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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."
Like Jabber. if my IP was 1:2:3 then my fancy Intenet Coffee Pot would be 1:2:3:coffeepot1
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]
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.
Private addresses + NAT is not a security measure, although it looks like one.
The same issues can be addressed without the need for NAT and private addressing.
The main reason private addressing is used is because getting public address space is a hassle... whether people realize it or not.
Just imagine.. if you could just have a million public IP addresses that worked, why wouldn't you use them?
I always understood that ipv6 has the ability to send 1 packet to mupltiple persons at once. So for example if you use bittorrent, and there are 7 people connected then you only have to send out 1 packet to reach to 6 people in stead of 6 packets with ipv4.
The rest I don't know
Except you're assuming that you force every network programmer to design their client/server programs the right way. I've lost count of the number of times my company has had a turf war over a vendor trying to force a badly designed client/server setup on us where for example , the vendors wants to directly connect to 3000 devices on our network. (oh but of course we both use the same RFC1918 space...ie all of it). So what happens......they ask me to setup 3000 static NATs. This is the kind of work that makes me pull my hair out, and its all caused by crappy choice by software designers who have no grasp of the issues faced by network/firewall people at the IP layer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Doesn't qmail need a non-DJB patch to use IPv6? I enjoy Bernstein's writing, but in this case, he is doing a whole lot of talking and not a whole lot of acting.
Personally, my entire home network is IPv6. If people don't want to use IPv6, that's fine with me. My ISP charges me $10/month for static IPs, but with IPv6, I got 2^64 of them for free. 2^64!!! That's 2^32 more than all the IPv4 addresses in existence.
I think it's easy to see why people don't want IPv6. Without artificial scarcity, they can't gouge you for IP addresses.
My other car is first.
I feel the ISP's have to be the ones who make the first move. A not so great example but gives an idea of how I'm viewing this is an official language of a country. Since I'm from the states I'm going to use English as my example. Most people here naturally speak english. Sure you have others here or there who knows other languages but they can't communicate by in large with the rest of the country without knowing english(thus its a GREAT benefit to know english). Now if there was a movement by a good portion of the poplulaton to move to spanish, what benefit would other people have moving to spanish if the key people(in this case the gov) still back english and will not change?
That's how I look at the whole situation, until the key players, namely the ISP's, are willing to change to ipv6 there is no advantages of small/medium size businesses to switch over because everyone else is still talking in terms of ipv4.
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?
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.
You may well have an argument, but I can't tell from the above comment.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"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.