a pressing need for quadrillions of addresses, and IPV4 could not provide a solution, I'd say ya, it's a complex problem with no non-complex solutions. IPV6 just seems like a way to perpetuate a flawed allotment system. Although I suppose if you approach an infinite number of addresses it becomes easier to satisfy a finite number of needs.

    21. Re:My cold, dead hands by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nah, it's a pride thing - Lilly suck, and it's one of the things that they are proud of in IT. Having a stupidly over sized address block.

      They still use telnet and rlogin on all Unix servers in EMA for christs sake.

    22. Re:My cold, dead hands by rdenisc · · Score: 2, Informative

      Indeend, RFC3363 specifies AAAA should be used. RFC3364 explains why AAAA is preferred over A6.

      --
      Remi Denis
    23. Re:My cold, dead hands by Mondoz · · Score: 1
      I thought of that.
      Thus my CYA qualifiers: "...typical NAT based network might be a router..."

      :)

      --
      /sig
    24. Re:My cold, dead hands by zippthorne · · Score: 1

      why does it have all those funny characters? couldn't they increase the size by simply making the addresses longer?

      just extend your shirt to 127.0.0.0.0.0.0.1 etc?

      what is the benefit of the new nomenclature and why is it superior to the previous one, especially as every address is just a xnumberofbits integer anyway.

      --
      Can you be Even More Awesome?!
    25. Re:My cold, dead hands by jxs2151 · · Score: 1

      Argument to antiquity is bullshit.

    26. Re:My cold, dead hands by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > I mean, that's why you have the DNS. You don't have to remember any addresses.

      Not quite. Typically when you're typing in IP addresses by hand, there's a problem with your DNS server or with your connectivity. That's why you're doing it in the first place. Using IPv6 makes the job of network engineers much harder. It's much simpler, like here at work, to tell someone to type "traceroute 18.7.22.83" to get to our web server than it would be to read a novel over the phone for v6. I'm dreading trying to read IPv6 over the phone to users.

    27. Re:My cold, dead hands by shreak · · Score: 2, Informative

      There are a lot more endpoints out there than you think. One of the major pressures to go IPv6 is coming from the wireless phone service providers (mainly out of Europe and Asia). ALL the phones they sell are IP enabled. That's LOTS of phones. It's a lot easier to just allocate them a static IPv6 addy than the constant DHCP traffic every time they access. We're talking MILLIONS of phones per service provider.

      =Shreak

    28. Re:My cold, dead hands by phasperhoven · · Score: 1

      Actually, I never quite got this. To me "There's no place like 127.0.0.1" translates to "There's no place like localhost". How is that funny? Now if I wanted to say "There's no place like home" wouldn't that be "There's no place like ~" ????

    29. Re:My cold, dead hands by shani · · Score: 1

      We have a solution now, IPV4, that, if utilized properly, would alleviate the need for an additional IPV...X solution.

      There are well over 6 billion people in the world. Ideally each person would be able to use an IP phone.

    30. Re:My cold, dead hands by misleb · · Score: 1

      A "reward?" Is it some kind of trophy? It isn't like they get to do anything with it. I'm pretty sure that when it comes down to a real IP shortage, someone will put the heat on these organizations to hand over the addresses.

      -matthew

      --
      "THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
    31. Re:My cold, dead hands by Dolda2000 · · Score: 2, Informative
      why does it have all those funny characters? couldn't they increase the size by simply making the addresses longer?
      Indeed, that is what they have done. They've just replaced dots with colons and decimal encoding with hexadecimal encoding. The only other trick is that you can replace a group of zeroes with a double colon.

      The localhost address in IPv6 is 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 (or 0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001 if you're anal), but since it's almost all zeroes, you can write ::1 instead. In the same way, I can replace the address for one of my hosts, 2002:52b6:8514:0100:0000:0000:0000:0001 with just 2002:52b6:8514:100::1. It's just so that you don't have to type out all the zeroes.

      I can't really figure out why they replaced dots with colons, though. I can only guess that it is so that the address is easily discernable from an IPv4 address.

    32. Re:My cold, dead hands by Dolda2000 · · Score: 1
      I don't really think that point is a very good one. Not very many people are able to remember an address like "192.168.1.25" either, until they learn that 192.168.0.0/16 is the prefix for private addresses and get that into their muscle memory. Then they can just remember the "1.25" part.

      Likewise, my 6to4 addresses were also hard to remember before I learned all the individual parts and put the more static parts in muscle memory: 2002 for 6to4, 52b6:8514 for my public IPv4 address, 100 for my subnet, and then only the host-local address left, such as 2002:52b6:8514:100::1.

      Sure, it's easier to remember IPv4 addresses, but now that I'm using a double-stack network, I can honestly say that it's not that much harder to remember IPv6 addresses. And getting true end-to-end addressability (whereas I use NAT for IPv4) makes it so worth it.

    33. Re:My cold, dead hands by jxs2151 · · Score: 1
      Does a reward have to be something physical? I am merely pointing out that organizations like MIT and Dupont take risks to be no the cutting edge of technology. It doesn't make any sense for someone to whine about how unfair it is that the early adopters have some residual benefits while those that sat on the sidelines don't.

      Would you feel the same way if Vint Cerf had some spare ip addresses by dint of his early work or is the ire only activated by some evil corporation? Careful about your choice, hypocrisy waits around the corner.

    34. Re:My cold, dead hands by misleb · · Score: 1

      Can you imagine tech support for home routers?

      "What is your assigned network number, ma'am?"

      "My what? Oh that. Let me see..." *digs through papers* "...2-f-0-1 colon 3-b-f..."

      "Ok, Ma'am, type that part in your browser."

      "Ok, now what?"

      "What is the MAC address of your router?"

      "The WHAT?"

      *sigh* "Turn the device over and find a number that hsa two digits numbers separated by colons..."

      "Is 'AB' a number???"

      "Ok, in your browser, type in 2-f-0-1 colon...."

      You get the picture. What a pain!

      -matthew

      --
      "THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
    35. Re:My cold, dead hands by misleb · · Score: 1
      Does a reward have to be something physical? I am merely pointing out that organizations like MIT and Dupont take risks to be no the cutting edge of technology. It doesn't make any sense for someone to whine about how unfair it is that the early adopters have some residual benefits while those that sat on the sidelines don't.

      Please explain how it is a benefit to be over allocated IP addresses by a huge margin? Is it so they can save a couple manhours applying for more addresses if and when they run out? The companies don't gain anything by it. I could, perhaps, understand reserving address space for certain entities. But to actually allocate them and put them to use is just stupid. It isn't about being "unfair," it is just poor planning.

      Would you feel the same way if Vint Cerf had some spare ip addresses by dint of his early work or is the ire only activated by some evil corporation? Careful about your choice, hypocrisy waits around the corner.

      Who said anything about evil corporations? Hell yeah, if Vint Cert had many, many more addresses than he could possibly use, he should give them up. Is a large netblock an extension of one's penis or something? What the fuck? Just give up the damn addresses that wouldn't otherwise get used.

      -matthew

      --
      "THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
    36. Re:My cold, dead hands by jxs2151 · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Please explain how it is a benefit to be over allocated IP addresses by a huge margin?

      Anything that is limited is valuable. Supply and demand. Think real estate. They aren't going to make more ip addresses, at least not in IPv4. That makes the ip addresses valuable and that's why MIT et al are not going to willingly give them up.

      reserving address space for certain entities

      When they were handing out addresses they had no idea that this thing would be wildly popular. Why ration (reserve) when you have no inkling that you would need to. Do you reserve water today from your grocery? Why would you, after all there is plenty of water. However, fifty years from now someone is going to wonder why we didn't. See how the idea of plenty works?

      Who said anything about evil corporations?

      Not you apparently. I got you confused with the parent. Now relax, this is just a discussion forum. No need to get mad at early risk takers just because they won't give up something willingly that they earned by taking an early risk.

    37. Re:My cold, dead hands by g0at · · Score: 1

      Cute girl: There's no place like... colon?
      You: That's right, baby... your colon, the place right where I wanna put my--
      Cute girl: *gasp*

      -b

    38. Re:My cold, dead hands by egarland · · Score: 1

      This, in my opinion, is why IPv6 isn't more popular. They really screwed the pooch with the address space layout. They designed a scheme that scales up well and down horribly and the fact is that most networks are small and private and run by people who don't know they are running a network (home users). Also, IP's are used much more often than the V6 designers seem to have realized and should be much easier to type. They should, in many cases, be easier even than V4 addresses are.

      They could have done it well. They could have made it so that the top bits are assigned by ISPs starting with the highest order bits first and expanding down from there and local bits are assigned lowest bits first and expanded as needed so in general most addresses would be short::short. A companies address range could be 2f:f0:2d:: (the equivalent of a Class C today that would normally only have 256 addresses but instead it would yield essentially infinite addresses. As addresses became tight they could limit themselves to 2f:f0:2d:1:: and then the 02-ff could be sold off. By only adding bits to the address when they are needed you guarantee the simplest possible address for the current size of the internet. Instead they are tying to add all the bits they will ever need at the beginning.

      I will also add that it's a bad idea to have 128 bits in the address. That's insane. 64 is plenty for the lifespan of the protocol. I believe the current population of internet connected devices would probably fit easily in 36 bits. Adding 28 bits yields roughly 200 million times as many addresses. If every person on the planet had 1 million addresses we'd still be using less than one tenth of one percent of the address space. Instead of figuring out how to write a clean 64 bit address scheme they assumed that more address space is better and came up with a way to use it. It's bad design.

      Generating local portions of the address from the Mac address is neat and clever but not really that good in practice because it adds bits tot he address unnecessarily. My guess is when a new scheme is finely widely adopted over V4 it won't be as wasteful and gigantic as V6's.

      That's my gut feeling on V6 addressing. Can someone please explain to me why I'm wrong and why, in fact, this gigantic address space and these insanely long addresses are a good thing? Is it possible to do what I'm talking about with V6 where addresses aren't any more complicated than is necessary?

      --
      set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
    39. Re:My cold, dead hands by egarland · · Score: 1

      The assumption that all machine addresses will always be in DNS is obviously false. Bigger addresses are a bad thing.

      --
      set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
    40. Re:My cold, dead hands by egarland · · Score: 1

      IPv6 is a 128 bit address scheme. There is no need for that many bits. V4 is 32 bit. 48 would likely be plenty for the next 50 years. It would be 65,000 times as many as we have now. We're talking TRILLIONS. While more addresses is good bigger addresses is bad. IPv6 doesn't strike a proper balance between the two.

      --
      set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
    41. Re:My cold, dead hands by egarland · · Score: 1

      But on the net you should probably be using DNS anyway's, Any version of IP is not meant to be easy for YOU to read, they are made for COMPUTERS, the fact that IPV4 is a little more convenient for a human to remember is just coincidence.

      You are assuming that humans never deal with IP addresses directly. This is obviously false.

      --
      set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
    42. Re:My cold, dead hands by Frank+T.+Lofaro+Jr. · · Score: 1

      Thanks for the pointers to those docs.

      A6 seems WAY OVER-engineered, this is something which could really slow down or derail IPv6.

      AAAA seems fine, and more efficient for DNS resolution (which is more time critical than setting up DNS entries).

      A6 is just too much.

      --
      Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
    43. Re:My cold, dead hands by misleb · · Score: 1
      Anything that is limited is valuable. Supply and demand. Think real estate. They aren't going to make more ip addresses, at least not in IPv4. That makes the ip addresses valuable and that's why MIT et al are not going to willingly give them up.

      If they choose to sit on the addresses, they (and everyone else) will just be forced to switch to IPV6 that much sooner. The real reason why thye might want to sit on the addresses is because they've probably already allocated rougly evenly throughout their block so it would cost them money to reconfigure and "compact" their usage. But I say too bad. We have CIDR now. Use it.

      When they were handing out addresses they had no idea that this thing would be wildly popular. Why ration (reserve) when you have no inkling that you would need to. Do you reserve water today from your grocery? Why would you, after all there is plenty of water. However, fifty years from now someone is going to wonder why we didn't. See how the idea of plenty works?

      If there was a severe drought and I had a swimming pool full of water, I would give some of it to my neighbor to drink/wash/water a garden. See how doing the right thing works? Poor planning in the past does not justify greed in the future. Rember, the Internet itself is/was planned. It is not a "free market." It should not be spoiled by capitalist greed.

      -matthew

      --
      "THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
    44. Re:My cold, dead hands by pe1chl · · Score: 1

      I agree with you that 64 bits for the address would have been a more sensible choice.

      But I think the worst decision of all is that there has been no provision made for compatability between IPv6 and IPv4.
      It should have been done in such a way that an IPv6 client can communicate with an IPv4 server, possibly via some service in a router that translates the addresses (which operates just like a NAT router).

      Preferably, an IPv4 client would also be capable of communicating with selected IPv6 servers that are in some part of the address space and/or have been configured to be reachable via another translation service.

      This would make it possible to rollout IPv6 without confronting the early adopters with only disadvantages, as it is now.

    45. Re:My cold, dead hands by BJZQ8 · · Score: 1
      Is a large netblock an extension of one's penis or something?

      Spilt my drink all over after that one...my netblock is bigger than yours!

    46. Re:My cold, dead hands by jxs2151 · · Score: 1
      But I say too bad. We have CIDR now. Use it.

      The point is *you* can't say too bad. They own the addresses and you don't have much of a say about it. I would give some of it to my neighbor to drink/wash/water a garden.

      Baloney. If there was a drought and you had no idea when more water would come you would hoard your resources like every other human being, it is in our nature to do what we need to do as individuals to survive. Doing the right thing for society does not enter into our thinking. Wishing it were otherwise does not erase thousands of years of history that says that humans primary instinct is to survive. Besides, it is healthier for the species for this to be the way it is.

      It should not be spoiled by capitalist greed.

      So it's all the fault of those greedy capitalist pigs eh? As you type this on your computer made by capitalists, on a network with filthy capitalist products, with electricity made by .... you get the idea?

    47. Re:My cold, dead hands by misleb · · Score: 1
      The point is *you* can't say too bad. They own the addresses and you don't have much of a say about it.

      You dont' really understand how IP address allocation works, do you? It isn't like real estate. It isn't a free market. Entities are allocated address space based upon need, not what they can afford. Whether or not I can do anything about it is beyond the scope of this discussion, but suffice it to say that I am confident that I am correct on this, lame arguments from antiquity notwithstanding.

      -matthew

      --
      "THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
    48. Re:My cold, dead hands by chgros · · Score: 1

      Does E.I duPont REALLY need 0.39% of the internet address space?
      I'm sure having .39% (OK, maybe more like 1% given the number of other reserved /8's) more publically available address space would go a long way (1%?) towards solving the sortage...

    49. Re:My cold, dead hands by jxs2151 · · Score: 1
      You dont' really understand how IP address allocation works, do you?

      Nah...you got me. I really am mostly into basket weaving but hang out on /. so little punks like you have someone to feel superior to.

      ...lame arguments from antiquity notwithstanding

      That was an inside joke between me and the guy I was responding to. You didn't get it.

    50. Re:My cold, dead hands by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      the point of A6 is to allow nets to be re-numbered and/or dual numbered (to allow a net to be multi homed without having to have an independantly advertised ip prefix) with minimal work

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
  27. No Market = No Action by Smarty2120 · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately, I can't see companies taking on expensive solutions until the address space is effectively exhausted. IP addresses don't work like commodities at the moment, they are rationed by a regulatory agency at a fixed price. When they start getting rare, I for one, would start allocating as many IPs as possible to sublease to the highest bidders. As long as companies can allocate as many IPs as they want a the fixed price, they have no incentive to migrate (save the other, less immediately useful features of IPv6). Maybe we need to set it up so as IPs get more scarce, they get more expensive. We'd then have a smooth (relatively) transition to IPv6 just like the way increasing gas prices will eventually force alternative fuel usage.

  28. Spelling error by dmuth · · Score: 0, Troll

    > Of course, Cicsco may have some vested interest in driving up the IPv6-compatible router
    > sales

    CicSCO?

    Um, shouldn't that be "Cisco"? Unless the editor was trying to compare them to SCO somehow...

    1. Re:Spelling error by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well then... Their name IS Cisco y'know. :P

  29. What about Honeypots by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 1

    What about some of the large unused spaces currently used as Honeypots? Is this the best use of these spaces now?

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
  30. reclaimation by Darth_brooks · · Score: 1

    It predicts that the IPv4 address space will be exhausted in 2 - 10 years and suggests that it isn't worth trying to reclaim old allocations

    In a related story, Conhugeco Amalgamated Logging industries announced that trying to replant logged forests is a "waste of time."

    There's an awful lot of IP space out there, and reallocation can expand the life of IPv4 to a point where IPv6 transition will be a moot point. Until then we'll just keep repeating the same chicken and egg argument, as if the "transition" is going to involve a janitor throwing a giant breaker somewhere and *presto* the world is IPv6!

    --
    There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
  31. transport ready, management a hassle by puzzled · · Score: 3, Informative



      I've been playing with IPv6 off and on since 2000. My current IPv6 plant incarnation is a Cisco 2610XM tunneling traffic from btexact (best tunnel broker if you want to play), a Cisco 1605 that is sometimes online, and a FreeBSD box. I don't have a site up this time, just taking it slow and playing, doing this mostly because the CCIE lab has started requiring IPv6.

      The transport works just fine, the application support is still a hassle. If its a barrier for me after five years of dinking and nothing left to do Cisco wise except complete my CCIE ... well ... Joe MCSE is probably going to get chewed up by it.

      Moving to IPv6 from IPv4 is as much a change in mindset as moving from IPX to IPv4 was ...

    --
    I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
  32. Didn't understand a word of that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Have you tried woozling the NAT address matrix with your predefined IPV4 reclaimatron? No? Well I would try that.

  33. Simple fix.. by MrJerryNormandinSir · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Don't use real IP addresses after the gateway. I do IP
    MASQUERADING. I get only 1 ip address from my provider.
    I've got a wireless webcam, a zaurus wireless pda, company assigned laptop, my linux development desktop computer, my Apple G3 running LinuxPPC (my gateway, web, imap server),
    My oldest son't room with a Linux based AMD 64bit server, a
    mini mac, a sharp zaurus, my 2 youngest boys room and thier
    computer and a laptop up in thier room, my hombrew robot,
    a hacked compaq IA-1 that runs linux that I use to monitor my firewall, email, etc.. All these devices get to the outside world on 1 ip address. I have multiple servers that
    are accessed by the outside world via port redirection as
    well.

    My point is that we should be tighter with ip address allocation.

    1. Re:Simple fix.. by Grey_14 · · Score: 1

      That's a quick fix, While your right IMO that IP masq is the way to go, it can only last so long for a few reasons, The first is that as more and more people get online, the complexity of everyone and everything being behind a NAT Firewall is going to really be a pain, the second is that eventually even being stingy with IP's we will run out, (Not for a long long time I'm sure, but it will happen eventually), We may as well be proactive with this problem, rather than wait until we're actually in a crisis situation, ("I'm sorry, you cannot check your e-mail because there is no IP available for you today, Please try again tomorrow"), Also IPV6 has more features than just increased length.

    2. Re:Simple fix.. by dodobh · · Score: 1

      And when your ISP decides to do the same thing and masquerades?

      --
      I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
    3. Re:Simple fix.. by BinaryCodedDecimal · · Score: 2, Funny

      I do IP MASQUERADING. I get only 1 ip address from my provider.
      I've got a wireless webcam, a zaurus wireless pda, company assigned laptop, my linux development desktop computer, my Apple G3 running LinuxPPC (my gateway, web, imap server), My oldest son't room with a Linux based AMD 64bit server, a
      mini mac, a sharp zaurus, my 2 youngest boys room and thier computer and a laptop up in thier room, my hombrew robot, a hacked compaq IA-1 that runs linux that I use to monitor my firewall, email, etc.. All these devices get to the outside world on 1 ip address. I have multiple servers that are accessed by the outside world via port redirection as well.


      That was a lovely story, but you could have just said, "I use NAT and port forwarding."

      Also, what's the difference between IP masquerading and IP MASQUERADING? Is the latter more l33t?

  34. Home / SOHO Routers by Commander+Spock · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Most of them have flash firmware, and can probably be adapted to work with IPv6.

  35. Examples by overshoot · · Score: 2, Interesting
    $FORMER_EMPLOYER has several Class B address spaces but keeps the entire internal network behind proxies and doesn't even support internet DNS lookups for machines in the intranet. Net result is that the entire company could present less than a Class C to the internet at large.

    In general, corporate networks today are so completely firewalled that they might as well be behind NAT, and some (bless 'em) are -- Intel for one uses nonroutable addresses internally.

    --
    Lacking <sarcasm> tags, /. substitutes moderation as "Troll."
    1. Re:Examples by Amouth · · Score: 1

      Same here, I keep all desktops on nonroutable addresses - the servres cross both internal and public..

      personaly i have a 224 & a 248 routable at my finnger tips but i only use mabey 1/4

      --
      '...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
    2. Re:Examples by CthulhuDreamer · · Score: 1

      My $FORMER_EMPLOYER only uses three real IP addresses: the external firewall interface, the email server, and the onsite web server. The other hundred-odd machines had whatever fake address I felt like giving them. The ISP gave me a block of 10 addresses to play with; the other seven have been sitting unused for the past six years (but they weren't interested in getting them back).

  36. Paying extra for fixed IP by 3770 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So, today you have to pay extra to get a fixed IP. I can understand that, somewhat, because there is a limited number of IP-numbers.

    Now, if we have an unlimited number of IP-numbers, then I will be pissed if they expect me to pay extra for a fixed IP. What is their explanation and motivation for a higher price for a Fixed IP?

    So maybe one of the reasons that they are trying to delay the introduction of IPV6 is because they know they will no longer get the extra income from customers that are paying for a fixed IP.

    --
    The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
    1. Re:Paying extra for fixed IP by Grey_14 · · Score: 1

      Nope, Much more likely they will continue to charge for a static IP because... Why change in such a way that would reduce income, when they can continue unnecessarily charging consumers for silly reasons.

    2. Re:Paying extra for fixed IP by program21 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      They'll still charge for static IPs even with IPv6. After all, there's not much reason for cable and DSL providers not to offer them for free right now. Most cable and DSL modems are always on and occupying an IP address anyway, and there's never been any mention of an address crunch at any big ISP (Cablevision, Comcast, etc.), so there's no technical reason to avoid offering static IPs.

      Charging for static IP addresses is pure profit for these companies. A small change to the DHCP servers to indicate that a particular modem should always get a particular IP is all it takes (and only needs to be done once), but the money for that keeps rolling in. Opening up more addresses isn't going to change that.

      --
      This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror and you would not have been informed.
    3. Re:Paying extra for fixed IP by pe1chl · · Score: 1

      This situation differs for different markets.
      Here in the Netherlands all DSL providers assign fixed addresses. Most networks use PPPoA where you get your address assigned automatically by the PPP negotiation, but the address is written in your welcome letter and will only change when there is a technical need.

      Cable providers originally assigned variable addresses, but faced with the ADSL competition most have moved to de-facto-fixed addresses (you still get your address via DHCP but it will always be the same).

      There is no extra charge for all of this. Extra charges only apply when you want additional addresses (when that is even possible on that network).

  37. I think I got ipv6 already. by jzono1 · · Score: 1

    My FTTH line, routed by my debian router, it has an ipv6 ip, and it gets its ip by dhcpcd, do my isp already support ipv6 then?

  38. most Cisco routers support IPv6 by puzzled · · Score: 1


      You'd be hard pressed to find a Cisco box that doesn't support IPv6. This is integrated into IOS 12.3 and that runs on everything clear back to the 2500s. The only thing I have that I want current code for is a 4700 I use as a frame relay switch, but that is archaic lab gear and you won't find many in production. It does have an IPv6 capable image available, it just lacks some of the new stuff like OSPF support that the 12.3 images provide.

    --
    I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
    1. Re:most Cisco routers support IPv6 by blargh-dot-com · · Score: 1

      Except one of Cisco's newest line, the Sup720s on Cat6ks, don't offer IOS 12.3 yet...

      Oh, and there's no IOS at all for the Sup32s, even though one has been promised for almost a year now (bit hard by that one)...

      Same with Cat3750s....

      Mind you, I think all of these support IPv6 anyway, but I'm just refuting your "IOS 12.3 and that runs on everything" line...

    2. Re:most Cisco routers support IPv6 by puzzled · · Score: 1


        Almost all my work is with routers, not layer 3 switches. I do have a 3550 on loan from a customer and 'ipv6 unicast-routing' is not recognized. Touche!

      --
      I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
    3. Re:most Cisco routers support IPv6 by blargh-dot-com · · Score: 1

      Yeah, we're stuck using them as "routers", rather amusing... but they do OSPF and BGP well enough.

    4. Re:most Cisco routers support IPv6 by puzzled · · Score: 1


        If you need wire speed they're the right thing :-) My customers have deployed about a dozen over the last year and I've got one for play now, but I never make time to do anything with it :-(

      --
      I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
    5. Re:most Cisco routers support IPv6 by blargh-dot-com · · Score: 1

      We have them in our core with the 4 port 10 gigabit ethernet blades in them... massive overkill, but they work OK...

      Don't fubar the IOS though - XModem recovery doesn't work on the Sup720s, you're stuck with using Flash cards, assuming you have them. Cisco wanted $1000 for a 256MB flash card... so we went down to Best Buy and picked up a ye-old-standard-512MB CompactFlash for $40, which worked just fine...

    6. Re:most Cisco routers support IPv6 by puzzled · · Score: 1


      The xmodem stuff is way touchy no matter what platform you use. I love my customers - each and every one keeps on site spares of stuff - makes solving problems like that not so traumatic.

      --
      I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
    7. Re:most Cisco routers support IPv6 by blargh-dot-com · · Score: 1

      Heh, the way we found out, fortuantely, was in our lab trying to upgrade IOS to a version that didn't go on right for whatever reason. Problem being, the built-in flash on the 720s have enough room for only one image. Grrrr. TAC agreed (after many back-and-forths) that XModem was broken, end of story, no further assistance. Heh.

  39. Already Pushed Here. by temojen · · Score: 1, Informative

    Shaw Cable (In Western Canada) now assigns IPv6 and IPv4 addresses to all DHCP requests. Whether your home firewall does anything with the IPv6 address is another matter.

    1. Re:Already Pushed Here. by rebelcan · · Score: 1

      Telus ( Western Canada only, as far as I know ) also assigns both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses. Easy to check for me, since my router is a home-built Linux box! =D

      --
      God is dead -- Nietzsche
      Nietzsche is dead -- God
      Zombie Nietzsche lives! -- Zombie Nietzsche
    2. Re:Already Pushed Here. by Dwonis · · Score: 1

      It's not in the fe80::/64 subnet, is it?

    3. Re:Already Pushed Here. by rebelcan · · Score: 1

      Nope. :fea6:/64

      What does fe80::/64 have to do with anything? ( just curious, don't have a clue ) Is it like 127.0.0.1 or some other private address space?

      --
      God is dead -- Nietzsche
      Nietzsche is dead -- God
      Zombie Nietzsche lives! -- Zombie Nietzsche
    4. Re:Already Pushed Here. by jguthrie · · Score: 1
      Among other things, IPv6 is intended to be used for network auto-configuration. To that end, every machine is capable of coming up on a LAN and talking to all the other machines on that LAN without any configuration at all. It does this by using so-called "link-local" addresses. The thing is, since those link local addresses are automagically configured, there's no way to guarantee their uniqueness on the Internet as a whole, so they aren't supposed to be routed. In fact, they can't be routed because there's no way for a router to tell which network to forward an incoming packet to because all of the outbounds have addresses in fe00::/8

      Routeable addresses are supposed to be assigned to TLA's (Top-Level Aggregators) and they portion them out to their customers and they portion them out to their customers and so on until you get your allocation. As far as I am aware, with the exception of the 3ffe::/16 pTLA (psuedo Top Level Aggregator) assignments that were made for the 6bone, and which are now well on their way to being phased out so they're now almost entirely of historical interest, all of the routeable IPv6 addresses are in 2000::/2, so if the first digit in your IPv6 address is not a 2, then you don't have IPv6 connectivity.

      As an example, I've gone to the trouble of setting my network as 2001:5c0:8305::/48, but I don't (yet) allow incoming connections to my network. However, all of the interefaces on all of my machines have addresses in the fe80::/16 block even though I've got three physically separate LAN's at the house.

    5. Re:Already Pushed Here. by Dwonis · · Score: 1
      fe80::/10 (of which fea6::/64 is a part) is link-local. This means that you can use it on a local LAN, but not to access the rest of the Internet.

      See the IPv6 address space allocations, published by IANA. As another poster mentioned, if your IPv6 address doesn't start with a 2 or a 3, you don't have IPv6 connectivity.

  40. One Giant Honking DHCP Server by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 4, Funny

    To make most efficient use of the 4.3 trillion possible IPv4 addresses, all we need is one giant honking DHCP server for the world to use. Of course, the USA should run it forever.

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
    1. Re:One Giant Honking DHCP Server by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      4.23 billion

    2. Re:One Giant Honking DHCP Server by takev · · Score: 1

      4.23 milliard (for people who live long scale countries)

    3. Re:One Giant Honking DHCP Server by assantisz · · Score: 0, Redundant

      IPv6 does not require DHCP at all anymore. Current standards use the MAC address of the network interface to create the IPv6 address for it. Auto-configuration of IPv6 is the recommended way to run IPv6 networks.

  41. Waste by Ed+Almos · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If the IP 4 address space was properly allocated then we could probably get another ten years out of the system. We have for example BBN occupying three class A blocks and HP taking another two or three. Set against this is the continent of Africa which is assigned one block.

    Ed Almos

    --
    The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
    1. Re:Waste by NatasRevol · · Score: 1

      If you want to bet who has more computers, HP or Africa, I'm taking HP.

      --
      There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
  42. All it means.. by Sir+Pallas · · Score: 1

    ..is that I'm going to have to re-purchase all the networking equipment that companies are going to refuse to update. That being said, I'm already using IPv6 tunneled through Hurricane Electric and Freenet6. What's nice is the automatic DNS identification and the swimming turtle. Oh, and the price.

  43. Not any time soon. by dills · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I have worked in the internet service business for over a decade now. I have seen a lot of things come and go, and a lot of predictions about when we would run out of IP space.

    The bottom line is that the only people who realy WANT a rollout of IPv6 is Cisco. Why? Because the vast majority of their existing installed routers will not support IPv6 with anywhere near the same feature set and packet rate as those routers can handle with IPv4. Thus, IPv6 means people upgrading equipment that isn't really deficient.

    Most people have no concept of:

    a) How much IP space we have left.
    b) How extremely inefficent we have been with a large percentage of the address space.
    c) How much assigned, announced, and routed space is completely unused.
    d) How much the rate of growth has flattened.
    e) How wrong every prediction about when we run out of IP space has been thus far.

    If you search the nanog archives, you'll see posts by myself going back many years stating essentially "Somebody tell me why we need IPv6 again?"

    Do not hold your breath. We're 10-15 years away from IPv6, because it will take an even larger gross expenditure for the service providers to upgrade to support IPv6 than it did for the broadcast industry to upgrade to HDTV.

    This is what industries that rely on revenue growth do when their customer growth flattens. They invent a new widget, come up with reasons why everybody needs it, market it, and hopefully everybody buys the product all over again. IPv6 is admittedly a good bit different; it was created by geeks in attempt to solve a perceived problem. However, it was siezed upon by the router vendors as a future "upgrade when growth flattens" path.

    Don't buy into the hype. IPv4 is here to stay for a long time. Even when IPv6 starts to have some decent degree of market penetration, you will always find most of the devices on the net are IPv4 behind IPv6 to IPv4 NATs.

    1. Re:Not any time soon. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There are 6 billion people on the planet. A lot of them are going to have at the least Internet enabled cell phones within 2 to 10 years, and that will require either a whole lot of worthless NAT setups, especially in poor countries who couldn't buy up address space (China alone would need about 64 class A networks). While I'm sure the cell phone companies are going to try to keep phones limited and behind NAT so they can't be *too* powerful, they are going to run into issues with NAT technology having to handle too much routing on its own. It's much less efficient to handle hundreds of thousands of NAT connections than it is to route packets to devices with their own IP. How do you think a company would handle a million clients behind NAT? 10 million? 100 million? Eventually you even run into the problem that private address spaces simply aren't big enough to hold all your NAT'd clients in one network, and you have to segregate them into multiple overlapping IP spaces that can't communicate with each other on your own (faster, cheaper) network. I suppose all this is just fine if you like the current client/server model of the web, but once it happened it would be a fundamental change to the nature of the Internet. It would be more like pay per view TV, and would probably fall prey to the same price fixing schemes.

      My guess? China rolls out IPv6 nation wide, followed by India, within a few years. China already has their Great Firewall in place that could handle the IP4 to IP6 translation at the border routers, and they have the technology base to build their own cheap routers. India is in much the same situation technology and need wise, and they both have huge populations. Once they convert, IPv6 will spread to educational institutions, then large businesses, and finally the Internet at large, probably in rapidly growing third and second world countries where practicality becomes important over the wishes of big business.

    2. Re:Not any time soon. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      ... and the US Government, of course. They are mandated to have IPv6 deployed by what, 2006?

      --Catonic

  44. How about this solution for ISPs? by Kat0325 · · Score: 1

    After switching over, give everyone the new IPv6 addresses, since I assume most people have hardware that can support it. If people run into problems or want to keep IPv4, then they can request the IPv4 for free.

    1. Re:How about this solution for ISPs? by tomstdenis · · Score: 1

      See that's the problem, there is no widely acceptable standard for mapping IPv4 addresses to v6... if there were it would be trivial, you could say "poof" everyone's ipv4 address is now v6 and just start making new v6 addresses...

      Of course I don't know why they went to 128-bits for the address ... the 32-bits we have now are not being used effectively anyways. We'll find ways of squandering 128 bits [my bet is you'll still see /8's being handed out].

      Tom

      --
      Someday, I'll have a real sig.
  45. Network Operators thoughts on IPv6 by br00tus · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I went to a NANOG meeting in 1997, at which were many of the bigshots of network operation - Van Jacobsen (author of traceroute and Van Jacobsen compression, which you may recall as a checkable option on Windows 3.x's Trumpet Winsock), Paul Vixie (of BIND and MAPS fame), Kim Hubbard (of ARIN), Mark Kosters (of Network Solutions) and that type.

    Anyhow, I myself was curious about if/when IPv6 would be rolled out. One of the talks was about how to deal with IPv4 space running out, and a lot of the talk revolved around such things as multiple web sites running on the same IP (which was very uncommon then) and other ways to use less address space. Some audience members gave other suggestions for conserving IP space such as ways to use Network Address Translation to limit public IP use. I would say the feeling in the hall was that this was not a problem, and that people had to go the route of IP sharing, and aside from the need for more IP sharing, everyone pretty much liked the situation as it was, which was in contrast to the prevailing attitude in the world outside the hall. One audience member rose his hand and said, "What about IPv6?" The response to this was the entire audience broke into laughter - it was the funniest thing they had heard that week. After that I began thinking about IPv6 more along the lines of projects such as MBONE (anyone remember the hooplah over that years ago?). Not that IPv6 will never be implemented, but this story that IPv6 was needed straightaway could have been written 8 years ago. I haven't seen much headway in it in the past 8 years, except for products promising they were IPv6 compatible, just in case. Not that IPv6 will never be rolled out on a large scale, but I'm not holding my breath.

    1. Re:Network Operators thoughts on IPv6 by Danathar · · Score: 1

      what do you define as "Large scale"

      Internet2 is almost completely end to end IPv6 enabled (at least up to border routers).

    2. Re:Network Operators thoughts on IPv6 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Did you make NM 1998? We had an hour of cheerleading for IPV6, followed by vlad standing up and presenting for an hour telling us how all the 'benifits' of IPv6 were already available in IPv4, then he proceded to trot out a very nice picture of 'currently utilized IPv4' space.... it was 3/4 empty!

      Of course, at the time, the backbone route table was only about 33k routes (check this morning shows about 140k routes now), but running out of IP space seems to be the least acceptable reason for going to IPv6...

  46. Of course cisco would say this by Synn · · Score: 1

    IPv6 worldwide will require all old routers that don't support it to be replaced. Cisco sells routers.

  47. UN's way of getting control by randomErr · · Score: 1

    This rising problem maybe the best way for the UN to get full control of the internet. Create two competing IPv6 systems (US and the UN) that will collide until one ruling authority has been dedicated. They will not get control of the internet for several years, but it will eventually be there and much more effective then controlling DNS.

    --
    You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
  48. Cisco biased? Never. by DysenteryInTheRanks · · Score: 1
    And of course, Cisco is the perfect firm to make such a prediction, because they are completely unbiased, because they do not stand to make any money selling IPv6 related equipment.

    (Sarcasm detector explodes.)

  49. Lack of IPv6 support on consumer-grade DSL routers by tedric · · Score: 1

    What about OpenWRT http://openwrt.org/, it runs on several consumer grade DSL routers http://wiki.openwrt.org/TableOfHardware and supports IPv6 http://wiki.openwrt.org/IPv6_howto?highlight=(ipv6 )?

    With nice Web frontends it's as easy to use (when successfully installed) as e.g. the Linksys Web frontend. Freifunk http://www.freifunk.net/ has a nice customized OpenWRT version (sorry, homepage is in German only).

  50. NAT is about a lot more than low address reserves by jjeffrey · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't think that IPv6 will see the end of NAT at all. NAT is a very quick and covenient technique for consumer DSL routers to use.

    For a start, a lot of ISPs only offer one address, partly to encourage people to buy more expensive packages with multiple addresses, and NAT transparently solves that issue.

    There is no reason to assume that increased avilability of addresses will cause ISPs to offer more addresses to consumers - after all if they anticipate 100,000 single PC broadband connections, they are going to find it hard to get approval for 800,000 addresses (to allow a /28), even with the increased address space. And even when you do have multiple addresses allocated, what about the users that have one more machine than usable addresses? Small company networks etc? Now matter how many addressed IPv6 supplies, we will run out eventually, and much sooner than we expect.

    Also low end ADSL connections often force NAT upon a user, allowing the vendor to create a differentiator between it's commercial and domestic offerings.

    In the end NAT offers security, independence of allocated IP space to available addresses, simplified network management with an excellent delineation point between vendor and consumer (the ISP dosen't have to worry about what is inside the end user network), and a reasonable form of security. It's great for a small internet connected network.

  51. Oops, never mind. by temojen · · Score: 2, Informative

    That was my "link local ID"

  52. of course cisco thinks this by mrsbrisby · · Score: 1

    It only makes sense. Cisco has:

    198.133.219/24
    128.107/16
    128.108/16
    64.104/16
    64.100/14

    I count 524,544 ip addresses right there. It's pretty amazing because cisco only has 34,000
    employees, or 15 IP addresses per person.

    No wonder they don't want to give any addresses back. It's a lot of work to use public addresses effectively.

    Meanwhile, convince everyone else to spend umpteen-trillion dollars to switch to IPv6 or only the people who want to get on the Internet in the next few years, and they don't have to do a damn thing.

    Oh, and I'm almost certain cisco has other netblocks. Those are only the ones I know of off the top of my head.

    1. Re:of course cisco thinks this by tomstdenis · · Score: 1

      How about the number of /8's and dark-nets out there [spaces with no hosts]?

      Tom

      --
      Someday, I'll have a real sig.
    2. Re:of course cisco thinks this by mrsbrisby · · Score: 1

      I'm sure there are quite a few- and they should be reallocated.

      Nobody will switch to IPV6 because there isn't a migration plan- there aren't proxies, there aren't anything.

      IPV6 doesn't deserve to be called "Internet2" because nobody uses it. Not for Internet access.

      I have no idea why methods of address compression aren't being used- like using SRV records so that we can use the additional 16-bits of ports as addressable space.

    3. Re:of course cisco thinks this by tomstdenis · · Score: 1

      IP itself doesn't have "ports". TCP is just a transport medium. There is no reason why you can't migrate 99.999% of all servers to TCPv2 and not notice a difference.

      We could make TCPv2 have 32-bit ports [and/or additional addressing bits]. This would change the servers/browsers but not in a very difficult way [that is the logic behind the connection would be the same from the high level]. With 32-bit ports you can do a NAT like gateway more effectively.

      But even that's not required. TCP supports tunneling [iirc via an option]. So there is no reason why you can't have a DNS entry like .com.myhouse. => 192.168.0.15 via 24.69.18.4

      Or whatever. That would be annoying because it would require changes to the DNS infrastructure [and IIRC UDP doesn't support tunneling in a standard way, it can be done of course]. I'd do more of an IPIP tunneling that way it does UDP too.

      But before we jump to modifying protocols like that we could try to clean up existing mappings. It may mean that not every house in the world can have it's own [or multiple] IPs. Certainly a large majority of users could deal with being behind a NAT. So drop 5$/mo off the net connection if you lose your IP address. That way the people who want to run servers can still do so and the rest save a few bucks, the IP addresses go back to the domain and we're set.

      Tom

      --
      Someday, I'll have a real sig.
    4. Re:of course cisco thinks this by mrsbrisby · · Score: 1

      There is no reason why you can't migrate 99.999% of all servers to TCPv2 and not notice a difference.

      Sure there is, it's the exact same reason you cannot migrate servers to IPv6. There isn't a migration plan.

      ALL software that stores IP addresses or port numbers needs to be updated to the new "format". That's what a lot of people think is the big hurdle, but it's not. It has to be done with no new "knowledge" of each piece of software.

      New services are what is quoted as being the big push for new address spaces. HTTPS should've used SRV, and has a built-in time limit (whenever the new root certificates expire). HTTP should've used SRV, but no such time limit exists.

      How do you upgrade clients to a system without servers, and how do you upgrade servers to a system without clients?

      The only answer the IPV6 working groups can come up with is "get everyone on both until everyone's on both."

      That's not a migration plan. That's billions of dollars of work for no real gain. Not when "most people" can get things like address compression a lot faster and still interoperate on both sides of the fence (albeit: with some possible workarounds for really ancient clients).

      So the million dollar question is why migrate thousands of protocols and thousands of platforms for address spaces that no one has a use for, when we can migrate dozens of protocols, and plan for future ones with no change at all to most existing clients or servers, and very little change to a few.

  53. How many times have we heard this? by abegetchell · · Score: 1

    The end is near. No more IPv4 address space is available. The sky is falling! I have a feeling that IPv4 will be around a lot longer than the next two to ten years. The reasons corporations move to the newest wizbang technology is because it affects their bottom line, in a good way. The transition to IPv6 will have no positive impact on a corporations stock, but rather be an expensive and time consuming "maintenance task". Granted there are a lot of benefits that go along with IPv6, such as increased security mechanisms which could affect a corporations bottom line, but indirectly... it's not something stockholders are likely to care much about. What reason does a multinational company have to spend millions of dollars moving their infrastructure to IPv6 if they're happily sitting being a firewall doing NAT with a whole class A at their disposal?

  54. Re:Lack of IPv6 support on consumer-grade DSL rout by dayton967 · · Score: 1

    Most consumer routing products are quite capable of running IPv6 if (keyword here) it gets compiled into the binary. Most of the products I have seen are running some form of Linux firmware. Most of the higher end networking products have had IPv6 for many years, though some products may need CAM cards to take advantage of this. My only issue for IPv6 is older operating systems that are still used, in the consumer market, Win9x, WinNT, and even Win2k do not have IPv6 stacks (though Win2k last I remember had a beta version available). But this is where the NAT to IPv4 address space would be more useful. But again there was one RFC out in the 80's that could have given us more time, by giving new classes of IP Addresses, in smaller blocks then a /24. But that's an argument for another day.

  55. Re:Lack of IPv6 support on consumer-grade DSL rout by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Also, Earthlink is offering a beta of IPv6 to any of their customers who want to use an Earthlink provided firmware set for Linksys (and compatible) routers. They've had this for a while. With OpenWRT and variants like SVEA there are a lot of consumer routers capable of IPv6 routing, 6on4 translation, etc.

  56. the 10.x.x.x net is mine! Get off my lawn you kids by infonography · · Score: 3, Funny

    I have had 10.x.x.x addresses for a long time and I am gonna keep them. You varmits need to find your own, your not taking away my net addresses. Same goes for the 192.168.X net. That's mine too, it's just my summer home.

    --
    Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
  57. the biggest problem i see by petermgreen · · Score: 2, Informative

    is home nat routers. They effecively prevent you using either 6to4 or native IPv6 unless the nat router itself explicitly supports it.

    and they are effectively closed devices so adding support requires the manufactueres cooperation.

    --
    note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    1. Re:the biggest problem i see by mmkkbb · · Score: 1

      A number of them run Linux and have firmware that can be replaced with heavily modified versions

      --
      -mkb
    2. Re:the biggest problem i see by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      yes a few have been made to run unofficial firmware unfortunately they don't seem to be the ones with built in dsl modems (and finding a dsl device that can connect over ethernet to a router and connect to a pppoa isp just seems like too much trouble). and i don't think it would count as anywhere near most home routers.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    3. Re:the biggest problem i see by Doctor+Memory · · Score: 1

      You might want to check out this link. EarthLink has come up with a firmware upgrade for the Linksys WRT54G routers. Supports both 4 and 6 simultaneously, and it's free. All I have to do is convince Road Runner (Time Warner Cable) to give me a v6 addr and....

      --
      Just junk food for thought...
    4. Re:the biggest problem i see by mmkkbb · · Score: 1

      well, you didn't mention all that stuff before

      --
      -mkb
    5. Re:the biggest problem i see by mrchaotica · · Score: 1

      Heh, I just knew somebody would mention the WRT54G in this thread. I'm just surprised it doesn't support IPv6 with the default firmware, seeing as how Cisco is talking about it, and they're the ones who built the thing!

      Do you have any idea if the Linksys BEFCMU10 cable modem supports IPv6 as well?

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

    6. Re:the biggest problem i see by stoborrobots · · Score: 1

      yes a few have been made to run unofficial firmware unfortunately they don't seem to be the ones with built in dsl modems...

      This is true, but they're getting close...

    7. Re:the biggest problem i see by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      sure you replieds and i clarified its not always possible to think of everything relavent when you make your initial post.

      btw while discussion of a few of our favourites is nice i think my original point still stands, most home routers can't be upgraded to support ipv6 without the manufacturers cooperation.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
  58. Rolling IP address blackouts by Retired+Replicant · · Score: 1

    I have noticed over the past couple of weeks that my cable modem (Comcast) loses it's connection a couple of times each evening, but comes back with a stable connection within about five minutes. Could this be an indication that Comcast might be having address space issues, and needs to institute rolling IP address blackouts in order to compensate? Just speculation.

    1. Re:Rolling IP address blackouts by Wornstrom · · Score: 1

      I had the same thing happen on cox cable. I called them up and they had someone come out to put a signal amplifier on my line. Been fine ever since.

  59. DMZ by Kadin2048 · · Score: 1

    You're talking only about the default configuration of most NAT-enabled routers. It's possible to enable NAT and have the translation device forward incoming packets to a machine on the internal network, it's just not usually set up that way. You can easily do this though by selecting a particular internal machine to be in the router's "DMZ," after which it will be accesible to the public Internet without initiating a connection.

    NAT is normally combined with stateful filtering, but it's not necessarily part of the bare minimum 'address translation.'

    --
    "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
  60. same old arguments... and baseless at that! by laugau · · Score: 1

    Everyone whines about address space and we will run out... but the fact is that the address space is only one of the benefits to ipv6 and not even the biggest one at that.

    1) Ipv6 has a fixed 20 bytes header and IPv4 has a 40 byte header with additional sub headers for extention. 20 byte headers are more bandwidth efficient than the larger ipv6 headers and represent a signifigant cost savings to an organization over the long run.

    2) ipv6 routers never have to worry about packet fragmentation and re-assembly. Packet too big? Send back an ICMP that says "Packet too big" and let the client/server handle fragmentation. IPv6 routers will need less CPU and memory.

    3) Want to switch ISPs? Use dynamic reconfiguration for your addresses. You can keep your old IP to stay responsive as you join a new network and TELL people that you switched IPs. If you have ever gone through an IP renum (for even a subpartition of your network) then you will know how much time and money this feature will save.

    4) You have multiple addresses such as link local addressing (fec0) for machines on the same broadcast domain (switches and hubs) org local addressing (for your business and behind the firewall) and none of these need configured locally on the machine... it is all automagic and guarantees uniqueness. You can also have hardwired addresses or use DHCP if you want... but why would you?

    5) DNS still works, so do most other services (ok, yeah, you might have to re-run ./configure for some)

    6) you can still tunnel to backwards ipv4 addresses.

    7) oh yeah... something about a larger address space. (which isn't a big deal because right now everyone that wants on the internet is on the internet).

    The real points for getting people to move are points 1, 2 and 3 with a little of points 5 and 6 for the FUDders. Stick to the points that will make the PHBs budge and maybe it will happen in the next 2 to 10 years for real. Otherwise we are likely to exhaust our oil reserves before we switch to ipv6.

  61. Why can't they make IPV6 addresses shorter? by tjstork · · Score: 1

    The whole IPV6 scheme blows chunks. I used to be able to type 124.23.11.222, or something like it, and I'd enter four numbers to represent my lot of a few billion addresses. Even 124.23.11.222.234.122 would be managable and that would provide 65k x 4 billion addresses, which ought to be enough for everyone. But IPV6 addresses look aweful. They really do.

    --
    This is my sig.
  62. Explanation is a little wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    A /8 network is a 255.0.0.0 mask, this is 16 million addresses, NOT 244.

  63. RE: "I think IPv4 is in its last throes." by infonography · · Score: 2, Funny

    oh great, now we got to worry exploding IPs and routers. People shooting spam at us from every direction. You never know when your gonna step on a 419 and end up buying the "low rate M0RTgaT3".

    Maybe we better give control to the UN after all.

    --
    Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
  64. Routers? by jridley · · Score: 1

    I'm running a Linksys WRT54G, which runs Linux. If Linksys doesn't release a new firmware to support whatever tech is needed, someone else will; there are multiple sources of firmwares for this box, and it's one of the most popular boxes.

    To me this is one of the best reasons to pay $50 for a 54G instead of buying one of the $15 crapo boxes; I'm not locked in and I can do all kinds of cool stuff if I want. Similar to why I like to run Linux on my PCs.

    1. Re:Routers? by davygrvy · · Score: 1

      ditto! wrt54gs for me with openwrt http://www.openwrt.org/ I'm happy.

      --
      -=[ place .sig here ]=-
  65. British Telecom by jd · · Score: 1

    I don't know if they provide native IPv6, but they DO provide IPv6 tunnels, so if they don't provide native, it's not because they don't have the equiptment. (You think they'd provide tunnels if they didn't have the protocol enabled on their routers?)

    --
    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)
  66. Cisco talks the talk... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What percentage of products from Linksys, a division of Cisco, ship with IPv6 support?

    I called them and asked--Linksys stated that none of their current products support IPv6, but if it ever becomes popular then an update will be provided at no additional cost to the customer.

    So, as a follow on question, I brought up that the same claim of an update at "no additional cost to the customer" was stated a year ago when I bought the WET54G v1.1 which provides no WPA support ("but will be supplied via a free update later.") Tech support now states that WPA is only supported with v2.0 hardware and the firmware for v2.0 hardware can not be used on v1.1 hardware. The recommendation is to continue using WEP or purchase v2.0 hardware at the full purchase price.

    When asked if IPv6 will truely be a "no additional cost update" or actually be a re-purchase like going from WET54G v1.1 hardware to WET54G v2.0 hardware just to get WPA support, Linksys could not provide an answer.

    Cisco backing IPv6 is just like Cisco backing TCP Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) while at the same time they are blocking use of ECN.

    If Cisco is going to talk the talk... it would be nice if they got their company/divisions in line to actually walk the walk. Then again, it seems like one thing you can count on with John Chambers running a company is alot of hot air being produced. If only hot air could be used as an update to support WPA or IPv6.

  67. Ohhhh. by Parity · · Score: 1

    I bet you meant 2^24, didn't you? 'sup' isn't an allowed tag.

    --
    --Parity
    'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
  68. Least ... Efficient ... Allocation ... Ever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You'd think they'd try to reclaim 127./8 first. It seems pretty awful to allocate a whole Class A when only the first address is ever used. I mean how hard can it be to change out? Just get all those Winows users to download a patch.

    But seriously, besides "localhost" and NTP clock devices, is any other use made of 127./8?

  69. Let the EU deal with it by 72beetle · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The EU is so hot and fired up to wrench control of the intarweb from the US, so let THEM deal with it. If we can't be trusted with the DNS system, seems logical to me that the EU would be much better off orchestrating and paying for the upgrade to IPV6.

    --
    -Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
    1. Re:Let the EU deal with it by rihteri · · Score: 1

      I say we let the EU split the internet like they promised. Then we shouldn't have to worry about address space for some time, even with IPv4.

    2. Re:Let the EU deal with it by ahillen · · Score: 1

      The EU is so hot and fired up to wrench control of the intarweb from the US, so let THEM deal with it. If we can't be trusted with the DNS system, seems logical to me that the EU would be much better off orchestrating and paying for the upgrade to IPV6.

      I can tell you who will pay for the upgrade to IPv6: the various organisations who run the network(s) - internet service providers, the various national scientific networks, ... - and ultimately their customers. You somehow still seem to have this idea that the US built and paid for the internet as it is today and lets everybody else in the world just use it out of generosity.

  70. Being shown up by RomulusNR · · Score: 1

    The bloody telecoms managed to fix this problem, why can't we?

    --
    Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
  71. Submarine Patents AHOY!!! by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Let's not forget that any rollout of IPv6 aware devices is going to be plauged by patent litigation. Turns out that just before its release, and lot of "Intellectual Property" "Firms" simply guessed the IPv6 standard, or parts of it, and bought^H^H^H^H^H^Happlied for corresponding patents from the USPTO rubber stamping office.

    That means for around the next 20 years we'll have the whole RSA debaucle played all over again in the IPv6 sphere. Expect to see "Innovative Ideas" lawsuits gouging money from OS makers and especially makers of routers(esp consumer grade) and other networking devices.

    Look on the bright side thought. With any luck, we'll run out of IPv4 addresses before the litigation finishes, and then someone really WILL have to do something about it!

    --
    May the Maths Be with you!
  72. It's going to be ugly by digitalgimpus · · Score: 2, Informative

    There are *millions* of Linksys, Netgear, DLink, routers and access points out there. Most of which don't support IPv6. And I doubt these vendors are going to update all that firmware.

    Nor will consumers be into throwing out old hardware "to get more IP space"... that's not exactly going to work (marketing wise).

    Nor will people with old OS versions, or other odd devices (IP cameras, etc. etc.).

    IMHO this will need government pressure, similar to the digital switchover for TV. Some sort of a date for compliance of devices, and a clean switchover date.

    1. Re:It's going to be ugly by kindbud · · Score: 1

      It's not going to be ugly at all. IPv6 has so many addresses that it is possible for large organizations and ISPs to have to themselves an allocated address space the same size of the entire IPv4 space, and smaller orgs can have an address space equivalent in size to a couple dozen IPv4 class A networks. Customers can retain their exisiting IPv4 equipment, and maybe even the same IPv4 address. The ISP's IPv6 border routers merely adds the proper IPv6 prefix to the customer's IPv4 address as it egresses the border. NAT occurs on the inbound side too, stripping the prefix and routing via old-fashioned IPv4 protocols within the network back to the customer's endpoint.

      This has all been thought of. Endpoint equipment capabilities are not a stumbling block. IPv6 can be implemented at the core or backbone, without affecting the end nodes.

      --
      Edith Keeler Must Die
  73. Big deal... by grumpyman · · Score: 1

    $30 for another home router?

  74. windows firewall by FlippyTheSkillsaw · · Score: 1

    There's always the native firewall in Windows.

    tee hee

  75. Correction by jd · · Score: 1

    Many major ISPs had some degree of roll-out nearly TEN years ago. Some of the early 6Bone maps are still on the Internet. Cisco, Bay and Telebit had some of the first IPv6 implementations nine or ten years ago. Technology has not been the problem for a very long time.

    --
    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)
  76. Give the ISPs Tax Breaks and they'll find more IPs by NigelJohnstone · · Score: 1

    Why not give the ISP's hulking great big tax breaks so they can go explore for more IP addresses.

    You could open up the IP address of the Department of National Parks, and let them look in there for more IP addresses - there's sure to be plenty in there because nobodies ever looked.

    Failing that, you could do invade some other countries allocation of IP addresses and use those.

    There's plenty of IP addresses in the world: using the USGS model, if you count the number of blocks where there is a 50% chance of finding 10 free IP address and average it with blocks where there is a 90% chance of finding 1 free IP, we won't run out until 2200 at the earliest and the number of IP addresses just tripled to 12 billion!

    I know, they haven't found new IP addresses for the last couple of decades, but that's because of them dam Democrats refusal to look.

  77. NAT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Thing since it opens up the door for peer-to-peer technologies such as SIP without needing nasty NAT traversal hacks

    While NAT was originally created to help with address crunches (in combination with RFC 1918), it is used as a security mechanism now to prevent from outsiders from hoping onto a person's / company's 'internal' network.

    I don't think NAT will go away since for most people NAT == firewall.

    IMHO, NAT is a simple mechanism to help minimize the risk of a direct attack on a network from the 'outside'. Though you have to be careful not to have a false sense of security just because you're "behing a firewall".

  78. Anonymity by SoopahMan · · Score: 1

    The IP-indirection that NAT creates provides a limited level of anonymity that many users appreciate on an Internet that is now threatened continuously by RIAA lawsuits and the like. Although technologies like this are possible on IPv6, they would be more the exception than the rule, making the act of anonymity a suspicious one. Whereas, in IPv4, the act of using NAT and becoming a bit more anonymous is the rule, and doesn't count as suspicious activity.

    It's not the only reason some prefer to stay with IPv4 as long as possible, but it gives some good reason to stick with it as long as the greedy clutches of the RIAA remain.

    1. Re:Anonymity by Professor_UNIX · · Score: 1

      NAT has absolutely zero benefit to providing you with anonymity unless you're stealing someone else's wireless connection and piggybacking on their service.

  79. Exponential loss.... by Qubit · · Score: 1
    If you copy HTML that has markup and paste it as text, you often get exponential loss ;-)

    Anyhow, those lines should look something like:

    ...absolute maximum of 2^32 (roughly 4.3 billion) possible addresses...
    ...when only blocks of 2^24 possible addresses...
    ...an entire /8 block allocated to it (2^24 addresses, about 0.39% of the whole...
    --

    coding is life /* the rest is */
  80. That's ok. They can wait a while. by springbox · · Score: 1

    I'd hate to see all of those IPv4 loopback address jokes phased out. Somehow telling someone to h4x 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 just doesn't seem as hilarious.

    1. Re:That's ok. They can wait a while. by man_ls · · Score: 1

      Just tell them to hax ::1 and it'll be a lot more leet, don't worry.

  81. Excuses, excuses by jd · · Score: 2, Insightful
    IPv6 address prefixes are defined up-stream. All you need to do is remember the one byte that indicates your router. The rest is imported. As for user machines, IPv6 addresses are automatically defined as being the router prefix + the MAC address. There is absolutely nothing for an administrator to do, with IPv6 networks, besides plug in the one byte designator and kick back.


    The only admins who don't like IPv6 are those who are either ignorant of the way it works, or who are too hooked on being worked to death. Both need help, treatment and beer.

    --
    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)
    1. Re:Excuses, excuses by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Both need help, treatment and beer.

      Hooray Beer!

    2. Re:Excuses, excuses by egarland · · Score: 1

      How does this make it easier to remember the address of my device that isn't in DNS for whatever reason? (and don't even try to claim those times are rare and therefor unimportant. They're quite common.) Yea.. it's just that 16 character router prefix + the device's 12 character Mac address + 4 characters of garbage the protocol throws into the Mac address..

      That hardly seems easier than the 12 number V4 addresses I'm used to. So you no-longer need DHCP. You're forgetting that the layer of abstraction is providing something useful, in the case of DHCP it's efficient use of address space which adds up to simpler addresses.

      --
      set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
  82. IPv6 wont solve NAT problems by smilindog2000 · · Score: 1

    I know it's not what people want to hear, but NATs serve two purposes: it allows multiple computers to share a single IP, and that's important. However, it's also important as a mechanism that protects home users from the Internet.

    When IPv6 becomes common, as it must, a new IPv6 NAT will almost certainly emerge to continue that isolation. Whether or not it gives any kind of real protection or not, homes users and home router providers aren't yet willing to allow guys like me to connect directly to your toaster.

    Sorry. Reality bites.

    --
    Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
    1. Re:IPv6 wont solve NAT problems by man_ls · · Score: 1

      NAT in place of a Firewall is a terrible, terrible solution.

      All IPv6 will mean is that each device will be responsible for its own security, or will have an actual firewall at the network border, rather than having a protocol hack which as a byproduct, blocks packets inbound for which there are no mappings.

      Even consumer-grade (Linksys et al.) equipment, running a proper IPv6 setup, could easily have basic firewall functionality built in, for each device MAC attached, allow all traffic/block all traffic/allow traffic only in response to outgoing connections/port forwarding/port triggering.

      It adds possibilities, it will never remove them.

    2. Re:IPv6 wont solve NAT problems by smilindog2000 · · Score: 1

      True. However, most people seem to think that IPv6 will be good for p2p. In reality, I still wont be able to connect to your toaster, and I still wont be able to connect to your BitTorrent client. I predict that the Skype kludge will win: STUN and a way to deal with the skrinking number of machines that are not STUN-able.

      --
      Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
  83. What is the likelihood of IPv6 never happening? by Peachy · · Score: 1

    Could it end up going the way of New Coke and completely failing?

    With the widespread use of NAT routes everywhere, is that glut of IPs really needed? Will workarounds be used instead of IPv6 implementation?

  84. Tunneling is not good enough, no multicast! by shapr · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm using 6to4 right now, but it's not good enough! One of the greatest benefits of IPv6, true multicast support, does not work, since the underlying IPv4 layer does not support multicast.

    Many applications could take advantage of multicast if it were available.

    Some examples:
    Bittorrent is a cheesy IPv4 emulation of multicast.
    Game servers could multicast 'common' data and save roughly 50% of the total bandwidth used.
    Mirror sites could multicast their updates. Debian, Redhat, and other mirrors would use a fraction of their current bandwidth.

    If you went the bittorrent way, files could be sent via looping multicast, no more slashdotting the Id games servers.

    Basically, any duplicate TCP/IP streams could be a single stream that gets replicated at the router. I want it now!

    Think of it, even spam could be more efficient with multicast emails!

    --

    Shae Erisson - ScannedInAvian.com
    1. Re:Tunneling is not good enough, no multicast! by laugau · · Score: 1

      Multicast doesn't work in ipv4? I think you are a bit mistaken.... or else there would be no stock markets (I could cite many example s here, many of which are public and others which would break various NDAs I have signed)

      There reason multicast "doesn't work" in IPv4 is because the packets would die as they are routed (TTL is decremented). Even though it is not enforced in ipv6 routing (because of the router subscription by proxy model) it is my guess that it would be strictly regulated (or else I could DOS the internet by subscribing the every multicast address on every host I control). It is my guess that the actual implementation of multicast subscriptions in ipv6 will only be allowed to either 'well known, managed multicast addresses' or by request from 'authorized hosts'.

      I doubt we will see the day that any yahoo with a comcast account can request membership to any arbitrary multicast address... nor should they.

    2. Re:Tunneling is not good enough, no multicast! by smilindog2000 · · Score: 1

      I'd say that IPv6 multicast is a totally unworkable kludge. Peer-to-peer emulation of multicast seems the way to go. You get most of the benefit, with not need to upgrade hardware, and no central commitee controlled by Microsoft/Cisco/Intel designing a protocol so complex that only Microsoft/Cisco/Intel can build it.

      --
      Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
    3. Re:Tunneling is not good enough, no multicast! by pe1chl · · Score: 1

      Multicast has existed as a feature of IPv4 for a very long time, yet "nobody" uses it. Because ISPs don't make it available to their customers.

      I don't see why IPv6 would change that. When Multicast is desired, it can be setup in IPv4 as well.

  85. Re:that quote by FlippyTheSkillsaw · · Score: 1

    I imagine it isn't worth the frustration to try to get the unused IPs out and reallocated when you could just be allocating IPv6 IPs and upgrading.

    To answer: isn't worth it to anyone who wants/has IPs and already has hardware that /could/ handle IPv6.

    Most of the networks we'd have to reduce would mean moving machines to different IPs, which is much more of a problem than it seems.

    First off, you have to make sure some percentage the old cached copies of the DNS are gone. You won't want to wait long enough to get them all, so for some people it "won't work."
    Second, you don't know who is connecting to an IP versus who is connecting by resolving a hostname. Even when hostname goes in the protocol(i.e. http) it can be fooled by an entry in a hosts file or something equivalent. You could do some rigorous cross-checking based on DNS records, but that's a big problem in itself.
    Third, often you have internal depenencies based on IPs. Document the hell out of it, but you still forget to mention that there is a default deny policy on a machine. Change your IP and you lose access to it.

    All in all if you move an IP in under a week with under 10 hours of paid admin work, you're tempting fate. Obviously, this frame goes up if your business depends on the machine in some way. Moving multiple machines will reduce the per/machine frame, but it's still significant.

    Now, moving to IPv6 you have those same considerations, plus you need to invest the pay-hours to get the IPv6ness to all the machines. Whether this includes leaving machines in their IPv4 state and translating from IPv6 or ensuring that every machine can do IPv6, it doesn't matter. Assuming you have hardware/software capable of doing IPv6, you should see about 150% of the time it would have taken to move to another IPv4 range.

    We may have a lot of completely unused IP space out there, but those IPs probably won't make much difference to the 2-10 year estimate. The problem is when you have 8 class C networks with 1-5 hosts each. Try to merge networks behind different routers and you will confound the routing space problems(huge BGP tables already), too. The final point is that once you've reclaimed all this IPv4 space you've still only delayed the inevitable shortage.

  86. Fossil fuels by totallygeek · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Interesting, but is 2 - 10 years as precise as they can be?
    8 years seems to be a long time, to me.


    Yep, and thirty years ago they said that we would be out of oil in twenty years. Go figure...

    1. Re:Fossil fuels by dustmite · · Score: 3, Informative

      Except, they didn't say that. "They" predicted that oil production would PEAK by (twenty years from thirty years ago) - "peaking" is completely different from "running out" - "peaking" means, basically, that you're at the top point of the production curve --- it means you've used up roughly half of the oil (i.e. you are only halfway), and that you will start running out ("start" meaning to be on the downward slope of the production curve - but you still have a LOT of oil at the point when you "start running out"). You're thinking of Hubbert's estimation (which was already in 1956, actually) that global oil production would peak in 2000. It was predicted that US oil production would peak by around 1970.

      See this link for more information on peak oil theory.

  87. Re: hardware limitations by FlippyTheSkillsaw · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Sure, the hardware /supports/ IPv6, but if you try to do both IPv4 and IPv6 on the hardware, you take the load way up.

    As long as IPv6 isn't required to get everywhere, they can save money by using smaller/fewer routers to do IPv4 work.

    In terms of just memory, you almost double the use by having a separate table for IPv4 and IPv6.

  88. Re: OT: All I know is by nathan+s · · Score: 1

    "And then Mel Gibson can play an ex-help-desk-guy-turned-hero whose Mac was killed by software pirates in the movie version."

    Mind if I use this to write a short story sometime?:-) I'd email you but can't find a link.

  89. Not worth it?!?!?! by sootman · · Score: 1

    it isn't worth trying to reclaim old allocations...

    Excuse me? Is it *really* that hard to talk to Apple, Ford, MIT or any of the other people with a whole Class A and ask "Say, guys, do you *really* need all 16 million addresses we gave you back when we didn't think this Internet thing was gonna take off?" Fucking A, according to that page, Halliburton has 34.x.y.z! Surely we can get *that* one back, right?

    --
    Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
    1. Re:Not worth it?!?!?! by jguthrie · · Score: 1

      What would happen if, say, the Chinese went up to MIT and said "We'll give you a billion dollars for your class-A address"?

  90. Tip for submitter... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Submissions aren't limited to three sentences. Try breaking that last monster up a bit for readability...

  91. QoS and Multicast by hughcharlesparker · · Score: 1

    QoS and multicast are built into ipv6, and both will make a big difference to internet broadcast media. With multicast it will cost a media source as much bandwith to transmit to a million viewers as to one, with little cost to the intervening routers. The Quality of Service stuff means that not only will my SOHO router know to shift my VOIP and game traffic first and the P2P stuff last, but so will the other routers involved.

    Regardless of the ipv6 transition, I'd expect a large proportion of routers to be replaced in the next 2-10 years, and if your hardware can't support a firmware upgrade then you need to replace it anyway.

  92. ipv4 is underutilized by austad · · Score: 5, Funny

    We had an IT person in our london office at a previous job. When I was out there, I had mentioned that they were running out of IP's for the office and we'd have to assign a new block. She pulls out her spreadsheet which is fully poplated up to something like .253, and proceeds to show me all the empty space up to .999.

    Obviously we are underutilizing the ipv4 space, no one seems to use anything above .255. We should just all follow her lead and go to .999. It's like a network that goes to 11 man.

    --
    Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
    1. Re:ipv4 is underutilized by SuperQ · · Score: 1

      haha.. I was at a lan party once in wisconsin, they had a /27 (30 useable IPs) routed on a T1 line. They were a bunch of goons, and didn't know how to setup DHCP or NAT. They got to the end of the allocation (low bit gateway) and just kept assigning more to people.. first the broadcast, then the next network number, etc etc.. they wondered why the network got wierd and slow when some guy had his box set to be the broadcast address.

      They had a linux box around, but it "crashed on boot".. I checked it out and they had just turned it off one time, and it was fscking. Got that box up, tossed another nic in it and had a DHCP/NAT setup in about 15min, saved the lan party from total stupidity.

  93. For *business* customers maybe, for a price. by Bob_Robertson · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I recently asked my cable ISP what their IPv6 gateway was. They said, "We don't provide that service. Maybe you should upgrade to a business account."

    They only offer multiple client services on business accounts, so technically I'm already in violation of their rules because of using a router and NAT even though I run no "server", just a couple of PCs.

    Yes, Cisco has a vested interest in replacing all those legacy IPv4-only cigar-box routers like mine. Yes, my IP provider would love a reason to raise rates or otherwise push me into a "business" account (and thereby charge me more).

    Fact is, I won't be buying a new router, I'll just recycle one PC into place as a gateway and continue to hide behind NAT because I don't care to pay business rates for home PC use.

    No matter how much I dislike IPv6 because of its "second system" bloat, I have yet to find a free IPv6 tunnel provider. Yes, it's my fault, people tell me they're out there I just cannot find them.

    Bob-

    --
    The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
    1. Re:For *business* customers maybe, for a price. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I have yet to find a free IPv6 tunnel provider. Yes, it's my fault, people tell me they're out there I just cannot find them.

      http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=free+ipv6 +tunnel+broker&btnG=Search

    2. Re:For *business* customers maybe, for a price. by ffsnjb · · Score: 1

      Hurricane Electric (was on /. a year or so ago). I used it for awhile, but I let the tunnel expire becuase I really wasn't using it. All of my NAT'd Windows machines were 98se, no IPv6 there. Now that they're all XP and I've enabled IPv6 on them, I just may get a new /64 from HE.

      linky link link.

      --
      "Why do you consent to live in ignorance and fear?" - Bad Religion
    3. Re:For *business* customers maybe, for a price. by Bob_Robertson · · Score: 1

      Many thanks. I had not heard thought to search for the phrase "tunnel broker", that worked. I have a tunnel from Hurricane Electric, I think, although I'm having difficulty enabling it through NAT at this moment.

      They do have great tools, though, I recommend them. http://tunnelbroker.net/

      --
      The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
  94. "consumer" service vs "premium" service by mcrbids · · Score: 1

    Why doesn't SBC/Earthlink/Comcast/Sprint/whomever roll out IPv6 to their "consumer" DSL customers? I know that IPv6 capable systems can "see" all IPv4 addresses, it's just not true the other way. And, by using an IPv6 address, they'd make it more difficult to set up a server, right? That's what they want anyway, right?

    Really, why not? Is there something I'm missing?

    --
    I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
    1. Re:"consumer" service vs "premium" service by pe1chl · · Score: 1

      You are wrong on v6/v4 compatability.
      When you give your customers only IPv6, all they can access is IPv6 services.

      This is the single biggest design problem in IPv6: it cannot communicate with IPv4 systems.
      That is what is holding back its adoption.

  95. link here Re:Already rolled... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
  96. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by alefbet · · Score: 2, Informative
    Now matter how many addressed IPv6 supplies, we will run out eventually, and much sooner than we expect.
    Based on my calculations, with the surface of the earth at 510 million square kilometers, and with IPv6 addresses at 128 bits (that is, about 256,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0 addresses), there are about 300,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses per square inch of the earth's surface. I don't think we need to worry about running out anytime soon. It's like realizing that eventually we'll have a Y10K bug, but none of our current hardware will be around for it.
    --

    A hack is just an idiom waiting for wider use.
  97. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by Stian+Engen · · Score: 1
    From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipv6
    IPv4, the previous version, supports 4.2 billion (4.294 × 109) addresses, which is inadequate for giving even one address to every living person, much less support the burgeoning market for connective devices. IPv6 addresses this problem by supporting 340 undecillion (3.4 × 1038) addresses. For scale, this would allow an average of about 430 quintillion (4.3 × 1020) unique addresses per square inch, or 670 quadrillion (6.7 × 1017) per square millimeter, of the Earth's surface.
    I don't think we need to worry about running out of ipv6 adresses any time soon :)
  98. Applications are a bigger problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How many programs are out there in active use that make use of TCP/IP? How many of them are IPv6-ready?

    My guesses: tens of thousands and a handful, respectively.

    IPv6 is going to happen, but upgrading all those applications is going to be much bigger than Y2K was.

    1. Re:Applications are a bigger problem by daverabbitz · · Score: 0

      > How many programs are out there in active use that make use of TCP/IP? How many of them are >IPv6-ready?
      >
      >My guesses: tens of thousands and a handful, respectively.

      tens of thousands and a few hundred, respectively.
      You'd be surprised how many applications either have compilet-time or run-time support for IPv6, at least on Gnu/Linux.

      --
      What could be better than a jet powered motorcycle? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8l6GTHLSWE
  99. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yup, this is a big issue. People want to have the liberty to do what they want in their own home. After all when you put a nail into your own wall, do you have to phone up the regional governing entity or pay to do so? Why should we have to do the same for our private computers?

    --
    Jumpstart the tartan drive.
  100. About half the space is lost or wasted by gelfling · · Score: 1

    I work for a class "A" organization and several years ago we did an audit because whole national geographies ran out of static address space. We found that about half of the addresses were never reclaimed and reused. Moreover we found more than 800 undocumented DNS domains internally.

  101. ADSL IPv6 router - Re:Already rolled... by new500 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Try a Cisco 87x router. These are sold in the UK, are fully IPv6, provide 4 10/100 ports in case your switch is v4 only, offer WLAN 802.11b/g option (does this carry v6? i dunno) and have lots of other nice features as well. Haven't had time to check compatability. Expensive - ish, see : http://www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk/Shop/ShopDetail.as p?ProductID=2277&CategoryID=325&ShopGroupID=78 (the top model in the series) but available now.

    Data sheet : http://cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/routers/ps380/p roducts_data_sheet0900aecd8028a976.html

      IPv6 addressing architecture

      IPv6 name resolution

      IPv6 statistics

      IPv6 translation-transport packets between IPv6-only and IPv4-only endpoints

      ICMPv6

      IPv6 DHCP

    Until the ISP backhaul is routing IPv6 it's still not native all the way, so A&A or whoever your ISP is doesn't. Ask for a allocation and tunnel to the 6bone. Until not so long ago NTT UK offered ranges and free peering, and there were other free v6 peering intiatives. coupl'a years since i cared much about this so forgive me if anything changed (save the ready availability of IPv6 capable routers). Hopefully POPs with lots of LLU will be the first to go native in the UK, so we can have v6 and >=8Mbps to cope with all that traffic from my fridge, cooker, clock, toilet, kitchen drawer, hallway light . . .

    1. Re:ADSL IPv6 router - Re:Already rolled... by Martz · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I have bought and installed several Cisco 837 ADSL routers for use with UK ISPs, and they have all been superb compared to the typical cheap ADSL and Cable routers made by the likes of Belkin, Linksys, SMC, Negear etc.

      Don't get me wrong - with most of these other routers now there isn't anything really wrong with them, it's just the Cisco 837 is exceptionally stable and never requires a reset or a poke to awaken it, like some others I have mentioned above. YMMV.

      Look out for the Cisco 837 SOHO version, and save a large wedge of money too! Expect to pay around £350 for the non-soho.

      (I don't work, nor am I associated with Cisco :P Just a happy customer, for once)

  102. Like current situation with IPv4 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    IPv6 will suffer the same fate as IPv4 multicast. It will be usable without additional tunneling to only small portion of Internet users. Unless users really need some features or the features can't be profited (by ISPs, manufacturers, advertisers) from, they're not going to be implemented in large scale.

  103. You seem to forget... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You seem to forget that ISP's want as tight a grip on the consumer as possible. They also want to charge extremem premiums on "serving" content. Why would they ever bother pushing a technology that just allows consumers more freedom when they can just triple NAT so that while you can view web pages, you'll never be hosting files, using VOIP that isn't through them, getting any value out of your connection. They have proven time and time again that they will do everything within their power to sap as much out of consumers as possible. IPV6 will just hamper their bloodsucking ventures, so why would they implement without being pushed? I wouldn't be suprised if they just started pulling current consumers with "outside IP's" to give to business divisions, and further NAT'ing people. You live in a dream world if you think they aren't rolling out IPV6 because there is no need (from a consumer standpoint).

  104. MIPv6 is nice... by mikeborella · · Score: 1

    Mobile Ipv6 may actually get rolled because it can reduce cost and backhaul latencies for wireless VoIP providers. MIPv4 doesn't allow route optimization, so it doesn't quite solve the problem as cleanly and required either more capex or opex to support. Whether or not this happens depends if the cost can be justified vs. router upgrades, staff training, and service outages due to new technology and misunderstandings of new technology.

    Having said that I don't see a landline ISP moving to IPv6 until at least one of the following occurs:

    1) Government mandate for v6
    2) v6 reduces cost somehow (see above)
    3) Everyone else is doing it

    --
    Mike Borella http://www.borella.net/mike
  105. but NAT turns it into a client/server model by dpilot · · Score: 1

    And here you've just hit the crux of the issue, and perhaps the biggest stumbling block in widespread IPV6 adoption. All of us (the Slashdot, Technocrat, and tech crowd in general) believe that end-to-end, peer-to-peer is the way things are supposed to work. I imagine that most of our ISPs sternly disagree with this philosophy, and *like* the client-server model, since it lowers support costs. Plus we know which model the ??AA prefers.

    I suspect that as others have said, Cisco sees IPV6 as an opportunity to sell more hardware, probably more than once, because there will be evolution as it sees real-world use.

    I can easily foresee a two-tier Internet, where there is IPV6 at some level "up there," but us unwashed masses will continue to get IPV4. Besides support, there's a cost issue. For instance, our ISPs can adopt IPV6 at their next-level-up feeds with a little bit of hardware. But I suspect most of their hardware investment is much lower down, closer to us, and if it works, they'd just as soon keep the old IPV4 hardware in place. Even if it could be a firmware upgrade, it's still a nightmare to roll out over thousands of users.

    The interesting question would be corporate interests. I suspect they'd like to get some of the benefits of IPV6, but probably would prefer to keep the tighter control over their lans that is "justified" by IPV4.

    --
    The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
    1. Re:but NAT turns it into a client/server model by FireFury03 · · Score: 1

      I can easily foresee a two-tier Internet, where there is IPV6 at some level "up there," but us unwashed masses will continue to get IPV4.

      That's essentially what we have at the moment - if I hosted a server at a big datacentre (for example, if I shoved it on the AMIX network) then I'd get native IPv6 routing whereas over my home DSL I have to use 6to4 tunnelling.

      Cisco sees IPV6 as an opportunity to sell more hardware

      I'm not convinced that adoption of IPv6 will cause a huge increase in the amount of hardware Cisco is selling - all their kit has supported IPv6 natively for years already.

    2. Re:but NAT turns it into a client/server model by dpilot · · Score: 1

      Another post suggests that Cisco's newer routers have better IPV6 support than what is currently installed. So if IPV6 were to become widespread, presumably upgrade fever would follow.

      --
      The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
  106. Something special about 255 by Danuvius · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Is there nothing special about 255 to you?

    It is the 256th number, if you include 0 in your count. Coincidentally 256 is also the number of values a single byte can represent.

    Each number in the dotted decimal form of an IP address is the a numeric representation of a single byte.

    There will not be IPv4 addresses going to 999, there will not even be any going to 256. (seeing as how counting starts from 0).

    --
    Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
    1. Re:Something special about 255 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ummm, you did recognize the reference to Spinal Tap and the failed attempt be +2 funny right?

    2. Re:Something special about 255 by Danuvius · · Score: 1

      *Obviously* I did not. And feeling a tad bit silly for it...

      --
      Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
  107. priority and quality of service information in the by dpilot · · Score: 1

    Aah, but is that information put in the packet in such a way that they can charge more for better priority and routing? I'm under the impression that they're currently looking at ways to do that stuff with IPV4 for "preferred customers." In that sense, ISPs would clearly not want to see QOS become "fair," because they lose a value-add revenue option.

    --
    The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
  108. Instead of IPv6, how about something less crazy? by camusatan · · Score: 1

    Most - if not all - internet connections are nowadays behind a NAT connection, which is a de-facto firewall. Those firewalls tend to take advantage of UDP and TCP connections having port numbers, and renumbering the ports. What if we were to somehow merge the IP addresses, and the TCP/UDP Port Numbers together into a 32(IP part)+16(port number)+1(UDP-vs.TCP) address? That would give us a 49 bit address space - which would be far more comfortable. No re-coding applications (for the most part) - the same basic IPv4 calls would work. But instead of allocating an entire IPv4 addresses to a machine, you would allocate instead an IP and a port number to a machine. This could be nicely backwards compatible with firewalls that are out there, and everything. And probably wouldn't change how the Internet is routed. You'd still have problems with Well Known Services tending to reside on certain ports, but you could help reduce that by adding some stuff to DNS to return port numbers as well as IP addresses.

  109. In other words... by thogard · · Score: 1

    Now Cisco has new products that can cope with IPv6 on the lower end, its time to sell everyone new hardware.

    The real reason we are out of IPv4 address is because Cisco routers were too stupid to efficiently treat the entire net as 16 million class C addresses and deal with that problem so their solution to reduce the memory requirements (of Just Cisco routers, no one else had the problem) was to consolidate routes and not allocate anything smaller than a /22 then /21. This mean that many people have far more addresses than they need.

    The reality is that real routing in the IPv6 land is just as bad as routing in the old class C world and you have the added benefit of needing far more memory to do the job.

    This still doesn't fix the real problem which is that many small companies need dual homed /24 or smaller networks.

    The solution now should be that no new address space is handed out unless its issued to two different ISPs that agree to allocated it to dual homed customers. That would means the next block allocated to MCI is also allocated to Quest so that they can hand it out to customers that are hooked to both. It will be a huge mess for the ISPs and an absolute nightmare for their marketing people but it would do great things for the reliability of the net for smaller users.

  110. China and India by dpilot · · Score: 1

    After a little thought, I agree with you, but each nation will have a different reason.

    India will want to roll out forefront technology because they see that as opportunity for their nation.

    China will want to roll out IPV6 for the same reason, PLUS: With IPV6 no NAT is needed, and in fact they could probably find a way to disallow all NAT within the country. That puts every computer on the country directly on their Internet, making government tracking and hacking much easier.

    --
    The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
    1. Re:China and India by nzkbuk · · Score: 1

      With IPV6 no NAT is needed, and in fact they could probably find a way to disallow all NAT within the country

      I see that as one of th big disadvantages of IPv6. Most isp's are reluctant to give static addresses, let alone subnets to customers. Almost always they cost extra. (atleast for home users).

      Now you have an addressing method that gives out subnets by default AND makes all devices directly accessable.
      Just think of the numbers of extra insecure boxes that will be dumped onto the net with this.

      Now not only will you have almost every hone PC, but almost every office pc as a potential zombie.

      I'll stick with IPv4 for as long as I can just to avoid those two problems thanks all the same

    2. Re:China and India by mrchaotica · · Score: 1

      Why don't you just fix it by using a real firewall?

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

    3. Re:China and India by nzkbuk · · Score: 1

      You're looking at the wrong end of the problem.
      Sure a firewall will prevent unwanted traffic entering and/or leaving my network, it will not however stop a DDoS from multiple remote sources saturating my network connection.
      Combine that with joe sixpack who's knowledge of firewalls is probably less than their knowledge of applying security patches / service packs etc, and maybe you'll see why I laugh at your "Why don't you just fix it by using a real firewall?".
      It's not me using a firewall, It's not the few computer literate people using firewalls, it's the vast bulk of people who know nothing about computers or embeded network connected devices who's computers are already causing problems.

      How long after we get ipv6 will we start having worms etc attacking people's networked xbox, etc ?

    4. Re:China and India by dpilot · · Score: 1

      But I spoke of this all-IPV6, all-accessible network as being within the Great Firewall of China, and I expect that there would be extensive monitoring within. In such a situation, I'd be scared to even try building a zombie network, because it wouldn't be guys in black suits at my door, it would be the Red Army.

      --
      The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
    5. Re:China and India by nzkbuk · · Score: 1

      Over 3 servers I already get 5 ssh brute force attacks or portscans origionating from within china PER DAY.
      About 75% I can't even find sufficent details within apnic to complain.

      I don't see these problems disappearing all because more hosts would be able to connect

  111. Whats going to happen first? by el_womble · · Score: 1

    Will we run out of oil before or after we run out of IPv4 addresses?

    The only good news to come out of the answer of that question is that nobody is going to die when we run out IPv4 addresses.

    (I'm just full of joy tonight!... I need more beer)

    --
    Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
  112. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 1
    And even when you do have multiple addresses allocated, what about the users that have one more machine than usable addresses? Small company networks etc? Now matter how many addressed IPv6 supplies, we will run out eventually, and much sooner than we expect.

    Current recommendations are for ISPs to hand out /48 networks to each customer (so that the customers have 80 bits of autoconfig space). If each ISP has 64K (2^16) users, there's still enough address space for 4 billion (2^32) ISPs. Conversely, we could have 64K ISPs, each will 4 billion customers, without overlap.

    I think that we'll manage.

    --
    Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  113. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by asdfghjklqwertyuiop · · Score: 1

    For a start, a lot of ISPs only offer one address, partly to encourage people to buy more expensive packages with multiple addresses, and NAT transparently solves that issue.


    NAT doesn't transparently solve that issue at all. Nothing about NAT is transparent, quite the opposite. NAT is no substitute for real addresses for many reasons.


    There is no reason to assume that increased avilability of addresses will cause ISPs to offer more addresses to consumers - after all if they anticipate 100,000 single PC broadband connections, they are going to find it hard to get approval for 800,000 addresses (to allow a /28), even with the increased address space.


    Read the standards and allocation policies for IPv6. The minimum amount of address space that the registry expects any end subscriber to get from the ISP is a /48 or /64 at a minimum. Given that fact, it will be quite easy for an ISP to justify a mere 800,000 addresses.


    And even when you do have multiple addresses allocated, what about the users that have one more machine than usable addresses? Small company networks etc? Now matter how many addressed IPv6 supplies, we will run out eventually, and much sooner than we expect.


    We will run out of IPv6 addresses much sooner than expected? Do you have any idea how many IPv6 addresses there are? Given the standards above, the smallest amount that will be allocated to any single subsriber is /64 = 2^64 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses

    That's over three times the surface area of the earth. Measured in square millimeters. For your network alone.


    In the end NAT offers security, [...]and a reasonable form of security

    No it doesn't. read the rebuttals


    simplified network management with an excellent delineation point between vendor and consumer (the ISP dosen't have to worry about what is inside the end user network),


    The ISP never has to worry about what is inside the end user network anyway. The only thing they're concerned with is the size of the prefix they're routing your way. That doesn't make any difference to them in terms of resource usage on their equipment. Only how many of their finite number of addresses are being consumed. And IPv6 makes that virtually irrelevant.

  114. http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
  115. Chicken Little may be right this time by The+Bastard · · Score: 1

    While I agree that the Internet version of the Chicken Little story ("we're running out of address space! we're running out of address space!") has been around for a long time and heard by myself more times than I care to remember; and that Cisco does have a vested interest...but this time, I'm starting to pay closer attention, as the next ten years will see major changes and major growth in address space utilization. The reasons?

    One thing we here in the US seem to keep forgetting is that the Internet is global. Over the past several years, several countries have been building out a good chunk of infrastructure, and the question I have is how much of that is IPv6, or will NEED to be IPv6? Don't forget, China has only just started to come on-line. Want to talk IPv4 address exhaustion?

    Additionally, mobile devices are a huge seller throughout the world (I believe a billion last year alone), and that will only be increasing as the years go by. With the addition of networking capabilities to billions of mobile devices...well, you get the picture.

    I think Chicken Little may be onto something this time.

  116. I for one welcome out IPv6 overlords. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    As a VoiP tech, NAT and it's evil brother NAT-t are the bain of my tech support life.
    The SIP contact header is nice but the EP and FW port number get messedup all the time by NAT tables.
    I rejoice when a customer tells me he has a public routable IP for his ATA, life is good after that.
    But woe to me when they hide the SIP ATA behind 3 routers and PIX firewall and want to know why they only get 1 way RTP audio.
    BTW SPI (statefull packet inspection) is not your friend.

  117. Re: hardware limitations by FireFury03 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    As long as IPv6 isn't required to get everywhere, they can save money by using smaller/fewer routers to do IPv4 work.

    I think that rather depends on how much of the network is IPv6 only - if there's a large chunk that's only on IPv6 then refusing to support it would be like telling the customers "we've decided to not route any of your traffic to the US anymore because that's cheaper for us". Customers would be leaving them in droves - they don't need to understand _why_ parts of the internet are inaccessible, it will just become known that this ISP is crap because they have "firewalled" off part of the internet in the interests of cost saving.

  118. We have a B-net by fluor2 · · Score: 1

    We have a B-net and we don't really need it.

    I guess many other have the same issue.

  119. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by m50d · · Score: 1

    I don't think you understand quite how big a 32 bit address space is. IPv6 has something on the order of 1000 addresses for everyone on the planet. Public addresses would simply cease to be rare or valuable. Your ISP could get the addresses it wanted with no trouble, anyone who wanted multiple ones for their home network would simply ask for them. We will not run out of IPv6 addresses on this planet, and I suspect we'll need a new routing protocol anyway once our networks move beyond it.

    --
    I am trolling
  120. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by quantum+bit · · Score: 1

    Not all 128 bits are usable in an IPv6 address. Only the top 48 is issued on a per-customer basis from ISPs, and the next 16 bits are used for internal routing on the customers network. The bottom 64 bits are all network-local address. Nobody in their right mind would try to put 2^64 hosts on a single subnet, so there will be a LOT of unused space.

    Yes, you can set up different routing internally if you really want to, but the bottom line is the 48-bit prefix per end-user bit is established in the standard and what will be assigned. Add hierarchical routing on top of that, and even more address space will be wasted.

  121. Re:Lack of IPv6 support on consumer-grade DSL rout by quantum+bit · · Score: 1

    My only issue for IPv6 is older operating systems that are still used, in the consumer market, Win9x, WinNT, and even Win2k do not have IPv6 stacks

    AMEN. If anything I would expect Microsoft to be pushing IPv6, because it's the one thing that WinXP has that Win2k doesn't. A lot of businesses are sticking with Win2k because XP has no compelling new features and adds a lot of useless crap.

  122. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by Katz_is_a_moron · · Score: 1

    Dude, do you realize how many addresses a 128-bit address space gives you? About 3.4 * 10^38 address, give or take. I would type out the number for you, but I'd probably get carpal tunnel syndrome from doing it.

    If you were to assign addresses at the rate of one billion addresses PER SECOND for a BILLION YEARS, you would not even come close to using up one trillionith of the address space.

    In short, we will not 'run out eventually', as you say. The sun will supernova long before that will ever happen.

  123. Vendors don't update? by anticypher · · Score: 1

    What rock are you hiding under? Vendors are all the time releasing new versions of their firmware for their consumer grade DSL router/firewall/NAT boxes. Quite a few of them have a linux project which gives you IPv6 natively, such as OpenWRT for LinkSys.

    You also seem to be under the mis-impression that IPv4 and IPv6 are mutually exclusive. This is a common mistake by people with almost no knowledge of networking. There are ISPs all over Europe right now that offer both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses on their DSL and Cable lines. If you have a router which supports IPv6, *BAM*, it's on and working. No real configuration to do, just click the checkbox on the configuration page or whatever. Computers which support IPv6 then just auto-configure their interfaces and start using IPv6 whenever possible, and the user never even notices.

    I've got a dual IPv4/IPv6 ISP at home, and it just works. Mac OS X, Solaris, and OpenBSD all just start using IPv6 when they see a local router offering IPv6 Neighbor Discovery packets. Windoze boxes require loading the IPv6 stack from a web site somewhere, but once installed and configured it pretty much works without maintenance.

    the AC

    --
    Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
    1. Re:Vendors don't update? by digitalgimpus · · Score: 1

      Yea... and do your parents update their access point with a linux based firmware?

      Come on... you don't really think average joe is going to do that.

      Most vendors don't push firmware updates to begin with... they make them available for those who discover them (either through tech support, or geekyness). And not all devices have been upgraded by the vendor for IPv6.

      Stop being a "if your not a nerd get off the net" freak, and start being realistic. I don't think you'll be seeing the entire world running doing something that technical. For most people accesspoints are simply "that thing the neighbors boy put in to share the cable internet".

    2. Re:Vendors don't update? by mrchaotica · · Score: 1
      Yea... and do your parents update their access point with a linux based firmware?
      If their ISP said "hey, do this or else your internet won't work," they'd do it.
      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

  124. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    > I don't think you understand quite how big a 32 bit address space is. IPv6 has something on the order of 1000 addresses for everyone on the planet.

    That one is just too funny. I don't think you understand how big a 128 bit address space is either. 1000 each huh.

  125. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    340282366920938463463374607431768211456

    That's not that bad

  126. Re:Lack of IPv6 support on consumer-grade DSL rout by dayton967 · · Score: 1

    Then there is Vista, at least one of the many many many many versions

  127. question - if UN got control.... by wakim1618 · · Score: 1
    in its recent proposal, How would this affect IPv6 and other rollouts in the future?

  128. Unjustifiable by Spazmania · · Score: 1

    The customers aren't demanding it. I'd still do it for the heck of it, but when the customers aren't demanding it I can't justify creating a multi-thousand dollar obligation to ARIN and filling out a mass of paperwork to get an allocation that's actually usable on the Internet. And of course the folks I buy bandwidth from aren't using it either for largely the same reason, so it does me no good.

    --
    Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
  129. Re: who BBN are by Medievalist · · Score: 2, Informative


    They built this thing called "the Internet" that you might have heard of?

    Testing this amazing new widget called a "router" required a fair amount of address space at one time.

    Well, OK, actually they called it a "gateway" but that means something else now. :)

  130. Cost? by Duncan3 · · Score: 1

    Maybe if a certain organization that assigns addresses wasn't using IPv6 to attempt to raise 2^128 dollars in fees... IPv6 is simple, paying for the address allocation will put you into chapter 7.

    But I still can't figure out why noone is deploying it... hmmmmmm.

    --
    - Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
  131. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How's your carpal tunnel performing now ?

  132. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yeah, if we start to run low by giving everyone /48s, we'll start giving out /64s or /72s or what not; it'll be like CIDR.

    A lot of the people who designed ipv6 don't like NAT, so you get this fanboyish opposition to NAT in ipv6 (ipv6 once had NAT, but they got rid of it; read the RFCs)

  133. No, and here's why by Medievalist · · Score: 1
    Is NAT Better?
    No. You can't play Sid Meier's "Civilisation" with more than one player on each side of a NAT gateway.

    This is probably true of all DirectPlay-based games, actually - since they want peer-to-peer communications, and they use IP address to distinguish nodes, you can't have more than one player transit the gateway in either direction cleanly.

  134. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by m50d · · Score: 1

    Bah, sorry, got my measurements mixed up. I was confused by american/british billions and ended up counting a million instead.

    --
    I am trolling
  135. Re: hardware limitations by FlippyTheSkillsaw · · Score: 1
    As long as IPv6 isn't required to get everywhere, they can save money by using smaller/fewer routers to do IPv4 work.


    I was unclear: as long as you can still get everywhere using IPv4, they can provide the service cheaper by supporting only IPv4.

    The point where you need IPv6 to get somewhere important is where people will start to complain about not having IPv6. Until then, only a technical minority will have problems for the lack. On the same note, it only takes the buzz word to make managers adopt it.
  136. Didn't they predict this already...? by KC7GR · · Score: 1

    I seem to remember that, back around 1994, there were lots of noises about IPv4 address space becoming depleted. Weren't NAT devices supposed to help with this?

    Also... I'm no network expert by a long shot, but I have looked at the docs for IPv6, and they struck me as overly complex at best.

    Wouldn't it be possible (and a lot easier) to stave off Impending Doom by adding one or two more octets to the existing IPv4 scheme? If not, fine, but I can't be the only one who's wondered whether it's really that simple.

    Keep the peace(es).

    --

    Bruce Lane, KC7GR,

    Blue Feather Technologies

  137. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low IQ rants by anticypher · · Score: 1

    You didn't RTFA, obviously. It was full of real numbers reflecting reality which includes NAT, not wishful thinking of an armchair /. pundit.

    Even with wide deployment of NAT in both consumer connections and at corporate edges, the IPv4 address space is still running out fast. NAT and HTTP 1.1 bought us 10 years of breathing space, but that is now ending. NAT is not going to go away, but in a few years, when an ISP or a corporation goes asking for some new addresses because they are still expanding, there just will NOT be any more. No amount of NAT is solving this problem, we're already close to 100% NAT on consumer connections, there are just too many new consumers who want an internet connection. On the server end of the connection, you just can't put NAT boxes in front of a big pile of servers, they need to be individually addressable. HTTP 1.1 bought us some time with virtual domains, but even that doesn't scale for much longer.

    Once things start to get scarce in a few years, there will be address blocks available from black-market sources. But would you stake your company's connectivity on a block which was allocated to the U.S. military or a spam-friendly Chinese ISP? Sure, the block might not be announced right now, but what happens a month or two down the road after you have paid $$$ for the addresses and the original owner pops up and smacks you down in court for illegally announcing their block?

    Its going to get ugly, this article and many like it at NANOG, RIPE, APNIC, IETF and other meetings are all sounding the end of freely available IPv4 space.

    the AC

    --
    Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
  138. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by jjeffrey · · Score: 1

    I'm genuinely conviced that this will happen. Partly for all of the address space wastage reasons that other people have given above (e.g. not assigning less than a 64 which in some ways could very loosely be seen as reducing the effective address space to 64 bits), but partly just because *every* time anyone has said "we'll never need that much" in the IT industry they have been proven totally wrong (think that Bill Gates quote, the one about 640k of RAM... ). It's just we haven't dreamed up the application yet.

  139. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low IQ rants by jjeffrey · · Score: 1

    You seem to have missed the point of my post there. In fact you don't seem to have read the first line.

    Nowhere in my post did I say that NAT is the solution to the address space shortages, of course it isn't. We need IPv6.

    My post was all about the reasons why NAT won't die, and why it dosen't necessarily deserve to be seen as a bad thing, even when there is plenty of address space available.

  140. No No No... by DarkOx · · Score: 1

    For the last and final time you are NOT going to see IpV6 any time soon. Powerful forces WANT you to be NATed. They would like your ISP to provide you an address that is already NATed if they don't already. Would IpV6 be great yes yes it would and it does solve most of the problems with IpV4 especially running out of host address. The powers that be don't want more 'hosts' on the internet though. They want only corporation and select groups of publishers to be hosts. The rest of you are to be clients so you can pay for the services they host. They don't want to have to compete with community hosted sites. The telcos many of whom make up the internet back bone don't want you makeing free calls with VOIP they want their toll networks used. They don't want you running P2P apps without more difficulty then Joe Sixpack can manage. Yes when universal NAT does break p2p profoundly Joe Sixpack will be upset but still won't understand the need to demand IpV6. He also will simply continue to wonder where this promised internet phone whent and pay his long-distance bill every month.

    IpV6 is NOT GOING TO HAPPEN any time soon don't hold your breath. When it does eventually happen they will make sure whatever is availible at comsumer costs is hopelessly crippled.

    --
    Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
  141. download speeds by calyptos · · Score: 1

    With the IPv6 address space using more than 4 bytes, the packet headers will increase in size, there by limiting the data space. So with IPv6, less data can be transfered, which means slower downloads. I don't know about you, but I'm a speed freak (no, I'm not a drug addict). Unless they can find some way to compensate for this, I'll resist it as much as I can... and fail miserably.

    --
    http://illhostit.com/ - Webhosting
  142. MOD PARENT -5: Sense of Humour Required by BinaryCodedDecimal · · Score: 1

    As per subject

  143. 2008 by jonabbey · · Score: 1

    DOD procurements rules will require IPv6 compliance for all IT gear by Fiscal Year 2008.

    There's been some talk to the effect that those requirements might be loosened up if need be, though.

  144. IPv6 denial and IPv4 forever by Danathar · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's funny to see that the people who keep shaking their heads left and right when "IPv6" is mentioned are mainly ALL in the U.S. Fact: China, Japan, Korea and MUCH of Europe will move to IPv6 first...and much sooner no matter what the U.S thinks. Control is the issue, those moving to v6 see it as an opportunity to move away from having to call a U.S. organization to get address allocation. Also..since DNS becomes REALLY important with v6 (try to memorize IPv6 addressess..) Europe could use it as a means of setting up their own root DNS servers to take control of the future address space. Whoever has the DNS servers that people use will get control, and if Europe/Asia defines that first they will have control.

    1. Re:IPv6 denial and IPv4 forever by LnxAddct · · Score: 1

      Most universities, many companies, and most major ISPs already use IPv6 with a v4 tunnel in the U.S. If you're talking about going cold turkey, its different, but quite a lot of the US already uses IPv6, even if most consumers don't realize it. Internet2 is also entirely IPv6 and it is a very large scale network all across the United States. U.S. hosted websites get something like 65% of web traffic, Europe isn't just going to cut itself off, not too mention that dropping IPv4 will break many devices and software. If Europe did ever get to a point like that, it'd still take years before all the nations agreed on anything, and then all the citizens can enjoy their international tax on their censored internet that is shattered and needs to be rebuilt because most major e-commerce is either through a company in the U.S. or the transactions take place through a bank who's parent bank is in the U.S. England is trying to make religious jokes illegal... the U.N. said they'd tax users to pay for infastructure... The U.N. is corrupt and and filled with dictators who all want control, hell they don't even like .sex domains. I hope you like giving up all those freedoms that the U.S. protects for you, just so you can say that your politicians control the names of the sites you visit.
      Regards,
      Steve

  145. That's lame by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why would a washing machine need a firmware update? I'm using the same washer I bought fifteen years ago. I don't think it even has a computer in it, just a couple of mechanical dials. What could a computer make a washer do that the old fashioned tech won't?

    Say the computer does a better job of timomng the spin cycle; a firmware update suggests design flaws or bad software.

    Some of you young nerds STILL don't get it- new tech is only better if it's better. Buying dog food over the internet is a losing proposition. Weren't you around in the dotcom bust?

    Now, when they come out with a washer and dryer that will put the clothes and soap in all by itself, and then put the clothes in the dryer, and then fold them and put them away I'll gladly buy one.

    Until then, internet enabling the washing machine just gives somebody an opportunity to crhack your washer. Great, you come home to 300 gallons of water on the floor.

    Dumb.

    (mind reading capcha ="predict")

    1. Re:That's lame by Armour+Hotdog · · Score: 1

      Just because you don't see a benefit to a shift toward computer controllers in household appliances doesn't mean it's not going to happen. In fact, given the trend towards ever-increasing complexity in formerly simple devices, I'd be quite suprised if it didn't happen in the next decade. I'm not making any sort of value judgement about this trend, but if you seriously expect household appliances, especially at the high end, to remain purely mechanical devices, I think you need to open your eyes.

  146. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by nzkbuk · · Score: 1

    Read the standards and allocation policies for IPv6. The minimum amount of address space that the registry expects any end subscriber to get from the ISP is a /48 or /64 at a minimum. Given that fact, it will be quite easy for an ISP to justify a mere 800,000 addresses.

    That's funny from the link you provided I read the line
    /128 when it is absolutely known that one and only one device is connecting.
    I'd say that almost all current ISP's would sell that as a standard home user address allocation, and charge for anything bigger similar to what they do already.

    Additionally also stated
    However, all /48 assignments to end sites are required to be registered either by the LIR or its subordinate ISPs in such a way that the RIR/NIR can properly evaluate the HD-Ratio when a subsequent allocation becomes necessary.
    This translates to all /48's must be registered address spaces. eg apnic, arin etc needs to be notified of the end user / end company it is assigned to.
    From that extra volume of work I'd have to say ho home user would ever get that without paying for it.

    I feel I must point out your link was to apnic.net (asia pacific region), NOT ARIN (which most follow) or equivilent links to RIPE etc.

  147. Presentation from the RIPE meeting last week by otmar · · Score: 1
    1. Re:Presentation from the RIPE meeting last week by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Note that the projection is based on flat line at the current rate despite growth in allocation rate on the left side of the projection line. Take the current outbound rate from the RIRs at ~ 3/4 of a /8 per month and run that flat on the remaining 64 /8's and it will come out ~ 7 years (prediction in the presentation). The same flat rate of ~ a full /8 on the inbound side to the RIR's yeilds ~ 5 years. Add the past growth rate to either of those numbers and they will be shorter.

  148. Is this right? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I have heard it said that Cisco draged their feet because of patent issues with IPv6, so are waiting for those patents to run out.

    Anyone got corroboration?

  149. okey doke by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I know how to get this machine I'm typing on called "barry" to be given an IP address and then have DYN_DNS update my BIND installation remember that "barry" is IP address 192.168.48 currently. I can rely on any machine in my domain to be able to "ping barry" correctly.

    However, I get my AAAA address from radvd for "barry". However, DYN_DNS isn't working. So how can I get "ping barry" to work? Am I going to have to give the same IP addy out and fill in the AAAA record by hand? Or what?

    Yrs in bafflement.

  150. Servers using DHCP? by misleb · · Score: 1

    Who sets servers to use DHCP? That's what I want to know. Mind if I ask if you've actually migrated a whole company from one ISP to another using this method? Sounds great in theory, but I find it difficult to believe that it actually works out so smoothly in real life.

    -matthew

    --
    "THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
    1. Re:Servers using DHCP? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Who sets servers to use DHCP?

      People running IPv6 servers. At least that's the idea. DHCPv6 is an essential part of an IPv6 network in a way that DHCPv4 never was for IPv4. The days of manually setting IP addresses are over with IPv6.

    2. Re:Servers using DHCP? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, it can be a very good idea even in the real world.

      Use DHCP reservations + dynamic dns. DNS gets updated when the DHCP lease does for workstations. Servers always get the same IP, AND they have the DNS entry that stays synced with whatever their reservation is (assuming the admin has a little bit of DHCP and DNS clue)

      If you want to go farther you can implement MAC filtering and static ARP so that every machine has to use the IP assigned, on the machine its assigned to, in the network port its supposed to be plugged in to.

      End result. Centralized self-documenting control of the network.
      Change what switch port something's plugged into, you have to change it in the system, or IT WON'T WORK.

  151. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by asdfghjklqwertyuiop · · Score: 1

    That's funny from the link you provided I read the line /128 when it is absolutely known that one and only one device is connecting.
    I'd say that almost all current ISP's would sell that as a standard home user address allocation, and charge for anything bigger similar to what they do already.


    You read right - when it is absolutely known that only one device is there, give it a /128. IE, for the end of a point-to-point interface. In your hypothetical situation the ISP is playing games. They should be giving out /48s or /64s since home networks are so abundant these days.

    With IPv6 space so abundant, there is no reason for them to not assume that and just give them out by default.


    However, all /48 assignments to end sites are required to be registered either by the LIR or its subordinate ISPs in such a way that the RIR/NIR can properly evaluate the HD-Ratio when a subsequent allocation becomes necessary.
    This translates to all /48's must be registered address spaces. eg apnic, arin etc needs to be notified of the end user / end company it is assigned to.
    From that extra volume of work I'd have to say ho home user would ever get that without paying for it.


    I didn't interpret it that way... key works "LIR or its supordinate ISPs". Sounds like they just want the ISP to keep accurate records that they can present to the registry as justification for its allocated address space. They already have to do that with IPv4 space anyway if they want portable allocations directly from the registry (which most sizable ISPs do).


    I feel I must point out your link was to apnic.net (asia pacific region), NOT ARIN (which most follow) or equivilent links to RIPE etc.


    I think the others have similar pratices... that is, in general, end subscribers are supposed to get get /48s.

  152. Re: OT: All I know is by Hershmire · · Score: 1

    Be my guest. I want 10% of the gross, though.

    --
    if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll); //Stupid roommates.
  153. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by nzkbuk · · Score: 1

    I didn't interpret it that way... key works "LIR or its supordinate ISPs". Sounds like they just want the ISP to keep accurate records that they can present to the registry as justification for its allocated address space. They already have to do that with IPv4 space anyway if they want portable allocations directly from the registry (which most sizable ISPs do).

    Even for non-portable address allocations you need to fill out the paperwork if you're assigning address blocks.
    My point is still that if an ISP has to fill out extra paperwork then they will charge for it. I've worked for an ISP and know how difficult it can be to get customers to fill out the forms even when their business depends on it.
    For this reason I doubt any home users would get a /48 unless they paid extra. So I'd argue good isp's would give out a /64 (it's the best of both worlds, no paperwork, while providing for multiple devices)

    As for the /128 address block. yes, the ISP is playing games, but that being said talk to most isp's and they will either want to charge you extra (and then assign extra IP's on the same connection), or flat out say no, 1 connection = 1 computer. Many have similar clauses in the T&C's

  154. Re:the 10.x.x.x net is mine! Get off my lawn you k by McMuffin+Man · · Score: 1

    Of course, some of us recall when 10/8 was MILnet. Every time I configure something in net 10 I feel like I should look over my shoulder for the kid with the M-16 telling me to get back behind the flight line.

  155. Re: hardware limitations by anticypher · · Score: 1

    if you try to do both IPv4 and IPv6 on the hardware, you take the load way up.

    On what kinds of hardware? Are you talking about old cisco catalyst switches like the 5500? Maybe first generation 6500s? But with newer switching/routing hardware, native IPv6 hardware processing support is there. Not just the stuff on the market this year (although I'm pretty much seeing close to 80% support in the current crop), IPv6 support has been getting included in hardware for at least the last 3 or 4 years on the higher end kit.

    Sure, some manufacturers are charging extra for the firmware to enable IPv6, that can't last for much longer. As soon as Cisco makes IPv4/IPv6 a standard feature in all of their IOS offerings (from IPBase upwards), then all the others will include it for free.

    the AC

    --
    Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
  156. The mystery of it all by snowwrestler · · Score: 1

    Geez, I wonder why the U.S. is moving so slowly on the conversion to IPv6?

    --
    Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
  157. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low IQ rants by anticypher · · Score: 1

    You are right. Re-reading your first line, I can't think of where I got that idea. Yes, NAT will be around forever, its too useful of a technology and well on its way to maturity.

    There are enough other posts in this thread from people who think that NAT is the saving technology which means there will never be a need for IPv6, ever. I'll go rant in another thread.

    Sorry
    the AC

    --
    Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
  158. NATting, ipv6 and ISPS - was Re:Interesting by speculatrix · · Score: 1
    Furthermore, NAT has been done

    NAT is a useful tool, but like many tools, it's been abused and bent to fit. On the other hand, some protocols like SIP do *not* do any favours when IP addresses are translated.

    I do not think the use of NAT has been exhausted: many mobile/cellular operators use nasty NAT tricks for mobile terminals (i.e. phones doing GPRS/EDGE)... and some consumer ISPs do it too. As ipv4 space becomes harder to get, I can see that NATting by ISPs will become more of a problem, so instead of counting yourself lucky getting a static IP, you'll be asking for a static port forwarding instead or something equally nasty.

    I work for an ISP as a programmer and the network engineers scoff at the idea of needing to roll out ipv6, saying that they'd only do it if big customers began to ask for it. Given that we're doing VOIP now, and NATting by customers is a problem, I would prefer them to bite the bullet and just get on with it!

    As you say, there are v few ISPs who do ipv6 on DSL, the only one I can think of is A&A in the UK.

    1. Re:NATting, ipv6 and ISPS - was Re:Interesting by Eldav · · Score: 1

      As you say, there are v few ISPs who do ipv6 on DSL, the only one I can think of is A&A in the UK.

      In France, only Nerim is currently offering native IPv6 access (with each subscription you get one IPv4 and 2^80 IPv6 addresses).

      There's also a petition asking Free.fr to provide IPv6 access (19,000 signatures collected up to now). The petition's website mentions that Wanadoo, arguably France's first ISP, has also been conducting experiments with IPv6 since June 2005.

  159. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by nzkbuk · · Score: 1

    on the /128 point, I don't mean to sound like I told you so, but

    from http://www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk/services/adsl

    Our ADSL service is IPv6 enabled; all customers will get a single static IPv6 address allocated to them by default if their equipment can support it. We can also allocate a /48 of IPv6 address space if a customer wishes to deploy it on their internal network.

    Sounds like by default they will give a /128 (note I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but saw the link on another post to this topic)

  160. Cry Wolf! by Please+tell+me+why · · Score: 1

    This would be more interesting except for two things. I have heard how we will run out of IPV4 addresses before. In fact I have been hearing this for 10 years or more! It is difficult to get worried about this when we have already passed several of the predicted dates for the "end of the internet". CIDR, DHCP, and NAT have all helped to conserve the available addresses.

    Then there is the question of why we should listen to Cisco. They are not in charge of allocating the address space nor do they run the backbone. (Administrate vs. run on their routers.) They do have a vested interest in selling new products to support IPV6.

    It is unfortunate that IP didn't start with a bigger address space. Eventually recycling poorly used class A and B blocks is going to run out. Eventually we will move to IPV6 (assuming there isn't an IPV7 by then). But I suspect there is still some room to squeeze and no one is going to change until they have to.

    1. Re:Cry Wolf! by lengau · · Score: 1

      There already is an IPv7. When replacements for IPv4 were suggested, Four were made (IP's v 5, 6, 7, and 8). IPv6 was chosen as the best replacement.

      --
      I really wanted to change my sig to something witty, but all I could come up with is this.
  161. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  162. Seems like... by VoodooRay · · Score: 0



    IPV6 == Duke Nukem For Ever

  163. whois 51.0.0.0 Department of Social Security of UK by chris_sawtell · · Score: 1

    chris@imogen ~ $ whois 51.0.0.0

    OrgName: Department of Social Security of UK
    OrgID: DSSU
    Address: Naming and Addressing Authority c/o DITA
    Address: Government Buildings - GZI
    Address: Moorland Road
    Address: Lytham St. Annes, Lancashire FY8 3ZZ
    City:
    StateProv:
    PostalCode:
    Country: GB

    NetRange: 51.0.0.0 - 51.255.255.255
    CIDR: 51.0.0.0/8
    NetName: ITSANET
    NetHandle: NET-51-0-0-0-1
    Parent:
    NetType: Direct Assignment
    Comment:
    RegDate: 1991-09-16
    Updated: 1999-04-13

    # ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2005-10-16 19:10
    # Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.

    That's 16777215 routeable addresses.
    Why do they need enough for every unemployed Briton to have four or five each?

  164. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by asdfghjklqwertyuiop · · Score: 1

    I don't see what the problem is. If you only have one host you get a /128. If you have more than one host, they'll give you a /48 on request.

  165. ageing cisco . . . not necessarily by new500 · · Score: 1

    hmm, thanks, i'd not thought of that. HP do some nice sounding ADSL2 modules for their routers and have equal features _save WLAN_ plus you get GbE ports, but they're not in the same price class, by a long way

    so i did my research, and if you read the product spec at http://cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/routers/ps380/p roducts_data_sheet0900aecd8028a976.html

    you find:

      876: ADSL over ISDN (ADSL2/ADSL2+ hardware ready)

      877: ADSL over analog telephone lines (ADSL2/ADSL2+ hardware ready)

    which may mean all or nothing, as these won't be standard WICs, but this does somewhat contradict your first thought, and I'd say this is one very featured router for small office / home lan use. Moreover they actually got around to supplying (some kind of) GUI setup with these . . .

    thinking of geting one, not pumping the product.

  166. I predict the exhaustation of IPv6 address space by Wolfier · · Score: 1

    In 2-5000 years.

  167. screw cisco by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Cisco can go climb a tree as long as they keep BrodCom in business. BrodCom has yet to open enough docmentation even via NDA to do IPv6, network testing and debuging, network application writing. From experience I wrote them once because I wanted to do just a fun little game that could be used played wirelessly-I was basicly told to go to hell. Now what kind of response is that to a rank ameture? Not asking them anything major just some tips. Anyway carry on.

  168. ISP IPv6 Transition by netrangerrr · · Score: 0

    If broadband routers can't make native IPv6 connections, ISPs can deploy IPv6 Tunnel brokers [RFC 3053] so customers can tunnel over the old routers. A tunneling software patch (tunnel setup protocol) sets up tunnels from customer computers to an IPv6 tunnel router. Tunnel brokers can also be deployed with a "prefix delegation" patch that can be applied to broadband routers to make them a simple IPv6 routers.

    NAT makes it very expensive to deploy most innovative new IP applications (VOIP, IPTV, Peer-to-peer) as each app typeically needs some type of gateway "middlebox" to get around NAT in order to connect users. In the old ARPANET they retired NCP in favor of IP [See RFC 801] to move to an end-to-end model so it would be easier (and cheaper) to deploy new applications. NAT has broken that model.

    Sig: Netrangerrr is the North American IPv6 Task Force Transition Technology Director
    See: http://www.nav6tf.org/

    --
    "As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
  169. Not an issue... by cookiepus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Sorry to be a ludite but this is really not an issue. Greanted we're placing more devices on-line, but so what? If I need to telnet into my toaster, I can just have my router forward a particular toaster port to it. He doesn't NEED his own IP. Similarly, do all the 1000-plus apartments in my building need to have separate IPs? Why? Most people read e-mail and look at websites, they don't need to host anything. We can all be on a LAN with a single internet IP, just like resnet in college was. Why not? if somebody needs an IP they can have their service set up that way but most of us don't give a shit.

    I know, I know, there are more people in the world than there are IP addresses or whatever, but so what? I'd say that billions of people don't have a shot at owning a PC in their life anyway. Those who do can probably share IPs too.

    It's a made-up crisis. There's nothing wrong with IPv6 but there's absolutely no dire need for it.

    1. Re:Not an issue... by Marc+Rochkind · · Score: 1
      That's not how it works.

      Blocks of addresses are given to organizations, so any comparison of the number of theoretical addresses to the number of addresses actually in use is misleading, because the distribution is nonuniform. In addition, while it's true that we could all work together to conserve addreses, under the present system they are assigned as they are requested, and therefore the assignining is going to find the well dry at some point. (We could all work together to conserve water, oil, or flu shots, too, but we don't seem to do that nearly as much as we ought to, right?)

      By the way, for my book Advanced UNIX Programming, I calculated the number of IPv6 addresses as greater than the number of particles in the universe.

    2. Re:Not an issue... by cookiepus · · Score: 1

      It doesn't matter how these things are assigned. If I run an ISP and I start running out of IPs I'll just go to a system where people share IPs. I don't lose any sleep at night because Ford has more addresses than I do.

  170. Hardware by ozTravman · · Score: 1

    It mentions lack of support on current DSL routers....DUH!!! Did VCR's have DVD support before it was released? Did analogue TV's start shipping with digital tuners before Digital TV started broadcasting? Mum and dad will not spend an extra $50 on a router because it supports IPv6, which we may need in "2 to 10 years". Even I would not spend the extra money unless the technology was on the horizon. The infrastrucure roll out needs to begin before the products will hit consumer shelves.

  171. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by knorthern+knight · · Score: 1

    > You read right - when it is absolutely known that only one device is there,
    > give it a /128. IE, for the end of a point-to-point interface. In your
    > hypothetical situation the ISP is playing games. They should be giving out
    > /48s or /64s since home networks are so abundant these days.

        Planet earth calling asdfghjklqwertyuiop... have you ever considered the logistitics of stashing ***2^64 PHYSICAL DEVICES IN YOUR HOME***??? You can't get that many RFID tags into a large mansion, let alone cellphones or PC's. Even a /120 (internet-connected 256 devices) would be sufficient thank you. As a side benefit, you wouldn't have any heating bills in the middle of winter. Electricity bills for air-conditioning yes, heating no.

    --

    I'm not repeating myself
    I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
  172. Have you considered the implications... by knorthern+knight · · Score: 1

    > NAT makes it very expensive to deploy most innovative new IP applications
    > (VOIP, IPTV, Peer-to-peer) as each app typeically needs some type of gateway
    > "middlebox" to get around NAT in order to connect users.

    Have you considered the implications... of the average home user running a server accepting unsolicited connections from the internet? Have you considered the implications... of the average home user running ***A WINDOWS SERVER*** accepting unsolicited connections from the internet??? No thanks.

    --

    I'm not repeating myself
    I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
    1. Re:Have you considered the implications... by netrangerrr · · Score: 0

      Lots of people do this today with broadband and P2P apps.
      The smart ones have "personal firewalls" on their
      end-nodes. We are testing the MS Vista firewall
      http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/eval uate/feat/secfeat.mspx#EEAA
      and Linux IPChains as IPv6 firewalls. For ave Joe user, an ISP
      managed or security admin managed group policy for host firewalls is the way to
      keep IPv6 E2E connctions secure.

      --
      "As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
  173. When will FEMA require IPV6 to ask for a grant? by knorthern+knight · · Score: 1

    (NT)

    --

    I'm not repeating myself
    I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
  174. Perspective by mabhatter654 · · Score: 1

    It's all about how you view the use of Ip addresses to start with. The "old guys" have this idea of everything with it's own IP address pie in the sky type thing. Unfortunately, they hoarded huge chunks of numbers up front making it very difficult for the rest of us to implement such grand schemes. The flip side is who wants every IP in your office to be routable? That's utterly stupid if all those PCs were windows. Nats and Firewalls in corperate/small home nework are the only thing holding back the virus/spyware/worm situation from being worse!! having set up corperate networks, it's a NICE thing to assign non-routable IPs to your office setup... it ensures your firewall can't be easily breached by something you forgot. Nat'ing is here to stay... we don't WANT people poking behind our firewalls... we don't want people to know about any internal IP other than the public address of our web page. Think of it like PBX in the phone world.. who want's their internal extention in the phone book for the world???

    1. Re:Perspective by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      I already know your internal IPs. They have the form 192.160.x.y, or maybe 10.x.y.z. No reason that somebody can't write a virus that infects one border machine and then scans away at your internal network.

      Most major corporations have routable addresses inside their networks - they don't hurt, so why not have them? They put up a nice firewall on all their entrances, and then it is just as secure as NAT (which is still only moderately secure - I'm sure NAT didn't protect many from Sasser and such - it still just takes one person with a laptop).

      In most of these companies the internal extensions on the PBX are also world-dialable. It is cheaper than having a horde of operators to redirect calls, and more convenient.

      Plus, when you have a corporate merger everybody has compatible phone numbers and IP addresses.

      You speak of everything having an IP address as "pie in the sky". The fact is that if ISPs just started assigning routing IPv6 in addition to IPv4 it would just be a matter of time before everything transitioned. There is no reason everything shouldn't have its own IP address.

      I'm sure back in the day of party lines the concept of having your own phone number was "pie in the sky". In any office only 10% of the people are on the phone at any time - why not just assign 1 phone number to each 10 desks and ask them to share...

    2. Re:Perspective by pdbaby · · Score: 1
      Think of it like PBX in the phone world.. who want's their internal extention in the phone book for the world???
      Yes. Think of it like that. You firewall out pings (your "advertisement in the phonebook") and only allow in the traffic you want (perhaps you've got a development machine and want to host a service on your machine for an off-site customer). With NAT that becomes a major headache. But like a PBX, you can just give the customer your extension number & they can connect straight to your machine. No routing nightmare. Another win for the every machine publically routable world.
      --
      Global symbol "$deity" requires explicit package name at line 2. - If only $scripture started "use strict;"
    3. Re:Perspective by Cramer · · Score: 1

      I've never been in a "major corporation" that didn't use private addressing internally. (And that includes at least one of those /8 hoarding bastards.) NAT at the firewalled perimeter handles their public addressing. At that point, changing providers and address ranges is rather simple and painless. AND, you end up needing far fewer globally unique, routable addresses.

      There is no reason everything shouldn't have its own IP address.

      And there's equally no reason why they should. Do you really need to ping the nerf darts on my desk?

      why not just assign 1 phone number to each 10 desks and ask them to share...

      Funny you mention it. While not sharing in the analog partyline sense, PBX's already do this very thing. How many extentions are there on your office phone system? 20, 50, 100? How many actual CO lines are there? 8, 20? It's very rare for a PBX to have one CO line for each extention. In fact, that's counter productive -- just put a damned POTS phone on each desk. (Telco's used to sell this as centrex service.)

    4. Re:Perspective by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      Funny you mention it. While not sharing in the analog partyline sense, PBX's already do this very thing. How many extentions are there on your office phone system? 20, 50, 100? How many actual CO lines are there? 8, 20? It's very rare for a PBX to have one CO line for each extention. In fact, that's counter productive -- just put a damned POTS phone on each desk. (Telco's used to sell this as centrex service.)

      And likewise a corporate branch office I work at has about 25-30 globally routable addresses, and yet only one line running to and from it. That doesn't change the fact that it has globally-routable addresses. The line goes back to another corporate office, and only accesses the internet at large via proxy servers.

      And there's equally no reason why they should. Do you really need to ping the nerf darts on my desk?

      No, but perhaps you might have a need to do so when you are't in the office?

      One major annoyance of mine is the difficulty in accessing home computers remotely due to NAT. This is a result of the general mindset among ISPs that IP addresses are a resource to be hoarded, and that only broadcasters should really have static ones, and everybody else should just be happy to use their interweb-TV.

      The power of the Internet is P2P. However, P2P cannot operate correctly over NAT - at least not if there is NAT at both ends. As soon as you add a central server to proxy connections it is no longer truly P2P.

      My whole point is that it doesn't cost a whole lot to allow everybody to just have their IP addresses, so why not just do it? Why should there be some burden of proof that I really need those addresses, as if I should care whether anybody else thinks I really need them or not. It would be one thing if they cost money to manufacture, but we're talking about numbers - they all exist already, we just need to start using them...

  175. Re:Interestingly precise by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Mr. President, is that you?

  176. CIDR vs. NAT by netrangerrr · · Score: 0

    Actually by changing to more efficient CIDR addressing [RFC 1519] IPv4 address allocation was made more efficient. That, along with the temporary aberration that was NAT, has made IPv4 last longer.

    NetRangerrr is a member of NAV6TF
    see www.nav6tf.org

    --
    "As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
  177. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by burns210 · · Score: 1

    Fine by me. My router+firewall should be doing IPv4 nat to the inside world. from my external router interface to ISP and on should be IPv6. If I choose to do NAT or not is my business, but the ISP can open up all kinds of options just by trying to do IPv6 if supported and fallback if not. Makes perfect sense to me.

  178. Wrong - there's also integration by cheros · · Score: 1

    There is a large 'aftermarket' collection of addons to IPv4 (QoS, IPsec) that will become integrated parts of IPv6 - that too drives its adoption.

    And the present solution with Network Address Translation (NAT) creates all sorts of problems for point to point work.

    But let me put it a different way: network vendors are always looking for new revenue, and this is like a blank cheque for both sale of new kit as well as overcharging for old stock ("umm, we don't really do IPv4 anymore, but at extra cost we will support your legacy equipment" - with our large warehouse of old $10 Realtek cards which we'll sell you at $100 a throw). There is no way this is not going to happen - they want that $$ (aka your tax dollars).

    [yeah, I know I'm a cynic but I've already planned some of those migrations - and I mean *BIG* ones]

    --
    Insert .sig here. Send no money now. Owner may sue, contents will settle. Batteries not included.
  179. RIPE meeting presentation by steffann · · Score: 1

    At RIPE-51 Geoff Huston gave a presentation about the IPv4 address lifetime: http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-51/presenta tions/uploads/Wednesday/huston-ipv4_address_lifeti me_revisited.pdf

    The presentation has a lot of nice graphs, gives estimations of address exhaustion based on Geoff's models, and talks a little about what could happen after IANA and the RIRs run out of addresses.

  180. Re:whois 51.0.0.0 Department of Social Security of by pe1chl · · Score: 1

    It is not even routed!
    Apparently it is their equivalent of network 10.
    Take back and re-allocate.

  181. My Toaster by Pleb'a.nz · · Score: 1

    .. he apologies for taking up valuable IP address space, meanwhile he browns my toast nicely over ssh.

  182. NAT: no prob per se by zde · · Score: 1

    Don't blame NAT, blame buggy NAT implementations. Letting P2P UDP traffic through regular NAT is actually very easy, see RFC3489. Good enough for VOIP, sufficient for file sharing which sadly has to re-implement most of TCP.

  183. Re:NAT is about a lot more than low address reserv by asdfghjklqwertyuiop · · Score: 1

    Planet earth calling asdfghjklqwertyuiop... have you ever considered the logistitics of stashing ***2^64 PHYSICAL DEVICES IN YOUR HOME***??? You can't get that many RFID tags into a large mansion, let alone cellphones or PC's


    Sigh... Come on now, this only requires third grade reading comprehension skills. Look at my original post he was replying to. I know how many addresses 2^64th is. I myself said in that post "That's over three times the surface area of the earth. Measured in square millimeters. For your network alone". The point that statement was to refute his statement that "we will run out eventually, and much sooner than we expect".
  184. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  185. The cost of unsupport by fm6 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Not necessarily. Many ISPs provide non-core services that they don't offer support for; for instance, my ISP runs an NTP server, but the only support they provide...
    And policies like that just don't work. Maybe with ordinary schmos like you, your ISP help desk can hide behind "That's an unsupported service." But suppose a customer who buys a huge amount of bandwidth and pays them 6 or 7 figures calls up, and says, "I have a mission-critical ap running off your NTP server, and it's broken! Help me fix it or I'm jumping ship!" What do you think they're going to say?

    I mostly work in tech pubs (when I'm working), and this has been a constant issue for me. At some badly managed companies, I've seen engineers add SuperKewl Features to the product without authorization, thinking they can just throw them over the wall to the customers and forget about them. Wrong. I have to document their damn features, and that costs. If I don't document their damn features, then tech support has to handle the resulting calls, and that costs even more. And if tech support tries to tell a big customer, "Oh, that's an unofficial feature, we don't support it," that really costs!

  186. The US Govt is mandating IPv6 by 2008 by couch_warrior · · Score: 1

    If you work for the Federal Gov't,the OMB in Memorandum M05-22 has now mandated migration to IPv6 by 6/2008.

    This may actually be a little slow, since Microsoft has stated in briefings to Federal Agencies that Windows Vista (Longhorn) will ship with IPv6 as the natvie protocol.

    What a boon to virus-writers. Encrypted IPv6 layer 3 sockets that drill through firewalls like a laser beam!

    Damn the network security, full speed ahead!

    --
    "Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
  187. Must type quick running of of intehwebnet! by tod_miller · · Score: 1

    Babelfish translation of the article:

    Cisco announce that everyone shoudl upgrade their cisco routers and aplpiances to IPv6 routers and appliances.

    When quizzed about software updates or firmware flashes Cisco looked bemused and said "hello this is IPV6!!!!!!!"

    of course the most interesting thing is... [Out of address space, recipient 255.255.255.256 does not exist]

    D'oh!

    --
    #hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
  188. Troll deficiency by fractaloon · · Score: 1

    Maybe a new troll modding system needs implemented to weed out the weaker trolls. At least then, new gibberish will be good gibberish.