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IPv6 Still Hotly Debated
inkslinger77 writes "A significant stumbling block to IPv6 adoption may be IPv4 loyalists who are keen to keep the old protocol in preference to the 'new improved' version, according to a Computerworld Australia article. The article covers the views of Cisco's senior technical leader for IPv6 technologies, Tony Hain and Geoff Huston, a senior Internet research scientist from Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (Apnic)." From the article: "Go to your favourite venture capitalist and say 'I want to be an ISP'. By the time he stops laughing and [finds you want to run] IPv6 - the discussion gets terminated. No one wants to hear this. IPv6 is well ahead of adoption in this market so everyone is deferring. No one is running IPv6, because there is no business case for it ... if we really wanted to leave a legacy to our children we'd review the crap we have today which is pretty ghastly ..."
But assuming we really do need more IPs, why IPv6? Why 128 bits instead of, say, 64? Why build the functionality of DHCP, which (mostly) works perfectly well* and is extensible enough to support cool stuff that hadn't been thought of when IPv4 and DHCP were invented (e.g. WPAD, netbooting), into IP? What's the deal with including your MAC address as part of your IP address?
Going with the assumption that the problem really is as bad as people say it is (China has a gazillion people and more of them are getting online, and it'd be great if my refrigerator had a web-based interface I could access remotely without setting up port forwarding or a VPN, etc.)... I'm not convinced that IPv6 is the right solution to the problem. It just seems to be the only solution anyone has offered, and a lot of money has been spent bringing it closer to reality.
So, convince me: why is IPv6 the right answer to the problem?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
What are the chances that the term "IPv4 loyalists" includes those who just have no reason to make the effort to shift to the new system? Considering the number of [people, admins, even that amusing case where MS didn't patch its own servers] who don't even download security patches - the shift to a parallel system while the old system still works fine just isn't going to happen in droves.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
Sometimes, it's good that NAT impedes some forms of communication. Like, say, exploits.
What I say does not represent the views of my employers, my friends, my cats, or myself.
I, for one, will welcome the end of the NAT kludge.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Just like anything else, market forces will dictate when this gets adopted.
Are we really running out of IPv4 numbers? The market will tell us.
Is there a killer app for IPv6? The market will tell us.
Can we ram IPv6 down everyone's throat? The market will retailiate and hit back.
BTW - what's with this "wont somebody please think of the children" bullshit about? If we need to get to IPv6 - we'll get to it - relax already!
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
#1. It allows you to run multiple boxes at home WITHOUT having to pay extra for a "family" connection plan.
#2. Cheap and easy way to block worms and such.
One does not need NAT to lock up vulnerable ports. I have a Linux-based firewall that covers my public IP Windows boxes, and it works fine.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You have to go to all kinds of lengths (using special session border controllers, media proxies, etc.) to be able to support SIP calls where one or both parties are behind a NAT. It is awful. NAT is a hack--a useful one in certain situations, but still a hack.
There's no place I can be, since I found Serenity.
"The death of IPv4 has not really killed the Internet. In fact, far from it, we've managed to make an industry around it."
.gov start adopting, then it will get off the ground. Of course, this is unlikely to happen because Cisco doesn't sell IPv6 switches.
In other words, by keeping IPv4, we can sell NAT boxes (which we're already selling in huge numbers.. the wireless network hub in my den is a prime example.) Cisco has a big investment in building hardware to take care of IP space limitiations.
"You will still be able to get addresses, if you pay for them, because a market will appear."
In other words, this damned internet isn't making us enough money, because IP addresses are free. We want people to start trading them, so we can get commissions on the sales.
It's clear that this is "good buisiness" for the big internet companies: why invest in a new system that will make users's lives cheaper and easier when we can continue to sell patches on the old stuff, and make a market so that we can start charging the freeloaders?
It's also clear to me that the only way IPv6 will get adopted is if public bodies start using them and demanding their use. For instance, if Internet2, the US military, or all of
I'm no expert, but to my cynical eye it looks not like market forces, but like the usual problems with capitalism exploiting a local maximum and avoiding short-term risk.
----Nathaniel
Yeah this looks like a serious privacy issue that most people haven't woken up to yet.
A MAC address is (usually) a globally unique identifier. How long before someone big builds a database relating MAC to user identity (Microsoft, your ISP, law enforcement, whoever).
At that point, no matter where you connect your laptop from, your traffic can be identified as yours. Be it for the purpose of advertising, tracing communication, or other data mining.
So the question is, are we ready and willing to surrender anonymity on the net?
The previous poster asked Why 128 bits instead of, say, 64?
The amount of work required to jump to 64 bit addressing or 128 bit addressing is identical. Since you're going to have to re-write everything anyway, you may as well figure in a ridiculously large address space, because not doing so saves you nothing.
Additionally, the routing table saving offered cannot be understated. With huge swaths of continguous address space, you can (hypothetically) represent an entire continent as a single aggregated routing entry (The more granular routing information would only be seen locally.), and the number of unique addresses within that range would be virtually inexhaustable.
Overkill is a good thing when it doesn't cost you anything.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
Is there an echo in here? "We'll never run out of [2^N for any value of N] addresses". Yes we will. There are people who are scheming to put every bloody light switch and kitchen appliance on the Internet. There are people designing applications to run on microscopic hosts that will be scattered like seeds, by the thousands or millions.
It's 128 bits instead of 64 so we don't have to go through this again in five years.
Remember, the Internet *core* used to run over 56kb/s lines -- the same speed as those $20 modems that individuals are throwing away by the basketful today because they're unbearably slow for *personal* use. It's *hard* to plan well for that kind of growth. Better to waste a couple of bits than have to waste the whole thing and do it over.
NAT is actually solves a secondary problem: allowing individuals to have their own home network without having to register each of their computers with some sort of central authority. Almost all IPv6 advocates say that NAT won't be supported as part of the protocol, which is not such a bad thing if you see NAT simplay as a solution to solves address space issue, but it isn't if you see it as a solution allowing individuals to allocate their own addresses, without having to go through the bureaucratic process of registering each one. I feel that in missing this fact is actually a real issue and one that needs to be dealt with - if there already is a solution to this, then no one I have asked has yet provided me with one.
**You have missed the point entirely**
Forcing everyone back into the bureaucratic process is exactly what the designers want to do. Imagine how much less money would be made by cell phone companies if you could pick up any phone and it would automatically choose a phone number, then register your name with a decentralized directory so anyone who wanted to reach you could. Instead, you have to pay that $50 activation fee, plus a sizable portion of every month's cell phone bill, just for the privilege of being told when and where you can make telephone calls. That is the ideal that our IPv6 overlords are shooting for. I for one welcome them.