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 ..."

Comments

Three Items: Vista, Home Autmation, and Search.

[CDPatten]

Windows Vista will make IPv6 the protocol of choice. You can bind IPv4 and IPv6 in different orders on the NIC and it will enable great support for the protocol. They are even talking about having it running as part of the default install.

MS is developing Vista to enable programmers to push Home Automation. One thing they are doing is adding in that area is the functionality for IP's to securely be handled like a plug and play device. This isn't for printers on a network; it's for all the appliances in your house. IPv4 just doesn't work well for home automation. Also another sign is the majority of GE prototypes all are geared towards IPv6 not IPv4.

The regional specs that come with IPv6 are also huge things for MSN, Google, and Yahoo. It will allow your search (and Ads for that matter) results for a "pizza place" to give you the ones in your area without any additional info.

Vista will start the ball rolling, and the other two items will make the transition come very quickly. Security is also nice, and will help stop allot of traditional hacking, but the end user doesn't get excited about that. They will get excited about the other stuff though.

Two years from now we will start to see IPv6 becoming very common.

Re:"IPv4 loyalists"

[jd]

Define "no reason".

• Security: IPv6 mandates IPSec (which encrypts ALL streams, ALL of the time, so contextual information can't be used for cracking as it can with SSH or SSL streams, which are generally only used for specific segments of a transaction).
• Authentication: X.509 within IPSec and the use of Extended Authentication protocols in IPv6 guarantee that all endpoints are who they say they are.
• Fragmented Packets: Firewalls don't handle fragmented packets well, as there is no header to check for later fragments. Fragmenting and re-assembly also adds latency. IPv6 defines per-connection MTUs, guaranteeing ALL packets are the largest supported between any two endpoints without fragmentation.
• Latency: IPv6 headers don't have as many entries and are heirarchical, which makes routing much faster and much simpler. The lack of fragmentation and the presence of auto-MTU also helps.
• Multicasting: IPv6 mandates multicasting and has a decent range of addresses for it.
• Anycasting: IPv6 mandates service location and resource location abilities, which means no more hunting for printers, routers, DNS servers, SMTP servers, POP/IMAP servers...
• Autoconfiguration: IPv6 uses autoconfiguration for routing and addressing as a standard, in a manner (almost) guaranteed to be free of conflicts and absolutely guaranteed to be fully scalable.
• Mobility: IPv6 mandates the ability for nodes or even entire networks to be totally mobile (ie: switch upstream routers without losing connectivity or existing connections) with upstream optimization of routing.
• Advanced Headers: IPv6 allows an arbritary number of extended headers to be attached to packets, with controlled responses for unknown extended headers.
• High Availability: IPv4's High Availability mechanisms require a lot of fancy manoevering, because the MAC address (used by switches) and the IP address (used by remote systems) are dissociated and ALL parties to a type of data have to agree on the failover for it to work. Hotswapping is extremely difficult and even hot standby is hard enough to be uncommon. IPv6 strongly couples MAC and IP addresses, both for autoconfiguration and mobility, allowing instantaneous, lossless failover with very minimal complexity or overhead and no patent problem.
• Tunneling: There is no agreed method of tunneling in IPv4 and the de-facto method (GRE) is detested by many network admins. IPv6-over-IPv6 is to be a universal standard.
• Clusters: Infiniband cooperates well with IPv6, making it possible for nodes within a cluster to directly access IP-based resources. Infiniband requires capabilities that are not guaranteed present in IPv4 stacks or IPv4 networks (such as multicasting) which means Infiniband cannot reliably treat IPv4 networks as extensions.
• Reachability: IPv6 can reach all IPv4 nodes, with only trivial conversion to make allowance for the different header structure and the lack of intelligence in IPv4 networks, so any client-only machine or network could be converted tomorrow without anyone noticing. Small numbers of IPv6 machines can be exposed to IPv4, making it possible to have DMZ servers on an IPv6 network visible to IPv4, so any server could be converted tomorrow without anyone noticing. The backbone could be left as long as you like. Because IPv6-over-IPv4 is also defined, if both servers and clients are IPv6 then the backbone could be ignored forever without significant impact.

All told, I'm not convinced that there are that many people who genuinely have "no reason" to shift to the new system. All I am convinced of, so far, is that there are plenty of people who have absolutely no reasons at all but plenty of excuses. Let's look at something, here. Say Comcast converted its entire cable network to IPv6, would you care or even notice? Probably not. Their routers hide their network from your computers, so your computers wouldn't see the difference. It would be