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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;
Why the emphasis on NAT boxes saving the day? Why do people think they're so wonderful and with them, we don't need no stinkin' ipv6? I mean, yeah, they've been useful and I'm not disputing that, but I'm not sure they were ever intended as anything beyond a stopgap measure until something better could be found. Not to mention that, as I understand it, they actually impede certain methods of communication over the Internet (anything that needs a real end-to-end connection, I think).
Yes, ipv6 still has a ways to go, but I honestly think it's a much better alternative than sticking with what we've got. We're going to have to do somethinga bout it anyway, since there are plenty of people already starting to use it, or will be in the future.
>insert witty sig file here
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
Maybe it will be IPv7 by the time it's adopted.
Better yet, why not name it IPv2005, so everyone will have to take it up by the end of the year lest they be left behind? Sure sounds better than IPvXP or IPvVista, doesn't it?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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
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.
#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.
There are plenty of addresses in northern Alaska that aren't being used. "Peak IPv4" indeed.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
In July 2003, Geoff said that IPv4 addresses will run out in two decades.
About two years later, Goeff says that IPv4 addresses will run out in just one decade.
So, if even very anti-IPv6 folks are saying that IPv4 addresses will run out sooner than expected, I think it is time to start preparing to the conversion.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't NAT and the separation of networks a good thing, security wise? (Obviously there are other measures needed, but it plays a part..) Even if we had IP6 it seems we'd still want DMZs and the like. Maybe I'm getting the wrong impression from the articles, but it seems like they're emphasizing everyone being able to have an IP address on a common network essentially - instead of the Internet being a network connecting a bunch of private networks. I don't know about you, but I feel much safer having my computers on a private network connected via one IP and a router than I would having all of them exposed.
Get your own free personal location tracker
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.
One is, despite the claims that IPv4 will run out in the next "x" years and companies will be screwed, that never happens.
Worst case, folks will figure out how to get by on 1-2 ip addresses, or pay more than the $1/month or so to get an extra. There are TONS of unused, unrouted addresses out there through the entire hierarchy, from subnets, class b's etc.
Second, IPv6 and you can what? If I run IPv6 only, I need to at some point tunnel to IPv4 (and often get an IPv4 address anyways) to connect to the rest of the net. If I run just IPv4, I can connect to everything, and the first person who develops google that is IPv6 ONLY is going to have very few users.
In other words, the business case is flat out not there.
Also, I never understood why IPv4 wasn't just a subset of IPv6? Why can't my existing IPv4 addresses also be IPv6 addresses with a standard prefix? Maybe this has changed, but when IPv6 came out it looked like that wasn't part of it.
If my address was a subset, my ISP could create IPv6 endpoints for my address along with the IPv4 routing, even if I hadn't upgraded. They'd just strip the prefix and forward to me.
At Tuesday's IETF meeting in Vancouver the vote for consensus was many for and none against elevating the IPv6 Protocol Standards from "draft Standard" to "Internet Standard" and make them part of the everyday production Internet. The IPv6 WG is even shutting down as it has accomplished its mission and designed a good working protcol. The wired and wireless networks provided for the engineers at the IETF is running IPv6 and we are regularly using it to get information from our working group colloboration sites like: www.v6ops.euro6ix.net/
. If you don't understand because of FUD, please read up on our North American IPv6 Task Force website website [ www.nav6tf.org/ ] or the similar European/Asian sites.
Don't fear, the IETF V6 Operations (V6OPS) team and the IPv6 Forum will continue work to better clarify how to deploy IPv6 and to help build new network services around the new features. Most of the new network services groups in the IETF are basing new services on the features of IPv6 - early examples are Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) and Network Mobility (NEMO) both of which are being extended to offer IPv4 access through IPv6 tunnels in order to get IPv4 native service through IPv4 NAT.
If you actually have useful comments or design alternatives for IPv6, bring it up in IETF working group mailing lists [http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/wg-dir.html%5D
"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Yeah because protocols are what we'll be remembered for!
"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
Because your recommended solution is a patch for the problem. So what if you don't want it, maybe I do want a public IP address for a fridge that I want everyone to have access to. Having IPv6 doesn't destroy NATs - you can still do it.
It's a matter of people saying "but I don't want to change!"
I'm excited that I could have a chance to reserve a person IP range for myself. I'm excited that the cost of IP addresses would fall because they are no longer a commodity. Why can't we realize that this gives us more options, it doesn't destroy the old ones.
Even my stupid IT Director thinks that IPv4 is sufficient...what a loser.
"We happen to work in an industry that survives on complexity, address scarcity and insecurity," Geoff Huston, senior Internet research scientist at Apnic, said. "This is where the margins come from, and we are not innovators in this industry any more. We've learnt that optimism doesn't create a business case. All those people disappeared along with the dotcom boom," he said.
That is a stupid statement. It would be more accurate to say either "limps along" or "thrives" instead of "survives" in this context. The steam engine industry undoubtedly felt the same way about the internal combustion engine when it was first proposed.
Of course, Ipv6 isn't enough. It's not enough until every atom in the Universe can have it's own unique IP address, after which we can discuss the strings that create them.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
the laws of supply and demand suggest that the value of each IP address will approach zero.
Except that the "laws" aren't laws at all and are in fact closer to myth. The supply of an item does not determine its price. The price people are willing to pay determines its price.
It's not really a myth, it's a valid model of economics. The question you're bringing up is more about who is providing the supply, and how freely they make it available. If everyone could just give themselves an IP address, then yeah, each address would be worth very little. But when your ISP controls the addresses you get, you have to have one to use the Internet, and they can market each additional address as a feature, then there is still a demand, and they are aritficially limiting the supply. It's like the diamond industry: DeBeers owns most of the supply, and there's lot of diamonds, but they don't let more on the market than the market demands to make sure that people will have to pay a lot for diamonds.
IPv6 vs. NAT
These are two distinctly different things. Nat takes one public IP address and translates it to many private IP addresses. THese are not two competing technologies, and you can use NAT with an IPv6 address. In reality, there isnt a debate here. Its a weak argument for those that want to keep things whe way they are.
IPv4 addresses an a commodity
Greedy Fuckers. Pure and simple. The basic interenet and all its various little noodly bits were created but university and governmetn organizations and then just loosed on the planet essentially for free. Yes, you had to buy some hardware to use it, but the shit works without you having to pay for a damn thing but your connection.
I have nothing against the idea of capitalism where you get paid for something you create, but hoarding a commodity that is out there for the collective good as a whole is just shitty. In very few cases is there a justification for the belief that "I must make ALL of the MONEY and IT MUST HAPPEN RIGHT NOW and YOU CANNOT HAVE ANY."
As an added bonus, this sort of behavior helps keep the "have nots" in the "have not" category, which just generally pisses them off unnecessarialy.
needing a publically available address
No, obviously we all do not have to have public IP addresses - not yet, anyway. Saying you don't now or never will shows a pretty big lack of foresight. You don't KNOW that there wont be an application that needs publically available addresses to work well andd that NAT just won't cut it. Why don't you know? Becuase someone will eventually come up with sommehting new, and it'll be good and important. People always do, eventually.
I realize that if you really wanted to have everything you own connected to the internet you could just use NAT and then if you wanted to talk to your refridgerator you sould just use "the fridge port" but its adding a level of complexity that could possibly get in the way of something on down the line.
This would slow down address scanning worms, neh?
if a worm's gotta look at giant chunks of addresses to find other victims, wouldnt this just slow down their epread a little?
then again, what the fuck do i know?
s'wut i sed.
"Hey, could you ping me? My IP is: 5F05:2000:80AD:5800:0058:0800:2023:2F8E. Thanks"
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
128-bit addressing isn't really necessary -- but it makes life really simple. With IPv4, you have a subnet mask (that AFAICT, 90% of people never quite understand) that tells how much of your address is devoted to the local subnet, and how much isn't. With IPv6, this has simply been fixed at 64 bits apiece, so using it, nobody ever has to figure up a subnet mask again.
A better question would be to turn this around: what would we really gain by reducing the addresses from 128 bits to 64 bits? We'd save 128 bits per packet. Even over a 28.8K dialup line, that's approximately 4 milliseconds per packet. However, IPv6 increases the maximum packet size you can reasonably use, so unless you really need to send lots of tiny packets, its addressing overhead may well be lower than with IPv4. In most cases, you gain a bit, and even in the worst case you lose very little.
If you're doing things like VoIP, IPv6 helps a lot more: in IPv4, QoS was hacked on after the fact (and has never really worked very well), but in IPv6, it's part of the base protocol.
Personally, I think we need to consider the source of TFA: Cisco and APNIC. Cisco is the leading provider of IPv4 routing (etc.) equipment by a wide margin. APNIC derives it "power" largely from the scarcity (and therefore value) of IP addresses.
A shift to IPv6 gives other router manufacturers a much better chance of gaining market share over Cisco -- about the best Cisco can hope for is to maintain their current position, but in reality they're likely to lose at least a little. Cisco has only to look at what happened to Lucent when the market shifted from ATM to IP to see how badly a technology shift can hurt even a huge market leader.
APNIC stands to lose even more: rather than a chance of losing market share, they face a near certainty that a large part of their power base simply ceases to exist.
Looking at it from this (admittedly cynical) direction, what are the chances that they were going to write an article in favor of IPv6, regardless of its merit?
--
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
I'd like to reiterate what the parent says about v4 compatible v6 addresses. I've had to study RFC2373 (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2373.html) and the people who designed IPv6 didn't do it without consideration of the current system and how a transition would go. In fact, a lot of effort went into making it possible to transition to a larger address system while using both systems at the same time.
::FFFF:129.144.52.38 and which an IPv4 device would see it as merely 129.144.52.38. The idea being, when transferring over, only devices that actually need IPv4 compatibility would have an IPv6/IPv4 address. Quick example using NAT technology:
It's actually similar to how the x86 archetecture has advanced. When we moved up to 32-bit CPUs, in order to access the upper bits, new registers were created to address those upper bits while the lower ones stayed. An older 16-bit program would merely only use the lower bits, ignoring the upper ones since it wasn't designed to use them.
IPv6 allows for the last 32 bits to be used as an IPv4 address. You can even write out an IPv4 compatible IPv6 address using a combiniation of both hex and dotted decimal. eg: 0:0:0:0:0:FFFF:129.144.52.38 which in IPv6 can be compressed to
Say I have an office with 500 devices that need net connections. Now I also have a remote office with another 200 devices. These devices all like to connect to each other.. with various servers and services on each that make using NAT translation a PITA, but also buying 700 IPv4 addresses is mighty expensive. Now most of these devices are for internal use.. (I'll get to that). Now we do have 5 web servers that need to be accessed by people outside of the company (sales servers with web pages to sell stuff or show off our company). We give all 700 devices IPv6 addresses so that they can access each other over the internet. We give those 5 that need to be seen by everyone IPv6 addresses that have IPv4 mappings so that everyone can see them. We can get a few IPv6 addresses with IPv4 mappings to act as a NAT-like access point for internal devices to get to external IPv4 places for say viewing web pages or the like from internal machines.
But now one has to think.. why would we need 700 externally accessable devices? Isn't that a security nightmare? Managing all of them so that they don't get hit by a worm or such could really suck... but why do those devices have to be computers? What about VoIP phones or something similar?
I currently manage a VoIP setup that I implimented and support myself, and let me tell you.. NATs SUCK for VoIP. SIP hates it.. works half the time and the other half no go. If two devices are behind NATs, plain and simple they cannot talk to each other. If they have external addresses on most phones you can just dial straight to the IP address of another VoIP phone without even needing an intermediate server.. which can be handy at times.
It's just a minor example and I'm sure it can be picked apart and made to work on IPv4 (I've been doing such). But the time/cost savings of IPv6 along with just the mirade of possibilities it brings shouldn't be thrown aside because it would be "too hard" or "too expensive". The cost isn't as high as a lot of people think.. most are just afraid because they don't know anything about IPv6 and what you can do with it in reguards to IPv4. And of course no one knows, because no one is going to train in an area that has no use currently, which will remain that way until people educate themselves in it.
Same way you'd get them for v4. Apply for an ASN, get them from ARIN. (Assuming you're in the Eastern Hemisphere). Otherwise, I've had good luck with tunnelbroker.net
In the past I was very pro IPv6, until I gave it some serious thought. True, IPv4 probaby will not hold up forever, even with CIDR and NAT/PAT, but those definately do extend it's life span signifigantly. If all the organizations with unused address space would turn in unused addresses, we would be in an even better position. If organazations not yet using NAT/PAT would do so, we would be even better yet. I am a big supporter of NAT anyways though, I do not feel that every machine in the world needs a live IP address. How many windows boxes are protected from worms simply because they are not on a live IP? Yes, there are some issues with NAT, but there will be issues with the conversion (and use) of IPv6 as well. My current distaste of IPv6 may partially be due to a lack of knowledge on it, but in a lot of ways it seems illogical, and unnecessary. 128 bit address space, when we are limited to 48 bits of MAC addresses. Illogical in that, with IPv4, it is fairly simple to know that a block of addresses belongs to Company X. But that is just my 2 cents, please, correct me if I am wrong on anything...
~oid
Anyone with a single globally routable IPv4 address can have a /48 IPv6 prefix right now, today. Check out 6to4.
I beg to differ. I question whether you're serious or a troll, but I'll respond anyway and give you the benefit of the doubt.
Lots of companies which are big enough to have their own Class-A allocations assign all of their clients globally routable addresses. I can tell you this from personal experience.
They don't use personal firewalls, obviously, and I have no idea why you think this is related. Using a personal firewall at the client level has nothing to do with IP address allocation or NAT. You can assign every user on a subnet a globally unique IP address, and then still use a stateful firewall for security. This is what these companies do: you get the benefit of not having your applications negotiate NAT with the protection of firewalls separating the internal networks at various facilities from the global network.
As far as the cost thing, if you're big enough to have a Class A block, you're not paying individually for IP addresses, so there's no difference in cost between a client that has a unique address and a NAT one. In fact the NAT one is probably slightly more expensive because the NAT routers are probably more maintainance and support-intensive than a straight firewall.
In short, I don't think you know what you're talking about. You might be correct when it comes to small or medium businesses, who are buying their connection from an ISP who is going to charge them more for a lot of static IPs than a few dynamic ones that they can use with NAT, but this issue isn't relevant to IBM, Ford, Apple, or the rest of the Class A companies.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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?
But the more appropriate analogy is: You don't take
your car in for complete engine rebuild if the engine
is running fine.
While this may be true for your car, it's definitely not true of a helicopter, or a generator at a power plant, or any other important piece of machinery.
Would you still fly on an airline if that was their attitude towards maintenance? "Nah, we're not going to tear down that turbine...it hasn't failed yet!"
I think perhaps you should reevaluate the importance of the Internet to our society today. I think we've well surpassed the relative importance of a car to an average driver.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Given how hard it is to get an ISP to give you reverse DNS... how in the hell are you going to persuade the them to start updating routing tables!
All the ISPs I've found charge *per month* per IP for *zero* effort - it's just a cash cow. IPV6 won't change that... they'll charge you per month for a block of 256 or something instead. Then change their TOS so you're not allowed to run servers (if they haven't already).
All this is academic... IPV6 has been around for years and not a single ISP has shown any interest at all in implementing it. The old 192.88.99.1 'anycast' address no longer works I notice... it did 2/3 years ago, so IPV6 adoption is going backwards not forwards.
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.
IPv6 fans ought to read D.J. Bernstein's excellent article on the subject. In short, the main problem is that the two protocols aren't easily interoperable, so investment in IPv6 infrastructure is without short-term return.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
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.
No, security through obscurity is not and never should be any part of the answer. The reason is that you should not rely for security on keeping things secret that you can't easily change if they should become public.
For example, you keep your cryptographic keys secret, and if they should be divulged, you change to new keys. But you should generally not rely on keeping your cryptographic algorithms secret, because if they get divulged, it would be a lot harder to issue new programs or machines using new algorithms. Coming up with new cryptographic algorithms is a highly non-trivial process, whereas anybody with access to a decent random-number generator can come up with new keys.
This is known as Kerckhoffs' Principle, and is applicable much more generally than just in cryptography.
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.
No, they aren't. IP packets are incapsulated in ethernet packets for local hops. Ethernet packets contain the mac address in the header, but these aren't delivered end-to-end unless both ends of a connection are in the same subnet.
In IPv6, it is envisioned that machines could use their mac address for the last 48 bits of their IP address so that they can claim a unique address within a subnet without a dhcp request, but this is only one possible convention. The truly paranoid could use a randomly generated number instead.
Well, I don't see any reason why a NAT router couldn't be used that translated a public IPv6 address into a private IPv4 address space, but I will certainly defer to the experts on this.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Its all horribly horribly simple. No large investor or large vendor wishes IPv6 to happen in the mainstream until all the bogus submarine patents filed around it have expired. Until then its not in the interest of Microsoft, Cisco or anyone else to ship large amounts of IPv6 and get shot at.
Nobody will say that in public because the US doesn't like industries apparently conspiring together against a patent holder but you will hear it in private.
The topology helps, as the IPv6 backbone developers have realized you can't have a horrible design and expect it to work.
The problem is not with customers of a peered network (as their prefix MUST match that of the peered network), but with peers of peers, where prefixes may differ. Because you have more levels of peering, the problem is theoretically reduced (as lower levels MUST share a common prefix and are - generally - not permitted to peer between branches in the hierarchy) but that is more human policy than technology.
There is some confusion with regards IPv6 and backbone connections. IPv6 was originally designed NOT to support default routes. The
So how does all this help? It helps because details are kept hidden as far as possible. IPv4 is bad on routing, because the layout is crap, too much is visible and has to be learned, multiple specific routes may need to be learned for a given prefix, corporations buy large blocks of addresses then share them with multiple sites using different providers, etc. IPv6 doesn't permit a lot of that and policies agreed upon don't allow the rest.
In the end, routing requires that you know every possible route you need to follow to get to where you want to go, in the most general form you can store it. There's no escaping from that. The trick is to ensure that absolutely everything is (more or less) equally general and no specific exceptions are needed. It is the exceptions that are the killer, not the rules.
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)