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How Things Will Change Under IPv6
Da Massive writes "IPv6 Forum leader Latif Ladid provides an insight into the workings of IPv6. He also talks about how peer-to-peer file serving as we know it today will be redundant with the newer protocol." From the article: "Q: What is the most significant benefit that IPv6 offers the world? A: Global connectivity. Currently we have less than 50 percent world-wide Internet penetration, and we have used most of the address space. If you look at the Western world, we have more than 50 percent penetration. In total we have close to a billion people connected to the Internet. So it is a false perception that we have full Internet penetration. We have six billion people on the planet. When the Internet protocol was designed back in 1980 there were 4.3 billion address spaces; it was already insufficient for the population. By 2050 we will be nearly 10 billion people. But there are not only people. There are things. Billions and billions of devices that will service these people."
You said penetration.
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
I call it The Thingternet!
Like Jabber. if my IP was 1:2:3 then my fancy Intenet Coffee Pot would be 1:2:3:coffeepot1
How long will a complete transition to IPV6 take? Many many years IMO, if it ever happens at all. None of the firms I know of or work with have even started looking into migrating yet. Hell they are'nt even talking about it.
"There are things. Billions and billions of devices that will service these people"
I for one welcome our new.... thingy overlords...
So it is a false perception that we have full Internet penetration.
This is completely untrue! There is lots of full penetration on the internet.
On the comment "Billions and billions of devices that will serve these people", it seems to be unmentioned that (random estimate, not researched in any way) half of them will not be directly hooked into the interweb. Many of those are intended to be that way, since you want your layers of security, and that's why we have however many thousands of addresses in the range 10.0.0.[0-256]; technically they're using the same IP, but it doesn't matter because that IP is kept internally, and not in contact with the web.
IPv4 does not have enough numbers to give every single device its own unique IP. On the flip side... if we were locked into the system, it would still be workable.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
Like this : here
It seems that when discussing "the sky is falling" ipv4 schemes, no one ever takes into account private networks. In most cases, especially in the Western world, all devices are not directly connected to the internet. Private address space, when used according to specification, will eliminate the need for costly conversions to a new standard.
IPv6, in some ways, is not a good thing, and my vote is to continue using the current addressing system, albeit in a more conservative manner.
Q: Besides the obvious thing about address space, what other advantages does it have?
A: Penetration! Because we don't have everybody connected yet!
Q: And how does IPv6 increase penetration? Does it build wires to people's houses or make provide satellite dishes to third-world countries?
A: No, but it does make sure we have enough addresses once they have some money to buy the actual hardware stuff!
Look, I know that eventually we're going to have to transition off IPv4 because of the address space issues, and that we might as well start now, but articles like this make it more like a marketing stunt to sell new hardware RIGHT NOW.
What people dont seem to realize is that IPv6 is not only about adding more addresses.
They also improve the packet structure (by doing things like removing the fragmentation flag)
And we should be looking at making wireless roaming easier (consider forwarding mechanisms when changing WAP's)
But more addresses is a key benefit. And there is no real harm, just the cost of transition which can be minimized due to the backwards compatibility provided through tunneling, etc. So if everyone just starts installing IPv6 hardware, everything is happy. Why is this issue being rehashed?
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
...needed to support a network of flying cars.
If you just want a broker that is quick to get started with, go to btexact and sign up. For those "permanent" set ups, go to (you will get a tunnel initially, but have to save uptime enough to get a subnet and such).
d en.info is.
So, what can it be used for? Well, at the moment I do not really use it to browse the web, but I use it for reverse dns on irc (efnet, freenode and most other ircnets have ipv6 enabled servers). In other words, I can have a range of customized hosts (very handy since many friends have shell accounts here) on irc, like @doomtech.net or cust-523452.nix.net.ru. The first one is my own domain, but the second is from afraid freedns. Afraid has a huge range of public domains, which you can add AAAA and PTR records for.
After thinking up a host, please go to spamcalc, if you don't have the brains yourself to see if your host is dns spam or not. A host like doomtech.net is not dns spam, but something like i.am.god.and.i.live.in.the.cave.with.osama.bin.la
Sixxs and btexact have pretty exact instructions on how to set this up on a range of operating systems. With the aiccu client from sixxs, the tunnel should work behind most NAT setups as well.
Dvorak on Doomtech
I call it the Hawkingnet
While it is nice to say we don't have enough IP address to cover everyone now, be realistic. Not everyone will need one. There are a lot of people like me who will have lots and lots of them with all the toys I accumulate. However, there is also going to be a lot of people who won't.
While we will need more in the future saying we have to have more IPs because we have more people is not necessarily correct. Whereas NAT is being used a lot in corporate networks it is also being used in the home as well. I know, this doesn't solve everything. However, I can say right now there is a generation of people (my parents) who do not know what an IP is, nor do they care. Including them in the big list saying we need IPs for them is a fallacy--they will never use it or want it. And how about babies? Unless you are tagging them with remote tracking chips when they are born chances are they don't need one. Moreover, right now there are entire places in the third world which do not have systematic running water or electricity. Including them in this count is ridiculous as well. They need a lot more basic needs before they all need individual cell phones running IPv6.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
I understand that NAT is considered a hack, but isn't the fact that a device's real address is hidden a security feature for the user? Wouldn't it be that much harder for malicious users to track my internet usage? This would be especially true if I had a mobile device, since moving from one NAT system to another would make following my movements remotely more difficult. So I'd think NAT would be considered a privacy boon. The article doesn't really address this effectively. Also, since most mobile devices have limited bandwidth, I'd think that having a constantly changing IP address, or hiding behind a NAT would mean that DOS attacks against them would be more difficult. If most big mobile device ISPs like the blackberry and sidekick folks offered NAT based access in the future, I'd think that we'd be relatively safe from IPv4 address exhaustion. So stating the main reason for IPv6 being address exhaustion I think is crap. It IS very useful for other reasons though, and I think those reasons warrant it being switched to.
The closer we actually get to REALLY running out of IPV4 numbers - the more IPV6 will become adopted
This is known as "Market Forces" - this is a foreign concept to many but it is the reality of this situation.
When NAT becomes insuffiecient to handle the demand - IPV6 will be ready to roll. Then every man, woman, child, insect and grain of sand will have its own PUBLIC address which we can then begin to exploit - YAY!
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Just think of the number of systems that rely on IPv4 right now: networks, routers, cell phones, etc. There really isn't a lot of room left at the current rate of expansion. But let's face, that's how we get: complacent. The current system is working -- why bother with a new one? I believe the Romans got that way toward the end...
I read the article and it was insightful, but I didn't have a lot of background on IPv6, so I searched for some background and found this on the details and this on implementing it in Linux.
From the article: The Internet was not designed like this. It was designed to enable peer-to-peer and VoIP. In the meantime, through NAT, telecomms companies are offering VoIP but they want to bill you for it, but the Internet was not designed with any billing mechanism. When you connect to the Internet you pay anyway, so why should you pay for more services? This is the big debate. The Internet was not designed for telecomms companies, it was designed for everyone to share expensive CPU power. When you share expensive resources you can do anything.
I agree. Paying for sevrices is basically just icing on the cake for telecoms.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Sure, sure... Not everyone wants a single IP address to uniquely identifies them. What's the point of using this metric? That's the lamest argument possible. Not everyone uses the Internet 24/7/365, in fact, many users share addresses from a pool. As far as I know, the "shortage" of IP address space doesn't actually result in higher prices for me, however, a switch to IPv6 will. There has to be a more convincing argument for switching, one that involves people benefitting economically, but that isn't it.
But what does it give me... Now... That I don't have already?
Deleted
There are things. Billions and billions of devices that will service these people.
:O
I like the sound of that!
I'll finally have access to the extended and color version of ASCII Star Wars via telnet at towel.blinkenlights.nl.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
I'm not really familiar with IPv6. Can some explain how P2P will make file serving redundant?
This is freaking ridiculous. And there is a simple solution.
The ONLY machines that need actual IP addresses are servers and gateways.
PERIOD.
Everyone else can be NATted.
The simple solution is to NAT everyone and everything that isn't a server or a gateway to other machines. Instead of a typical University gobbling up class-Cs or even class-Bs like candy, they'd require a single class-C at most. Every other machine on campus would be NATted. AOL could have a single class-C, since its users aren't technologically literate enough to want actual "real" IPs. ISPs with a mix of non-technical and technical users (such as Earthlink) would need more, so they could sell "real" IPs to those who'd use them. ISPs which cater to geeks (such as Speakeasy) would need still more.
In such a world, we'd see a complete reversal of current trends; huge national ISPs whose user populations are mostly non-geeks would need only a scant few IP addresses, and smaller "boutique" ISPs whose users are mostly geeks would need more than AOL or MSN.
And we WOULDN'T run out of IPs this way.
I've heard the hype about every coffee percolator, Coke machine and pencil sharpener having its own IP address. That's nice. But not necessary. This whole "crisis" with us running out of IPs can easily be averted with a change in IP distribution policies.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Err - how is an expansion of IP space going to bring a net free of government speech controls (not to mention physical connections) to parts of the world that are resisting? We can't even pry those things out of the hands of the US Government, much less those of Robert Mugabe or Iraq.
Why does IPv6 make P2P any easier to implement?
Why does it remove the need for servers?
Why does it mean that we "won't need providers such as Skype anymore because we'll be able to do it all ourselves"?
I don't see how IPv6 lets you do ANY of these things. You'll still be firewalled, you'll still need servers and software vendors like Skype. In fact the only thing about IPv6 that would seem to me to help P2P is that slighly more people might end up not being NATed but that won't affect anything much.
Does this person actually know what they're talking about or are they from marketing?
With sixxs, you get a /48-subnet, which should be sufficient for your quadrillion machines. The address I have looks something like this: 2001:770:11e::1, which is a short for 2001:0770:011e:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001. Luckily those zeroes can be shorted to just ::, which makes these addresses pretty easy to remember, actually. You can also have a bit fun, if you wish, by having e.g. 2001:770:11e:FFFF:DEAD:BEEF:DEAD:BABE :)
If you are bored some day, give the tunnel stuff a try, instead of sitting in your underwear drinking cola and multitasking irc and quake4.
Dvorak on Doomtech
Oh, you know what they're talking about. Billions and billions of devices to "service" you. Ever increasing "penetration." What, you think this guy is wrong aobut the future of the internet? ;)
I didnt RTFA but... I thought that this was pretty much a moot point with the widening use of routers and NAT. A single external IP to your router that dishes out local network IPs to your coffee pot and your fridge and whatever else...
Can someone explain the value of IPv6 beyond that?
In other news, a door in germany refuses to open because some script kiddie got it's IP address and crashed the door. Officials are trying their best to open the door but they suspect the door has to be rebooted.
Are this going to be the news from the future?
It seems to me most of you are just afraid of change. I personally welcome it. Of course I don't see why we can't see different proposals, it is always nice to have choices. What is so bad about having more IP addresses? Yes, it's a little more complicated, but hey it could be fun. I am sure most of you where scared when a masked man in leather walked in with duct tape, pliers, and a watermelon, but you get used to it after awhile.
...None because fish don't eat ice cream
Even though we do have a lot of people on the planet; I seem to recall that the population on the planet actually declined in the last 10 years.
Where the heck did you get that information? We've added 750 million people in the last 10 years.
Take a look here http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/worldpop.html/
1995 5,694,418,460
2005 6,451,058,790
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
...when HDTV and digital broadcast become a reality. Right after the metric system is adopted.
To all o' you people asking, "What does it give me?"
/. users-- old, out-of-date, and constantly reminiscing about the old days.
It gives you nothing. You're already on the internet.
IPv6 is going to give India and China and other high-populous countries connectivity. As it is, they don't have enough IPv4 addresses even to *nat* their country, let alone to provide real services with which NATing interferes.
And that's why you and I have very little say about the adoption of IPv6. It's gonna happen, and it's gonna happen soon (say, the next 5 years, tops). Pretty soon, those of us who remember IPv4 are going to be like 3-digit
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
When I read "But there are not only people. There are things. Billions and billions of devices that will service these people." I immediately invisioned billions of internet enabled sex toys.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
You will have a hard time making people give up their subnets, if your plan requires that. Another thing, actually paying for a public ip is what we want to avoid. I would certiantly love to have a huge subnet for free, instead of paying a two digit sum of money each month for one static ipv4 ip.
Dvorak on Doomtech
Article has style of a good movie trailer.
"Gee, I guess we better take up all IP addresses before the machines get 'em!"
"What are you talking about? They're just machines!"
Address space isn't why we should gloss over IPv6. Yeah, its nice that we can get rid of NAT, but the bigger deal is virtual circuits. IPv4 can't handle streaming data, keeping us from high-broadband technologies like TV-over-IP. IPv6 was designed to optimize routers for doing high-broadband transfers. That should be the biggest selling point of IPv6.
im more worried about g0at sex on the internet than this shit. fuck you
Implanting an RFID chip in everybody with a unique address makes it a very easy way of tracking people...and explains why IPv6 is being pushed so hard even though it is unnecessary. Sure, NAT will handle boatloads of expansion to come, but it offers a layer of anonymity to computers behind the NAT...security through obscurity...how many 192.168.x.x addresses are out there? This way, a unique IP can be given to each computer, more unique even than MAC addresses. And it can be reached around the world. If Those Above get their way through, I see computers eventually having hardcoded IP addresses. And RFID implants with a unique IP address for everybody.
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
I'd better get one of those life insurance policies with the robot clause, then. I need to protect my family from financial obligation when the robots come for me.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Ah yes, in the immortal words of Carl Sagan
gasmonso http://religiousfreaks.com/a whole lot of things.
Right now on the internet, "no one can tell you're a dog."
With IPv6, we'll be able to tell that you are "Spot, a lab collie mix owned by Fred C Mugwump of 123 Fourth avenue, Anytown USA" and that you should not be trying to email anyone about viagra.
Think of it as the death of Spam.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The most important change will be the fact that, when we finally actually do start transitioning to IPv6...
Hell will have frozen over.
Widespread adoption has been 'any time now' for years now..
Blah.. Just think, ipv6 gets adopted, and suddenly, all those girls who looked at the fat guys will regret saying, 'When hell freezes over'..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Think about it. Almost every broadband ISP offers a "home network" package where they charge you extra for extra computers on the connection. However everyone else on the planet is selling easy to use broadband routers to do it on the cheap. If every device gets an IPv6 address then you can bill them very easily for all those extra computers on that DSL line.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"Currently we have less than 50 percent world-wide Internet penetration"
No sir, alot more of the internet is penetration, well i guess he could be right if he's not including softcore...
If you've ever tried to implement an IPSEC VPN with numerous endusers that have DSL/CableModem gateways that default to 192.168.1.x, you'll know why NAT is so bad, particularly if you're using that address space internally already. Granted, there are workarounds to this.
That's dicey, but what's even more dicey is trying to interconnect corporate networks that use the same private address space. Companies that run virtual trading floors, for example, offer private line connections. You end up with multiple IP subnet conflicts and it's an incredible headache. That having been said, there are workarounds to that, too.
When NAT became popular way back when, I was part of a few really painful reIPing projects. The reason we went to NAT was because there was no way to get portable IP space and our ISP was being a complete dick, jacking their prices and refusing to run BGP with us. Moving to NAT meant portability and portability meant our ISP couldn't dick us. If I was to move away from NAT and put v6 addresses in my corp network, that's what I'd worry about more than anything.
Why have we gone from version 4 straight to 6? Is there such a thing as IPv5, and if so, how does it differ from versions 4 & 6?
ipv6 will never happen. ive heard this same bullshit story for YEARS AND YEARS AND NOTHING HAS EVER COME OF IT. NO MAJOR ISP'S, CONTENT PROVIDERS AND END USERS EVEN HAVE PLANS TO IMPLEMENT IPV6. IF YOU SAY OTHERWISE YOU ARE A LIAR.
no one cares what they do in foreign countries. the real internet is in the united states.
Back in the 70's, President Carter was going to move us to the Metric system. Road signs were being converted to mph/metric, goods were dual marked, etc. The idea was to make the conversion in 1981. Then reagan came in and stopped it. America was nearly ready, but it was stopped. Now, we are just about the only nation that does not do metric. That means that special labeling is done just for us. That also means, our goods are more expensive. Sadly, at this point, we have raised several whole generations without as much metric as we had in the 60's, and 70's. When we decide to finally change, it will be expensive and hard. reagan's choice was very short-sighted.
Right now, is the time to switch. In the future, it will only be more expensive esp. as small devices get IPs. They will also have to be switched. Finally, a new wave of software development could take place with IPv6, that is more difficult to do with IPv4. Not siwtching is very short-sighted.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yes, yes, we already have these. They're known as 3rd world labor to some and child labor to others. I suppose they will be needing their own IPs to report productivity? Perhaps direct links to Hyperion backends of multinationals?
and you want to hype that IP6 will achieve global connectivity??
Under IPv6 the internet will surf you.
Of course companies and academics don't want IPv6 they already have the only real advantage it provides - per machine addressing. Why would they invest money to get something they already have?
IPv6 benefits individuals. It benefits P2P, VoIP, photo sharing, blogging and email (yes email - you don't need a third party server if you have a permanent web presence). Yes you can have all of that with IPv4, but its held together with hacks like NAT, port forwarding and man-in-the-middle servers. That's fine, if like me, you hold a degree in computer science and arn't put off by the nuances of network security, berkley ports and subnet masks but if you're a noob who just wants to share their Christmas pictures with friends and family its a pretty steep learning curve.
I'm a pretty typical nerd. My home network has 4 computers that regularly connect to the internet. Of those, 2 offer services such as SSH, bittorent, email and my testing web server. After christmas that will probably extend to a new XBox360 and a PSP (admittedly passive net users). Next Christmas it might be my mobile. The Christmas after that my espresso machine will probably be consulting a distributed database to see what is the best way of brewing Co-op's Fairtrade Java.
You can buy a computer the size of a pack of gum with a complete Linux operating system and enough horse power to run a web server for ~$200. That's too expensive to be ubiquitous but in 2-3 years time that figure will be in the region of $20 and it will be a WiFi network. It's going to happen.
IPv4 forces our devices to be passive because configuring a NAT Router and Firewall is hard for Joe Public. IPv4 means that we have to poll to get system updates. IPv4 means that I can't just ask my fridge what its contents are without configuring a seperate box. IPv4 means that I'm happy when a third party agrees to handle my communications - I actually ask them to listen in and they 'promise' not to read my mail or listen to my conversations. IPv4 means that when I get an email from my girlfriend at 195.95.195.94 I have no method of authenticating that.
IPv6 means that I buy bandwidth and nothing else. I don't get 100MB of web hosting, or a whopping 5 emails addresses, I get to use my over powered desktop machine with 200GB of 'web space' and as many email addresses as I please. IPv6 means that I can start to build a web of trust, so that I can start to authenticate the messages I receive against a web of my peers - not a single verisign certificate. IPv6 means that consumer electoronics can be connected to my data pipe and that the manufacturer can be responible for its up keep - including firewalls and virus protection.
In short IPv6 allows people to own a bit of the internet and say it's theirs rather than renting an inch and getting kicked off that inch every 4 hours.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
Ok, so I run a network. Lets say I want to move my internal network to IPv6. Where do I start? What do I do? How do I check that my switches/routers are capable of it? So I only have 100 pcs on my network, I don't care! This is not a rehtorical question, I have googled.
The ONLY machines that need actual IP addresses are servers and gateways. PERIOD. Everyone else can be NATted.
Sigh.
The problem with this statement is that it presumes all content comes from central servers. But that's not what the Internet was designed to be, and forcing it into that model will severly retard, and in many cases simply destroy, all future innovation.
The Internet was designed as an endpoint-to-endpoint communications medium. The intelligence is at the edges, every device on the network has equal access to every other device, none are "special". In practice, of course, 72.14.207.99 (one of Google's servers) *is* special, recieving many more connections than most other addresses, but that's an emergent phenomenon, not one that's designed in. It's only special because lots of other devices *choose* to talk to it. One day they could all choose to begin sending their search requests to some sort of massive, distributed, peer-to-peer search engine (I don't think so, I think it makes sense to centralize search, but perhaps there's a really powerful distributed indexing and search algorithm that no one has yet discovered).
There's huge power, flexibility and opportunity in that model. We do a lot of things using the Internet now, in 2005, but it's still in its infancy. We have no idea what other kinds of communications technologies will arise or what sorts of things people might come up with to do with this medium ten, twenty, fifty years from now. That means it is critically important for the future of technology and innovation that we preserve the ultra-flexible model that the really bright guys at DARPA came up with.
End-to-end delivery. Intelligent endpoints. Dynamic, multi-path routing. No central control. Those are the characteristics that turned the Internet from a lab-based curiosity to such a worldwide phenomenon that we seriously talk about how it will one day touch every human being on the planet. Think about it. The Internet looks poised to become the *single* communications medium used for all electronic communications, be it text, audio, video. What is it that made this such a powerful medium? End-to-end. PERIOD.
Let's not throw it away before we even find out what we can really do with it.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I disagree with all of your points.
* You don't want your staff to have direct external access and don't want to have to limit this with firewall rules (i.e. you want it done by the nature of the network not by the configuration of the network devices).
yeah, ip4 is good if you want to play China and control every step of your worker bees.
* You don't want any incoming connections.
Why would you want that? The phones of the workers allow incoming connections, why not the computer? How do you want to implement a real voice-over-ip system when people can't be reached from outside?
* You don't want the possibility of some junior tech bodging the firewall and opening your network wide open by removing filtering.
Human error exist no matter which implementation you chose. No argument.
Take into consideration how meny routers,switches,servers exist on the net. The ENTIRE infrastructure has to be wiped. (very expensive) :) )
Its not a "Flip the Switch" scenrio here,
Even my crappy linksys router will need a firmware upgrade (which is already available) I just cant see a hardcore Aol user flashing firmware, untill he looses his connection because hes still using v4 in 2010 (even tho aol will no longer exist then
So whos gonna pay for all these upgrades?
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
Keep in mind that the reason they can make money is by minimizing the support costs. If they have to deal with people trying to run IPV6, they have an entirely new way they have to do things. As for charging per device, why do that? You just charge a rate based on an average usage. If you charge per device people get cranky with you about adding new devices and then they go find a provider that doesn't do that.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Where do I sign up to be 'serviced' by one of these devices??
He seems to have a pretty "exotic" view of NAT and P2P, that's for sure. Point by point...
Most people didn't adopt NAT for that reason, and in fact wouldn't even know what you meant if you told them about an IP-address shortage. Many consumers use NAT because their ISP would only give them one IP address. That's not going to change going from IPv4 to IPv6 without other structural changes at the ISPs. They're just not set up to track multiple addresses for one customer, no matter what kind of addresses those are. Their databases only have one field for that, and that one field gets used to seed their MAC filter etc. Where's the incentive for them to accomodate this guy's wishes?
Another reason many people use NAT is for security. Never mind whether they actually achieve greater security; they believe that they do and that reason is distinct from concern over an address shortage.
What part of "peer to peer" doesn't he understand? Why does he think it's called that, instead of "client to server"? The whole point of P2P is that there's no such thing as a server. Also, again, he doesn't seem to understand why people use P2P systems. It's not just about getting content, which we've all been able to do via FTP for ages. It's also about storing multiple copies in multiple locations so that it will still be there despite a failure of a single node, and about finding it in one or more of those multiple locations, and about downloading pieces of it from multiple locations to maximize speed, and about keeping it all anonymous, etc. None of these are addressed by a switch from IPv4 to IPv6. Yes, NAT traversal is an issue that people have to deal with when they adopt P2P, but it's not the reason they did so in the first place.
It's wonderful that this guy is beating the IPv6 drum, because there are legitimate reasons why we should switch to IPv6. However, he should not let partisanship lead him into misrepresenting the facts.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Prof. D. J. Bernstein has an excellent summary of why he is
not changing his programs to use IPv6.
http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html
Basically, IPv6 is *not* compatible with IPv4, it requires a
whole new parallel system *everywhere* so it will never happen.
My biggest problem with IPv^6 is the deliberate hobbling of newer protocols to try and force the move to IPv6 on people. Take SIP for example, which has no built in support for NAT because either 1) they were too lazy to tackle it or 2) they were too arrogant and assumed everyone would just jump on the IPv6 bandwagon just because they were told to do so. The reason there's no rush to v6 is because the internet works just fine right now. What is it about v6 that's going to change the internet experience for my parents? Nothing.
People have been predicting the depletion of v4 addresses for 5 years now but NAT has changed that. My question is, why aren't new protocols deliberately taking NAT into account so that we don't have to create hacks to get around this limitation later?
History is full of companies trying to start over from scratch because it wasn't done exactly right the first time, but then end up bankrupt because they didn't stop to consider the most important part: the enduser. How many people are going to want to buy new routers or new dsl or cable modems because they don't support v6? And before anyone says that manufacturers could just offer a firmware upgrade, how many of them are going to do that when they could just as easily use it as an excuse to sell new equipment?
There might be advantages but all I hear on slashdot are the sheep. How about we talk about the disadvantages?
Back then there were a few test tunnels, however a quick search revealed, that there are so called "tunnel brokers" online allowing to play around....
...... strange ....
.... crap
And Voila you have an ipv6 address (most sites will "approve" your endpoint and you need a public IP with ICMP enabled (from the tunnel site)....
offtopic: i remember ping times being better between 2 macines using ipv6 addresses, interestingly now my laptop pings with bigger latency over ipv6
hmm at the end I will make use of the ipv6 in my kernel that I religiously compile in for the last 5+ years for who knows what misterious reason...
at least kill time instead of working on that "must finish today" project
IPv6, Exactly how does this work? is it automatically burnt into your NIC like a MAC address? or does it gets it "permanent" address from the DNS? IPv6 isnt all about telling your toaster to start making toaster strudles or changing the temprature in your Freezer. You can do all of this with IPv4. It's called and internal network. and im sure they have the technology to be giving Coffepots and stoves Ip address and MAC address's. I mean they have Stoves now that dont have any hot coils or flames. They are just not putting technology to its full potential. IPv6 is going to be for those who dont yet have internet. making it MORE widley available. but then this problem exists, How are we getting computers and link connectivity to these minor outlaying countries? Is there going to be even people to help them there if they do have problems? I see how we could have Authentication not being a big problem but once again we would have to change Our Os's to be more compatible with Server technolgies.
IPV6 could well be DOA, because it solves the wrong problem.
IPV6 solves the problems of the Internet, as originally conceived - egalitarian and end-to-end.
Nobody in power wants that any more. I'm sure that those in power would mostly prefer that the Internet would just go back and hide under the rock it came from, but they DO like the benefits it gives to THEM. If IPV6 goes forward, it'll only be because it has enough momentum as the "logical successor," and because TPTB can't propose what they'd really like.
If IPV6 were being designed TODAY:
It would have DRM built-in for the ??AA, as well as router-based monitors and controls for peer-to-peer networking.
It would have built-in provisions for wiretapping, even at the opportunistic VPN level, for government TLAs.
It would have content and traffic filtering provisions, for China and the Religious Right.
Of course IPV6 really runs counter to all of these "design criteria."
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The notion of a complete transition is fairly meaningless. We're going to be using IPv4 for the web, email, and dedicated appliances like printers that are hard to upgrade, almost indefinitely. However for those applications the limitations of IPv4 addressing aren't such a big deal as there are fairly acceptable workarounds. IPv6 enables many more hosts to participate in peer-to-peer interactions than before, and this opens up potential for many new kinds of protocols and networked applications.
As for deployment - Some large ISPs are already selling IPv6 access to commercial customers. Consumer ISPs will be the last to see IPv6 because consumers will be the last to understand why it is useful. But this isn't such a big problem either, as anyone with a static IPv4 address can use IPv6 right now using 6to4 or an IPv6 tunnel broker. Bottom line - if you want to use IPv6 with an application today, there's a way to do it using existing networks and services. What we're waiting for is new applications that make use of IPv6 to do things that they couldn't do with IPv4 (maybe because they couldn't access enough devices that way). I think we'll see IPv6 used to control traffic lights, monitor security cameras, etc. before we see it widely used to transport web and email.
I use IPv6 every day between home and work. It's what lets me have multiple individually addressible machines at home with a residential DSL connection. My work network now supports IPv6, but my home ISP doesn't. 6to4 solves the problem handily.
Whatever happened to IPV8 stuff?
It would have solved all these issues. totally.
where is it now?
A number of [reputable] science fiction authors have written about mass suicide due to changes in culture. Sometimes the scifi authors are dead on, I hope this isn't one of those times, no pun intended. Then again, the world could do with a couple billion less people...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And you don't see the problem with this? Are you going to sacrifice your privacy for freedom from spam? Let me guess, you're one of the those people who argue "If you have nothing to hide then why do you need privacy?"
Think of it as the death of privacy.
Your mommy buy you a 'puter for Christmas?
All of what you mention can be taken care of at the router in IPv6. Just like in IPv4. (Router is Firewall's oft-forgotten last name.)
The reason China is so hot to trot for IPv6 is that they can track every individual and your little dog too. No more hiding behind dynamic IPs. We know what you did last summer.
Jesus christ. Every other day some other yahoo (no pun intended) with how IPv6 will change our world - be it good or bad. Will they shut these zero originality, boring ass clowns up? This is not being a troll, this is for real. It's about as bad as my freshman year in college, where 40% of orientation comprised of required day classes about political correctness.
God, just get IPv6 implemented...if you want to talk about it, stop trying to be- well you know - sounding like you came up with a new idea and actually come up with a new idea.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
"world-wide Internet penetration"
"Billions and billions of devices that will service these people."
Which is it--penetration or service? I mean, it's kind of difficult to get both at the same time.
For that, use the .here domain.
.Com".
A coffeepot somewhere physically near you would then be coffeepot.here or something like that.
Given we still live in the physical world it makes sense that we should have a reserved domain to address things that are within a location.
So whichever place you go to, http://jukebox.here/ should always get you to a jukebox in the general vicinity (if there's one). and http://here/ will give you info about who is providing the network etc, and perhaps point you to other stuff in that area.
I tried to get ICANN to reserve such a TLD (emailled a few of them), but I'm not rich and don't have USD50K to apply.
Don't forget the whole idea is to then give the TLD to the world so people can use the TLD in a similar way they get to use the 192.168.x.x and 10.x.x.x and the 172.x.x.x addresses.
So far ICANN is just interested in creating TLDs that are mostly practically "Yet Another
Look up tldhere for more info.
As a regular nobody, What can I do to help speed the transition?
Currently we have less than 50 percent world-wide Internet penetration, and we have used most of the address space.
Um, no.
Take a look at the IPv4 address space. Over a third of the addresses are still unused.
Now, I understand that this is a result of the stingyness in handing out IPv4 addresses due to the address crunch -- I'm ready for IPv6 to go mainstream, so the /48 I get from freenet6 will be usable -- goodbye silly NAT hacks! -- but the statement that we're nearly out of addresses is untrue.
"That's all I have to say about that" --Forrest Gump
Ok, I'm not suggesting there's no need to upgrade to ipv6 but why do all devices need their own static ip address? If my toaster or fridge or tv or whatever is network capable, I don't want it accessible to anyone! I'm perfectly happy to have my mythtv box behind my firewall/router and just port forward using ssh when I'm at work.
The main disadvantage would be if my phone was web enabled because as far as I know I can't get an ssh client for my phone. However, I think a better solution would be to integrate ssh into your programs to access these devices. ie. have a special mobile phone program where you insert your ipaddress (that would be the NAT) and of course the username/password and then say port 80 on local device 192.168.x.x so when I open up my phone mythtv program it automatically uses ssh to connect to it. Nice and secure and my mythtv box isn't exposed. This way I don't have to worry about the latest exploit for apache or upgrading my toaster every month. This way all I have to worry about are ssh exploits.
This works fairly well for me now, I have two webservers behind my firewall, a general testing webserver where I can test stuff before I upload it to my main webserver and then the webserver on my mythtv box so I can schedule shows while at work. Neiter one are opened up to the internet except the one box is connectable via SSH (port 22)
To get to the one:
ssh -L80:localhost:80 username@ipaddress
to get to the other:
ssh -L80:192.168.x.x:80 username@ipaddress
While the total population of the earth may not need an ipaddress right now, it's silly to rule it out completely. If history is any indicator, the population will continue to grow. As more and more people get on the internet, we will find there is a problem.
I don't really see how IPv6 will improve peer2peer and VoIP that much like claimed in TFA. I mean I have a static IP address now, and I've had one for many years, same goes for a lot of other people I know. Although these are all 1 IP per house and NATs for the internal network, it's still simple to forward different ports to different computers. I really don't see how IPv6 is gonna make a difference here. I'd appreciate if anyone could give me an example of where IPv6 can do something for me that I can't do now.
...because my D-Link router doesn't support it, its firmware source is closed (no hacks) and D-link will probably force me to upgrade.
Well... it hasn't decreased, though there was a cool study published in Nature a couple years ago that concluded that the world population will probably top out at about 10 billion depending on various factors. This is due to the "adverse" effects of affluence on population growth. Africa is an enormous factor. How Earth's population grows depends a great deal on how African war, poverty, and AIDS turn out.
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
which will come first, IPV6 or harnassing Fusion for power.
/The problem is mostly social./
Its mostly an issue of justification: What killer app. makes the change worth any effort? Real* QOS for VOIP, for example, would do it but where is the movement on that?
*Not QoS over IPv4, but the kind that all ISP's and backbones agree to and offer some level of guarantee about.
It a lot of people seem to think that the main advantage of IPv6 is the larger address space. IMHO, that's not much of an improvement, and could be handled without resorting to IPv6.
President Bush, ironically enough, provided an alternate proposal when he referred to "the internets". There's no really compelling reason why there should be just one of them. He's right.
Running out of address space? Fine, build another overlapping IPv4 internet (using identical public address space) and interconnect the two. It could be done with a little creativity involving NAT and/or part of the "reserved" or "experimental" IPv4 space to solve ambiguities.
Yes, we would have to change a few things in IPv4 to make it go. But we'd have to change a lot less than implementing IPv6.
* There are many good reasons to implement IPv6. Address space is not one of them. And I'm not a Bush fan, by any means. But he makes a good point occasionally.
Actually, there is a growing market when IPv4 address get short. ISPs can make a whole lot of money by making special offers that give you a static IP, or even a (ridiculously small) subnet like /30. The shorter IP addresses get, the more money can be made out of the shortage.
So, I am very sure that there are ISPs that are quite happy with the situation as it is now.
The problem is: ISPs are the ones that need to set things up for IPv6, and if they have no incentive, it won't happen.
Continuous positive slashdot karma since... uh, maybe next year.
our system that runs Windows NT 3.51 on Alpha? How do I get that to use IPV6?
Who cares about IPv6?!? I waiting for IPXv6 to be released! :)
"Tell me, Grandpa, what was it like in the days of IPv4?" young Suzy asked as she played with the IP wireless transmitters in her golden locks of hair.
"Well Suzy," Grandpa said, his mind on the distant past, "back then we only had 32 bit addressing, and much of it was provisioned out to various regional entities, with large corporate interests sitting on whole chunks of the space. We had these things called NAT routers."
"Sounds scary, Grandpa." Suzy shivered.
"It was." Grandpa replied. "The first NAT routers could only support FTP and IRC, and folks using some chat programs could barely get their software to work at all. Still NAT did okay, for a while."
"Then what happened Grandpa?" Suzy asked, enthralled.
"Well, as I recall, the first problems came when handheld wireless devices became more common. They had to sit behind various other networks, without direct connectivity. Proprietary solutions abounded, and connectivity was in the hands of large corporate communications giants. Everyone knew that IPv4 had been in trouble for many years, but some folks said 'NAT's all we need' while others didn't think there was a crisis at all, and even if there was one coming, it was nothing to worry about."
"But there was, wasn't there Grandpa?" Suzy knew the best part of the story was coming.
"Very much so." Grandpa said after a moment. "You see, even with NAT and various other networks between the IPv4 network and the average person's devices, the Internet was growing too fast. The limited supply of IP addresses as beginning to slow the expansion of the Internet. Finally, with the great IP Famine of '18, we had no choice. IPv6 was rolled out. Some folks were mad, because they had put their heads in the sand and refused to recognize the problem had been coming for a while. It costs those people lots of money, and some either had to put up with being stuck behind NAT routers and losing out on new functionality or simply going out of business."
Suzy laughed. "They were very silly people, Grandpa!"
Grandpa nodded. "Yes, they were, but most of us survived. Now it's time to go. Don't forget your data glasses and your book tablet. The last flight to Tokyo leaves in an hour, and I promised I'd get you home before dinner."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
We will be able to get GPS callback service for celphones to find out where that person who called you is... Duplicate articles will become a thing of the past on /....
The Houston Texans will win a playoff game...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
We're multiplexing addresses with NAT and DHCP. If everyone's address is permanent, DNS already maps names to addresses. Your IM client would not use a central server, your buddy list entries would map to IPs.
The list of those with the service is in your adress book. We don't ring the switchboard and ask for LordEd any more, we patch the call ourselves with LordEd's phone number.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
We keep hearing this, but what isn't emphasized is that there are over 75(!) class A-equivalent (/8) networks available that IANA is holding in reserve.
In fact, organizations are returning
Does IANA have an unpublished agenda to force IPV6 upon us?
Slashmail.org "The Open Source Email Company"
you misspelled ginger. but man, yeh, those freaks with their red hair and light skin with freckles. sickening
uauagh *shivers*
if i'm not immortal, what's the point of living?
...te?
Does it also mean that there are so many addresses that unless someone knows your address, they'll never find you? Security by obscurity, if you'll stomach the term. If addresses numbers are scattered enough (random?) then won't it make finding open ports, unsecured services, etc much more difficult for viruses, worms, miscreants, etc by just incrementing IP #s?
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Nicely put.
...
If I might elaborate on the economic reasons
The economic reasons to change (or enable) will present themselves as consumer services that require IPv6 to run, or that work better over IPv6. Just as with VOIP, these may appear as cheap routers you stick on your home network to enable the service.
Like, say, home security monitoring services with each sensor having its own IPv6 address.
As these services become more widely deployed, and as the volume of IPv6 traffic tunneled over IPv4 grows, it will at some point become cheaper for the ISPs involved to support straight IPv6, instead of 6 on 4. At which point, it will be easy to do so, seeing as how every OS will then have mature dual stacks and the IPv4-only hardware will continue to function through 4 on 6 tunnels without ever knowing the difference or having to be touched or configured.
The IPv6 community has done an excellent job of thinking through these co-existance scenarios. I really don't see what DJB is complaining about.
Address translation has multiplied the effective address space way beyond the 4 billion unique values. The limitation for active connections under IPv4 is 2^32 IP addresses * 2^16 port numbers * number of protocols. The limitation for clients connected and sharing an address and port and protocol is infinity.
IPv6 will, therefore, vastly increase the number of active connections possible, but security will still demand address translation (really? maybe; anyone want to kibbitz on that?), so the number of unique IP addresses you'll need won't get too big too fast.
Some degree of anonymity is provided by the dynamic IP addresses handed out by ISPs. Does IPv6 seek to remove this useful aspect? Case in point: a flood-based attack to a given IP can be thrwarted simply by getting a new IP from the ISP (old version of yahoo chat, for instance, makes the user vulnerable to these flood attacks).
Sorry! You are right. It is an over all decline in the growth rate - not population. Population is still increasing but growth rate has decreased.
See:Growth Rate for the United States and World Population
My bad.
(Although the second site is predicting an upturn in growth rate once the third world countries have become more moderized and then there is a sharp drop off in growth rate once 10 billion people are on the earth. I would think, given that people still only live to be around 80 or 90 that at some point there will be as many people dying as there are being born.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
What Would Harrison Ford Do?
The protocol doesn't have one. IPv4 addresses should be embedded into the IPv6 address space, and the protocols should co-exist for a while.
But the IPv6 was designed as a replacement instead of a improvement of IPv4. It's not technical, it's economic, it means that we MUST BUY IPv6 addresses alongside our IPv4 ones. More money for already greedy companies.
If the address space of IPv4 is put inside the address space of IPv6, this problem is over. Everybody instantly has an IPv6 address, no $$$ needed. This is the real problem with IPv6. Fix it and people will start using it.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Rubbish. Firewall is not a security measure. If you have port {whatever this week's virus uses} open, you are just as vulnerable as if you don't use Firewall. Similarly, if you have a public IP and a NAT between you and the Internet which doesn't forward anything on that port, you are secure.
A public IP with everything other the VoIP and (for example) BitTorrent closed is much more useful, and no less secure than Firewall.
The parent says that by cracking the victim ISP router, he could propagate a route to his private subnet. Basically, adding a static route 192.168.1.0 /24 to the public victim's address.
1) The guy is still protected by NAT because incoming packets won't reach his LAN because the NAT entry won't be in his NAT box.
2) Private IP (10.x 192.168.x 172.16.x) are not routed on the internet.
3) Even if the victim happens to be using public address space on his router, the other BGP peer on the Internet will ignore the route advertisement from the cracked ISP router. All decent ISP rely on stuff routing info from RADB.com If the RADB record does not list a particular route a being advertisable by AS X, AS Y will ignore it. You would need to crack RADB and modify the ISP routing info there.
Even then, NAT will still protect the user. So YES NAT ***does*** security. If no, explain to me what's the difference between filtering using a firewall and filtering with the dynamic NAT entries ?
I just bought a 2 Litre bottle of Coke tonite.
It would not be earlier that i call IPv6 same mature as current IPv4, than we found ourselves running out of IPv6 addressses and switching to IPv8 :)
;)
Now, seriously, NAT is not only limiting, it is protecting also. The problem is that we have no ZeroConf or UPnP port forwarding up to an outer gate. If at home my campus network operator allowed me to demand some port - then it would make me easy to send/receive files with jabber, etc.
I pay per-megabyte, and i guess i i had direct IP, all those port scanning, virus attacks and crackers trying to zombie my PC, would at very least make me traffic i would have to pay 10 times more than now. And perhaps they will find a hole and infect my PC. So i am not that against the NAT. It is limitaition, but it is saving my money also
If you look at the Western world, we have more than 50 percent penetration.
Something must be done!
I refuse to be penetrated!
Defining Statistics and Social Research