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."

Comments

Why don't we start today? Tunnels!

[Nichotin]

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).

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.lad en.info is.

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.

Re:Why not give PEOPLE addresses?

[Mercano]

It wouldn't really be routable. There would be no way figure out which way to send the packets for a given "address." For istance, under IP4, any router that sees a packet going to any machine with an address starting with 129.22 (one of the few blocks I know off the top of my head) knows that the packet should be pushed out a pipe that heads in the general direction of Cleveland. In fact, most routers probably work off even broder rules, with (just making this up, now), all address starting with 129.17-129.32 should be pushed out towards OAR net, then OARnet would do more focused routing in house.

With "people address", there are three problems. First, no way to generalize routing rules. Secondly, there is the fact that all your stuff might not be in the same place. Most of it is at your house, but some of it is at the vacation home. Finally, there is the problem that people, unlike IP4 address, tend to move arround alot, geographically speaking. Usually, if you move from New York to LA, you get a different IP, even if you use the same national ISP. Under your scheme, the whole internet would have to be told to redirect your trafic. Yick.

Re:What About Private Address Space?

[TheRaven64]

Rubbish. NAT is not a security measure. If you have port {whatever this week's virus uses} forwarded, you are just as vulnerable as if you don't use NAT. Similarly, if you have a public IP and a firewall between you and the Internet which doesn't allow anything through on that port, you are secure.

A public IP with everything other the VoIP and (for example) BitTorrent blocked is much more useful, and no less secure than NAT.

Re:"Billions and billions"

[Anonymous Coward]

however many thousands of addresses in the range 10.0.0.[0-256]

Sorry, but I have to completely discount technical analysis and discussion from anyone who writes 2^24 as "however many thousands" when discussing a technical subject in a technical forum. Nothing personal, mind you, but it demonstrates either (a) a lack of basic math skills which are essential, even reflexive, to anyone really knowledgeable in this space or (b) a lack of attention to detail. In either case, your analysis is of much less value given that there are people around who actually do understand the topic.

Re:But when?

[Scott Wunsch]

Longhorn has an IPv6 stack built in, find your favourite Linux distro and demand an IPv6 stack in that.

What Linux distribution doesn't have an IPv6 stack built in these days?

And for that matter, Windows users don't have to wait for Longhorn either. Windows XP has an IPv6 stack built in too: How to install IPv6

You don't understant the Internet

[swillden]

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.

Re:Haha...

[NIN1385]

Awww... c'mon, that's classic family guy comedy!

Re:I don't get it

[Anakron]

Why does IPv6 make P2P any easier to implement?

It allows you to make direct connections from any computer to any other computer connected to the Internet. The way it was supposed to be. I'm guessing most peer to peer applications contain a lot of code that is designed to work around NAT.

Why does it remove the need for servers?

It doesn't. Not servers in the sense we normally think of them

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 believe what he is referring to is the fact that Skype tries to set up a connection between two users who are both behind NAT boxes by using another computer that is not NATed. That part wouldn't be necessary. We'd still need the Skype software, though.

you'll still need [...] software vendors like Skype

Right. It's just that Skype wouldn't need to use the kinds of ugly kludges they do now to get around NATed users.

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

The hope is that nearly no one will have to be NATed. Please don't start that security story again. NAT is NOT about security. NAT boxes usually also perform firewall duty (and usually not very well). That's it

but that won't affect anything much

I disagree. I think it will help a great deal. Network administrators and creators of network-aware applications spend a great deal of time trying to make sure that NATed users won't see much of a difference (and it needs to be reinvented for every application). If they no longer need to spend time trying to work around such a broken concept, we can hope to see real innovation.

Re:IPv6 Changes

[silas_moeckel]

And the ISP's are asking where the profit in doing it is? There are a lot of downfalls to providers Multicast being the big one along with a whole lot of training. I do love all the people that think all of a sudden there toasters can have real IP's and NAT will go away, nothing in IPv6 says they have to give you more than one IP without paying more for it just like today.