IPv6 Transition to Cost US $75 Billion?

darthcamaro writes "There are alot of reasons why the US isn't moving as quickly as Japan and Europe in migrating to IPv6. One of those reasons is likely cost. An article on Internetnews.com cites an unreleased 'Dept. of Commerce report estimating it will take $25-$75 billion to pay for the transition.'"

Comments

$25-$75 billion

[biocute]

$50B difference is huge, this goes to show nobody knows what's going on.

I guess USA's high internet adoption and usage actually hinder its move.

This reminds me of China's ability to build its new Shanghai rail based on the magnetic levitation system, while other well-established rail-using nations like Singapore may find it difficult to switch. Talk about right place right time.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[ProfaneBaby]

It's hard, very hard, to know exactly what hardware every company has, and more importantly, how that hardware is used.

The vendors may know what the big guys have (how many IPV4-only routers and switches have been sold to company X, for example), but you still have to know how that's going to be used. You could go native IPV6 on all public facing hardware, and IPV4 on internal only (perhaps on disconnected networks), so even if you know how much hardware exists for IPV4, that doesn't tell you how much has to be replaced...

It's a difficult problem, and it's not going to be much fun. As a netop myself, I'm slightly more worried about 16bit AS numbers than IPV6, though.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[lgw]

Eventually though, all the IPv4-only equipment will reach the end of it's natural life, and be upgraded to IPv6-compatible equipment, and the IPv6 support won't cost anything extra. Unless you're upgrading early just to jump on IPv6, there rally no equipment cost at all. Sure, there's some manpower cost in learning how IPv6 works, but that's the nature of the industry. This reports looks like an excuse for someone to not adopt quickly.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Anonymous Coward]

It's sort of like going from the British Engineering System to metric. Most of our new engineering work is done in both BES and SI, but it's all the old stuff that prevents the switch. Once the infrastructure and technology is built, it is designed to operate for 50 or more years (I've seen steam turbines and reduction gears than have run constantly for 60 years). While there are tons of Euro-weenies that complain that we don't switch because of our stubbornness, they had a 50 year headstart without all the baggage from the latest period of the industrial revolution. And heck, give us a break, we did introduce the world's first decimal currency.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess USA's high internet adoption and usage actually hinder its move.

But even higher internet adoption in Europe and Japan doesn't hinder their moves, most strange.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Anonymous Coward]

$50B difference is huge, this goes to show nobody knows what's going on.

It's government. Aim for the midpoint, and double that = $100 billion.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[metternich]

$50 Billion here, $50 Billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money...

Re:$25-$75 billion

[pHatidic]

More likely it would take 25 billion if we did it today, but by the time we actually get around to doing it the cost will be 75 billion.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[luvirini]

That is mostly because those people planning the infrastucture there are not all bound by quarterly results and can at times spend a bit extra now to avoid spending a lot later.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminds me of China's ability to build its new Shanghai rail based on the magnetic levitation system, while other well-established rail-using nations like Singapore may find it difficult to switch. Talk about right place right time.

Yeah. That's true. Early adopters (those who have implemented railroads in the last 150 years) can often get burned by the fast pace of technological change. Sometimes getting your hands on early technology isn't worth the costs. It's hard to justify a measley 100 years of railroad use when they could have just waited for magnetic levitation systems.

To think my grandparents wasted all that money on a party-line telephone, when they could have saved their money and done VoIP.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Lord_Dweomer]

'I guess USA's high internet adoption and usage actually hinder its move."

I also wonder if it is the population density that affects things as well. Remember, thats one of the reasons we're not all on 12mbit connections for $10/month. Its because we're all so damn spread out. But in places like China, you have to change far fewer main lines to get everybody (not that I claim to know what I'm talking about here, but it sounds right in theory at least).

Re:$25-$75 billion

[tyagiUK]

"It's hard, very hard, to know exactly what hardware every company has, and more importantly, how that hardware is used."

So why bother making an estimate?

Either say nothing, or make a statement based on well-understood and well-researched facts.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[SatanicPuppy]

I don't know, I mean, where I work (and we have a metric ton of network hardware) transitioning to IP6, at least as far as dealing with the rest of the world, would be pretty easy.

As far as the internal network goes it'd be a nightmare, but in that case, why switch internally at all? No real need to at this point, we could do the translation without too much trouble. Let the internal stay IP4 until all the software/hardware becomes ip6 compatible, THEN switch.

Numbers like this are always pulled out of thin air. Sure it'd be a pain in the ass if we had to up and switch today, but it wouldn't be that bad to switch in 5 years or so if we mandated compatibility today.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[mctk]

(not that I claim to know what I'm talking about here, but it sounds right in theory at least)

Ahh, the old slashdot EULA.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Keruo]

well, compared to war in iraq, which has already cost $215 billion dollars,
if the transition would take $25 billion, it could have been done 8 times alredy.. and still have some "change" left

Re:$25-$75 billion

[rm69990]

As a Canadian, this rule doesn't fit. We have more land mass than the US, 10% of the population, cheaper/faster internet, and it is more reliable. For instance, where I live, the slowest Cable/DSL I can get is 3 MB/s, and it has gone down maybe 4 or 5 times in 2 years. The company sent out a technician, as we were the only ones in my area experiencing the problems, and it was faulty wiring in the house causing the problem. Since that was fixed, it hasn't gone down once. For $80 a month, we get phone with unlimited long distance (in the US and Canada), cable tv with a lot of extra channels and internet.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Rimbo]

This reminds me of China's ability to build its new Shanghai rail based on the magnetic levitation system, while other well-established rail-using nations like Singapore may find it difficult to switch. Talk about right place right time.

Well, I think you're right about the pre-existing infrastructure being a problem. Another problem you can face is that building something new ticks off the general population.

Shanghai's maglev to Pudong Airport wasn't a walk in the park. The biggest thing is that they had to build the tracks using concrete instead of metal (I forget why, but I think it had to do with the fact that Pudong is basically a man-made island? or the cost of the metal? Crap, I forgot). The problem with concrete is that it doesn't expand and contract freely the way metal does. They had to develop an entirely new form of concrete for the rail as a result. Now note: This is not just your typical "new tech has to be developed" thing; trying to get concrete to have the properties of metal is really trying to get a zebra to change its stripes. We're talking, "Hi, would you please revolutionize the field of materials science for us?" Now while many vital details slip my mind (it was in a conversation a few years ago with my wife's uncle, who led the concrete development, and what little I remember was what my wife translated for me), "developing a new form of concrete to use instead of metal" is up there in degrees of difficulty along with "ditching existing infrastructure."

More importantly, if you look at what China's done to Beijing for the Olympics, where all of the old neighborhoods and streets are being scrapped in favor of ten-lane streets and high-rise grids as far as the eye can see, you'll see that China has absolutely zero qualms about eliminating existing infrastructure to replace it with a different one. It's easier when you don't have an electorate to report to and don't have to worry about the people you're displacing voting you out of office.

So I think your example is a better example of this than it is an example of pre-existing infrastructure being a problem.

The USA has both of these problems, so it's always going to be the last to get major infrastructure improvements.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[zojakownith]

you wouldnt happen to live relatively close to the US border, in the south eastern part of canada would you?

Re:$25-$75 billion

[bigberk]

$75 billion is nothing. Google's market cap is $122 billion. So when you're talking about the cost within the technology sector, the cost of this transition is not even as much as the worth of a single tech company.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Anonymous Coward]

See, there's Canada, and then there's that bit of land between Buffalo and Detroit.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Traiklin]

(not that I claim to know what I'm talking about here, but it sounds right in theory at least) Ahh, the old slashdot EULA.

so...that must mean it's not worth anything and can't be enforced excpet in courts that don't understand you don't legaly sign anything when you press a button?

Re:$25-$75 billion

[TedCheshireAcad]

7/10 people prefer to make estimates on things they know nothing about.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Loconut1389]

more like: 3 to 10 people make estimates on things they know nothing about. :o)

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Anonymous Coward]

That's an old one... but the timing was great. My first real laugh of the day. Thanks!

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget adoption rates and instead look at raw number of people.
-!!!

Re:$25-$75 billion

[IdleTime]

Change to IP V6 has very little to do with distance or where people live.

Why this is to expensive for the best, richest, smartest, thoughest country on the face of the Eartjh, is a mystery. Maybe pourimg more money into USA rather than wasting it in Iraq? But I guess a lot of criminal organisations like Hallinburton would be mad. How dare people take away their loot^H^H^H^Hrevenue.

If number of humans per square miles had anything at all to do with speed and price, New York would have 1GB for $1 a month compared to other places in USA and the world, so you are totally on the wrong track.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Anonymous Coward]

Eventually though, all the IPv4-only equipment will reach the end of it's natural life

I'm sure it will. But a lot of network gear is really reliable. My company still has some 3com hubs that are more than 10 years old.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Professor_UNIX]

But even higher internet adoption in Europe and Japan doesn't hinder their moves, most strange.

Not really strange.. there's really no IPv4 address space crunch here in the USA. Most people have become accustomed to using NAT, but even if NAT hadn't taken off, the USA has a huge surplus of unused IPv4 address space compared to the allocations given to the rest of the world. Pull back some of the millions of addresses grandfathered to early adopting universities and government sites and you will have more than enough for the entire USA. Does GE really need 16 million addresses? Does the Army's Yuma Proving Grounds need 16 million addresses? How about HP? Do they need 16 million addresses? Force these kinds of groups to prove they are using that much address space, if not they should be forced to readdress their networks and give back all that unused classical A space so it can be subnetted into smaller CIDR blocks. Once you run out of that, start doing it with the old class B networks. Most companies can get by perfectly fine exposing only a handful of routable addresses on the Internet and NAT'ing the rest.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[dadragon]

What does that matter? All of Canada has good internet and cable access.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[DigiShaman]

I bought a ticket to that maglev when it was time for my return flight back to the US. While it was fun, it's also not practical. The way the seats are laid out is almost identical to being inside the cabin of a plane. That is, you're buckled in. The very fact it rides...make that fly a few inches above the track makes it very unsafe for mass transportation of people. So packing people in train standing up like in a subway is NOT going to work.

Basically, here is how my return flight worked out. I woke up from my hotel to check out. I hopped from three buses before I reached the subway (I hate walking underground packed with people around me). Next, I took the subway clear across Shanghai to the Maglev train. At my last stop I arrived at Pudong Airport. With this all said and done, I would have saved more time taking a non-stop taxi ride from my hotel to the airport. The only reason I didn't to this is because the cabbies will FUCK you on the fair. Why not? I'm a round eyed American, so it's to be expected.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[appleLaserWriter]

I would like to take this opportunity to announce that I am willing to move the US to IPv6 for $24 billion.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[JWSmythe]

    Kind of like:

    98% of all statistics are made up, including this one.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[JWSmythe]

    Actually, the current estimate on the war in Iraq is $350 billion. But hey, what's $135 billion dollars between friends. :)

    The estimated daily cost in late 2004 was $177M per day. Take a few months off of the war, and you have the cost of migration.

    There are many better ways to spend that cash though. Think schools, healthcare, infrastructure, and job training.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[afidel]

So? I have 5Mbps cable, unlimited in state calling with international rates at 3.9 cents per minute, and a decent cable package. Total cost: $80/month. Of course that's $US, but the way our currency is going that's about to become the same as $Canadian.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[CraigV]

I doubt the figures include all future costs of benefits to the injured and families of dead. Also, I suspect there will be an enormous rebuilding cost to replace equipment and supplies that may not be replaced/replenished as fast as they are being worn-out/destroyed.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[vistic]

The European Union (which doesn't include all European countries, even) has a population of 456,953,258 (July 2005 est.)

Japan has a population of 127,417,244 (July 2005 est.)

While the United States has a population of 295,734,134 (July 2005 est.)

(Canada is 32,805,041 [July 2005 est.])

If you look at raw numbers... I would say Japan and Europe have us beat by quite a bit.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Alrescha]

"As a Canadian, this rule doesn't fit. We have more land mass than the US, 10% of the population, cheaper/faster internet, and it is more reliable."

I'm sorry, but I can't let this slide. Shaw and Rogers Cable (the two cable providers in Canada) have both implemented draconian on-the-fly bandwidth limiters which effectively nuke anything that isn't pure HTML/HTTP or 'approved'. Heaven forbid you run bittorrent, edonkey, or even commercial TCP-based software that they don't recognize - your throughput will fall thru the floor faster than you can spit.

Why do they do this? One can only guess.

Curious? Want references? Just type appropriate keywords at dslreports.com.

A.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[IAmTheDave]

There are many better ways to spend that cash though. Think schools, healthcare, infrastructure, and job training.

You mean like, by putting in an IPV6 network? It blows my mind that we can talk about $75B like it ain't no thang. Although, perhaps Bill will be philanthropistic enough to foot a quarter or so of the bill. We'll just go ahead and name it the Microsoft Vista Network 360 XP.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[AJWM]

How much of that $215 billion would have been spent anyway on routine costs (including housing, training, etc) if the deployed forces had just stayed home? Sure, it costs a lot to deploy, but even a standing army (navy, air force...) ain't cheap.

In other words, what's the incremental cost of the war in Iraq?

Re:$25-$75 billion

[shaunbaker]

almost, but any CIO worth his pay would have done a NPV analysis of the situation and presented the findings to the CEO. You could even ammortize the expenses out so that any single quarter wouldn't be overly effected, you know, kinda like how they pay for factory upgrades. But then agian, bashing capitalism is so much more fun. Maybe there are other reasons they are holding out.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Doesn't HP have two sets of 16M addresses, or did they give one up? My understanding is that both HP and Compaq had an A domain each, then they merged.

While reallocating IP addresses only delays the inevitable, I think it would help ease the transition by not having to force new hardware purchases only for the sake of v6, but simply becase that hardware would need to be bought eventually to replace aging or outgrown hardware.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[FLEB]

Solution: Bomb IPv4 installations.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[hazem]

That's all fine until the CFO says we need to cut costs now... because shareholders and the stock buying public don't understand NPV - they just want to know why you're spending more on infrastructure when the stock price is going down.

It's stupid, but sadly, we are a stupid people, bound by our stupidity to make stupid decisions.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[jZnat]

Damn Mexicans and their cheap infrastructure upgrades...

Re:$25-$75 billion

[EvilOpie]

Also, don't forget that Compaq bought out Digital Equipment Corporation, who *also* had a class A netblock. So I started searching around, and I found a Wikipedia article that has a list of class A netblocks.

While I don't see Compaq in the list, I do see Hewlett-Packard (15.x.x.x) and DEC (16.x.x.x). So while I can't prove who currently owns what, it certainly sounds like HP may have given one class A back, and kept one class A under DEC's old name.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Nethemas the Great]

It's real simple. If ISPs upgraded to IPv6 then there would be plenty of addresses to hand out. There would not be any reasonable argument against handing out a static address to each and every one of their customers. There are however a limited supply of IPv4 addresses. Right now most people are hiding out behind a NAT. If they want a static address though their ISP will be happy to give them one for a small monthly fee. I if memory serves I believe my ISP would be happy to give me one for $25/month.

--Neth

Re:$25-$75 billion

[JWSmythe]

    The current rebuilding estimate was $50 billion.

    And yes, none of those numbers seem to include anything towards human costs.

    I seriously doubt they'll be cutting checks to the families of the dead, or doing a socialized health care to help the injured. Hell, even here, they're cutting back on VA benefits, so even American service men and women may be seriously injured and not have enough income to survive. Ask any local Vietnam vet.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[JWSmythe]

    I know..

    I'm looking at moving expenses to cross the country. Gas for a 26' U-Haul will be $1,500. I look at that and say, "Fuck, $1,500, that's a lot of money.". I think we get lost in the fact that we know it's a number, but really we've gotten very used to numbers, and it really doesn't sink in.

    $75,000,000,000

    That's 15,000,000,000 $5 shooters in a club. That's a lot of drunk people. :)

    That's 3,750,000,000 large pizza's delivered, with tip.

    Like, every man, woman, and child in America could get 10 pizza's delivered to them.

    Or you could buy 750 million $100 laptops. :)

    Ok, I'll stop being silly now.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[pete-classic]

I certainly no expert on Canada. I do, however, own a map. I'm highly skeptical that the far reaches of Yukon or Nunavut have "good internet and cable access."

-Peter

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Rimbo]

So I talked to my wife and got the refresher course on the maglev.

So the short version is that the Pudong Airport train is their prototype for long-distance transit infrastructure. Like the United States, China has vast tracts of land to get supplies around. Unlike the United States, airplanes are uneconomical due to the huge per capita cost of an air system (China has a lot more capita than the United States, y'know). So the next idea is to do a maglev. Thus, the airplane-like seating arrangement; this is not intended for short subway-like commutes ultimately.

There are two high-speed (400km/h-600km/h) maglevs: The Japanese one and the German one. The German one has the higher setup cost, but the lesser maintenance cost, so they chose that one.

Now the tracks need to be built within a couple of cm of spec for the German high-speed maglev. Metal is easy to fashion this way. Concrete is cheaper, but in order to get concrete to flow into useful shapes, you have to use more water, which weakens the concrete. Her uncle's foundation's innovation was a concrete additive that makes the concrete flow into place much more easily, so that you get quick-flowing concrete without as much water. That part of the Pudong train succeeded.

The problem was that the German train rusted and wore out much more quickly than advertised. At the speeds this thing travels, a little bit of bad maintenance can lead to a lot of kaboom. So China is still planning on using maglev trains, but only ones in the 200km/h-300km/h speed range. They're not as high-end, and more easily maintained.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[quarkscat]

Considering the times in which we live, the price differential is understandable. It will cost $25 Billion USD if it is only the US government and the universities convert, while issuing yet another Federal unfunded mandate (like "No Child Left Behind" or Medicare/Medicaid requirements passed to the states). But it will cost $75 Billion USD (estimated) if the entire conversion to IPv6 is turned over to "most favored" government contractors.

Anyone want to place a bet on exactly what each "Class C" IP address range will cost the average American taxpayer? The regime currently in power has a penchant for passing the greatest fiscal burdeon on to those already most heavily taxed (or their children and grandchildren). The promise of ubiquitous USA broadband internet and the era of "every appliance internet aware" have thus far fallen far short of the mark.

As an already overburdeoned USA taxpayer, anticipation of my "share" of the conversion cost to IPv6 makes me happy just to have IPv4 and NAT.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's another piece of perspective; If you count out one billion dollars at the rate of one per second, you will be more than 32 years older when you finish than when you began.

--

Re:$25-$75 billion

[rob_squared]

"Take a few months off of the war, and you have the cost of migration."

Did anyone else read this and picture troops in humvees laying fiber optic cables around the US?

Re:$25-$75 billion

[rob_squared]

The other 4 are just bad at math.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[djimi]

HP owns both 15 & 16.x.x.x - according to whois

Re:$25-$75 billion

[slazar]

and your 3com hubs are ipv6 compatible! Why do you still have that crap around??? Unless everything on it has a 10baseT nic on it... heh

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Kagura]

What are you talking about? In the US, military retirees still get the same check every month that they were guaranteed when they retired from service. And I guess you didn't hear that they recently upped the max life insurance payout for soldiers from $250,000 all the way up to $500,000. Seems like you know little about what you are talking about.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[dadragon]

Well, Yukon apparently has the highest rate of broadband connectivity in Canada. See here. As for Nunavut, you're right. It's hard to get broadband internet outside Iqaluit as far as I know.

The problem is that it's more expensive than it is in the rest of Canada.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[rleibman]

gawk, I hate that argument... if we only could save money from x we could spend it on y. How about not taking it away from the people who made it in the first place? You know, us taxpayers? There's a change.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[jimmypw]

Of course their comptible they work on the Datalink layer which is before IP even cpme in to it.

In short if it aint broke dont fix it.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Ex-MislTech]

China has old rails too, they are just flush with cash as all manufacturing in
Old Europe and the USA has been outsourced to China, Mexico, and other countries
where there are no unions, no OSHA, less worker rights .

Wal-mart is building the largest building in that country as a warehouse to ship here .

With their large infusion of cash, fastest growing economy on earth, they
can do MANY things included build the largest dam in the world, and start
a planned space program to the moon .

The city of industry in California is a tax/tariff free zone that large amounts of
near shored product is stored til it is ready to ship/truck/air/rail to consumers here
in the US .

Many billions of dollars is what allowed china to build a mag lev rail, not lack of
railroads .

Here is a map of the railroads in china .

http://www.nordling.nu/schaefer/chinamap.gif

Only the deep interior has a lack of railroads .

Singapore is losing its grip on cash flow due to other nations undercutting them
cost wise , and that is why u see M$ investing in India not Singapore .

It is all about a race to the bottom, whoever does it for less, gets the billions .

The rest will have to make due with what they can scrape up and hope they
can do something for less than the rest of the world .

In the not so distant future, u will see nothing manufactured in the US, and you will
see no food grown here, and truck drivers will not be citizens as well as all manual
labor .

Mexican truck drivers can already cross from mexico into the US thou they cannot read the
signs, and the trucks do not have to meet the safety standards that US trucks do .

Yea baby !!! yea !!!!

Peace,
Ex-MislTech

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Sathias]

$50B difference is huge, this goes to show nobody knows what's going on.

Or maybe the $25B is the actual cost, and the $75B is if they out-source it to Halliburton contractors ;)

Re:$25-$75 billion

[jadavis]

So let me get this straight: if you have your own money invested in a company, and it's stock price is going down, and they were spending all their money on network upgrades, you wouldn't ask why?

It sounds great as an outside observer. But at some point you have to ask what the real gain is, and when it's going to happen. And that's not stupid at all.

For most businesses now, the cost of IPv6 will be high, and the cost of migration later may very well be less than it is now.

Just because a technology is an inevitability does not necessarily mean that people who wait are short-sighted.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Wikipedia]

And look at the Computer Sciences Corporation: CSC employs 78,000 people in 88 countries. That's 205,000 addresses per person!

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Fred_A]

New new !
3Com hubs now IPv6 compatible !
Upgrade now !

Don't be left behind with your old crappy IPv4 hubs, our new hubs are ready for the Internet of the future !

Upgrade now for $99.95 !

(hum)

Yes, well, it would work with a lot of users)

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Fred_A]

Don't be silly, if you didn't take money from taxpayers, they wouldn't be taxpayers anymore. Then they wouldn't be ANYTHING !

Re:$25-$75 billion

[minus9]

"Why this is to expensive for the best, richest, smartest, thoughest country on the face of the Eartjh, is a mystery. Maybe pourimg more money into USA rather than wasting it in Iraq?"

You forgot "Best Educated".

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Jason Earl]

Exactly. Even if your company is doing well putting off major network upgrades like this will almost certainly have a cost benefit as other companies go through the pain of being early adopters. As time passes IPv6 hardware will get less expensive, IPv6 network stacks will get real world testing, and it will be easier to find administrators with IPv6 experience.

The reality of the situation is that, without some sort of a crunch, most everyone is going to want to stay on IPv4 until someone turns out the lights on those protocols.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Firethorn]

Your paying alot for it then. My static IP is $12 a year.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[ozmanjusri]

While there are tons of Euro-weenies that complain that we don't switch because of our stubbornness, they had a 50 year headstart

Australia switched between 1972 and 1980, one industry at a time, while about a third of all other metric countries changed over between 1960 and 1980. It wasn't that difficult.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[FireFury03]

So why bother making an estimate?

Because a bad estimate that makes something appear expensive gives you an excuse not to do it.

This isn't a lot different to "we must go to war because there are WMDs in Iraq" - bad research which can be used to justify stuff.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[FireFury03]

Your paying alot for it then. My static IP is $12 a year.

My static /29 subnet is free... If your ISP doesn't do that then I guess you need to shop around a bit - a large percentage (i.e. well over 50%) of the ISPs here in the UK will do static IPs by default and small subnets for free on request (usually they'll to a /30 without question and a /29, /28 or /27 without quibbling if you fill out a RIPE form showing why you need it).

Re:$25-$75 billion

[blank axolotl]

Many of the French people that come here (NJ) (to work for a year or two) say they were shocked how old and antiquated everything seemed. The thing that stands out in their mind is all the telephone poles and the mess of wires over the streets. It's as if we were still in the days of the telegraph. Where they live all the wires are underground.

They expected the US to be modern and ahead of everyone else. But in fact, because we were the first to establish a lot of these technologies, we get stuck with the old obsolete version, and then it is too expensive to replace.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[MarkH]

Little more complex than ensuring network hardware is up to it. There is a lot of applications which think an ip address is a group of 4 numbers from 0-255 separated by dots.

Bit like year 2000 - going to be very hard for organisations to check all apps can cope.

Might be good check on the dependancy on Unix Epoch time while doing scanning applications

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Anonymous Coward]

Think schools, healthcare, infrastructure, and job training.

Right, but those don't ensure a perpetual war, which is the holy grail for the power elite. Those programs make government bigger and more powerful, of course, but compared to perpetual war (or even temporary war), those programs are small fries.

War is the health of the state. War is the single most effective route to power. History has proved it over and over again, and in fact, is proving it once again as we speak.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[dusik]

I've had to learn at work that "I don't know" is not accepted for a time estimate. People don't want to take responsibility. They want you to give a figure and then hold you to it.

People's worldviews are fragile. They have a notion of how things "should" be. And experts "should" always give estimates.

Am I off my rocker? That's just how it seems to me.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[ThosLives]

$75 billion is also roughly what it would cost to hire 1.5 million people for a year. So, yeah, the public is now hiring those people, but would the private sector support that many additional jobs? Nobody ever looks at the cost to bring all those people back. How many would come back to no job? Did the private sector save any money by not having to pay them? What about reduced gasoline consumption, power grid, water usage, and waste management since that many people are now overseas? A proper analysis will look at the public and private sectors, not just the public sector, because they are inextricably linked.

I can't say that having the forces deployed or not is better overall from a financial standpoint, as I've not done and not seen any analyses of that type. I would find such quite interesting though.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[jlnance]

This reports looks like an excuse for someone to not adopt quickly.

People don't need an excuse not to adopt. They require a reason why continuing with the current approach is not going to work for them.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Nethemas the Great]

Assuming you're not attached to a miserably slow ISDN line (last I knew there was much heel dragging regarding upgrading from obsolete yet expensive tech) nor having to take out a second mortgage to pay for it I envy you. Where I live I'm surrounded by much dark fibre and anchient charged copper. If I want anything beyond a 22.4 Kbps dialup around here I've got to point a dish at the sky and there aren't too many folks floating Buicks and offering let you suck on the tail pipe.

--Neth

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Anonymous Coward]

A quick, admittedly simplistic calculation. With a population of 295,734,134 (July 2005 est.), every man, woman and child in the good ole USA pays/owes $1183.50 for the Iraq action.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[FireFury03]

Assuming you're not attached to a miserably slow ISDN line (last I knew there was much heel dragging regarding upgrading from obsolete yet expensive tech) nor having to take out a second mortgage to pay for it I envy you.

It's a 2Mbps ADSL line, costs me about 20ukp / month (paid to the ISP) plus about 10ukp / month (paid to the telco for the POTS line). Other than having to pay for a voice line I hardly ever use (come on naked DSL!) the only problem I have with it is the rather slow 512Kbps upstream.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[mwood]

I suppose there was also some thought about (a) what it would cost over the interval to *not* transition to IPv6 (for example, techie hours spent figuring out how to do things that IPv6 would take care of for us) and (b) how much of that transition is going to happen over the interval anyway, due to attrition and to economies of scale from replacing entire infrastructures rather than maintaining a mixture of old and new products.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[hador_nyc]

Just because a technology is an inevitability does not necessarily mean that people who wait are short-sighted.

Good points all! It's like asking how many people have bought HDTVs when SDTV still is available with most of the programming and their SDTV still works just fine. Sure, I'll get a HDTV soon, but I don't need it yet. I'll get it when I do, and by the way, by waiting I'll save a few bucks. I wouldn't call that short-sighted either!

Re:$25-$75 billion

[wooferhound]

It's not the heat . . .
-It's the Stupidity-

Re:$25-$75 billion

[mwood]

No, I wouldn't. The stock price is going down because the stock price is going down. "Stocks closed broadly lower today on rumors that Alan Greenspan has tennis elbow." I used to try to understand why stock prices fluctuate, but I decided that only a herd animal can make sense of it. The market seems to hate customers, employees, and prudent management.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[mwood]

Guys, the "early adopters" finished a long time ago.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[mwood]

The only hardware that needs replacing for IPv6 is (a) routers lacking sufficient memory for longer addresses, or for two sets of routes during the transition phase, and (b) a tiny amount of hardware that handles IP addresses *in hardware*. There was a time when high-end routers used content-addressable memory for route lookup, but with processor speeds going up and costs going down, do they still do that?

BTW here we have several /16 networks, but even so the number of devices we have is causing a big expensive push to reallocate and reclaim as much as possible.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[HillaryWBush]

Why this is to expensive for the best, richest, smartest, thoughest country on the face of the Eartjh, is a mystery

"I am a great mayor; I am an upstanding Christian man; I am an intelligent man; I am a deeply educated man; I am a humble man." -- M. Barry, Mayor of Washington, DC

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Jason Earl]

Oh please. There are some "researchers" that are using IPv6, but you can't pretend that there is a significant install of production IPv6. I would be surprised if you could name one large organization that relied on IPv6 for its primary networking protocol.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[lgw]

I'm in the middle of this now for my company. I have no sympathy though - assuming that IPv4 was the only sort of address or network protocol you'd ever need was just silly. That may make the cost estimate more reasonable, however.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[JWSmythe]

    I didn't even think of that, but you know..... That isn't a bad idea. :)

Re:$25-$75 billion

[JWSmythe]

    That's always a valid argument.

    If we weren't paying roughly 20% or so on our income, plus 6% or more on our purchased items, plus.. well, they screw us every which way.. Lets just stick at 26%.

    If we weren't paying out 26% of our income to taxes, so the government could spend it any way they want, like wars that the majority don't agree with, economics would be a lot different.

    I was listening to an add on the radio, where they were saying the US Government has hired tens of thousands of new tax auditors, trying to get people who are cheating the income tax system. If they weren't collecting that tax, they wouldn't have the expense of paying the new auditors. It sounds like a failing business model.

    If people and businesses weren't paying out the money in the first place, we'd all individually have the money to pay for our own parts of the migration, plus many of the other things we 'need'. Government is all about control. Consider, why did we shift from citizen militia to organized military and no gun rights? Because the government needs that control. If the people were the military, and the majority had the power to say "Hey, we don't like that!", that would be bad for the government. With that said, Bush's approval rating lately has been in the high 30%. That means around 60% or so of the people don't approve.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[JWSmythe]

    You make a good point on the load of public utilities, but look at the losses from private companies. Say 10,000 troops were deployed from a base. In many places, the city by the base survives because of the base. Taking 10,000 individuals out of the population makes 10,000 individuals that aren't buying things locally. If I were, say a local cleaners, I'd be financially hurt due to any significant number of troops being deployed. Not everyone washes their uniforms at home. Many take them to me (the local cleaner) to get washed, ironed, and repaired.

    Grocery stores, liquer stores, and even places like video rental stores are hurt too. Even the local mechanic and gas station. While these troops are out, their cars are parked. They don't get oil changes. They don't get fueled up, and obviously they don't get repaired.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[shaunbaker]

I fear you missed my point. Any CIO would do a NPV on the situation and present it to the CEO. Likely, the reason the CEOs aren't jumping on the idea isn't because the shareholders don't understand NPV (they don't have to, good use of NPV will increase share price), it is probably because the NPV of making the switch now is much less than the NPV of making the switch in the future.

Why should I agree to pay for new hardware, training, a price premium for people that understand IPV6 when I could just wait until IPV6 hardware is commoditized and needed and make the rollout then? Plus, for many American companies, there aren't any benefits to migrating now. Most do not have an IP space shortage and the vast majority of those that do are perfectly contended with IPV4. I don't think Starbucks is ready for each cup of coffee to have it's own IPV6 address yet, once they need that, then you'll probably see people jumping on the bandwagon.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Nethemas the Great]

I'm dropping $70/month for my 1Mbps/200Kbps sat. Your $55/month is about the going rate for pipes similar to yours in the more civilized parts of the country (though not with the static IP) but alas, I live far from them.

--Neth

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Anonymous Coward]

50 B$ is not more than the US costs for 6 months US war in Irak...

Re:$25-$75 billion

[sn3ak3r]

Aleluia the only thing its true i'm not giving my oppinion because i really don't know nothing about ipv6 upgrades :)but keep up the good work XD

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Mr Z]

I think the class A the GP was refering to as Compaq's class A was the class A it inherited from DEC.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Bob_Robertson]

There are many better ways to spend that cash though. Think schools, healthcare, infrastructure, and job training.

Sounds great. Don't take the money in taxes in the first place, and I'll be very glad to spend it on just such things.

As a side benefit, without the bureaucratic overhead of filtering the money through government, more of the money will end up being used for making peoples lives better.

Bob-

Wrong angle

[Anonymous Coward]

They should have focused on how it will *GROW* the economy by creating $75 Billion in new jobs and infrastructure.

Re:Wrong angle

[ackthpt]

They should have focused on how it will *GROW* the economy by creating $75 Billion in new jobs and infrastructure.

Sorry, Charlie, but this administration couldn't give two bits for anything in silicon. It's all about petroleum, otherwise Michael Dell would be Secretary of Commerce.

Whatever you think you believe about this crop of economic vandals being pro-business you can just forget it, like any small business which has been infinitely more screwed by the oil price maniupulation than any jump in minimum wage or healthcare premium.

Re:Wrong angle

[qbwiz]

Maybe they should also focus on how it will crowd out investment in other things, by costing money that could be used for other things. Merely creating jobs that do something useless and creating worthless infrastructure wouldn't be a good use of money; we actually have to consider the value that we get out of it.

I'm not saying that converting to IPv6 is a bad thing. I'm merely saying that we have to consider if it's worth the money. If you want to go about creating jobs that do worthless things, why not divide the unemployed into two equal teams: those who screw nuts and bolts together for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and those who unscrew those same nuts and bolts, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week? That would certainly create jobs, and I'm sure we'd need to increase our bolt- and nut-making infrastructure.

Re:Wrong angle

[Poltras]

Hem! You _know_ oil is not going to last forever... don't you?

Re:Wrong angle

[luvirini]

depends on: can they continue programming the electronic voting machines to give the results they want?

Re:Wrong angle

[Headcase88]

And that closes the circle right back to silicon! Looks like the administration does care about electronics after all ;)

Re:Wrong angle

[Anonymous Coward]

They should have focused on how it will *GROW* the economy by creating $75 Billion in new jobs and infrastructure.

And the way to grow jobs is to throw away those snowplows and force the use of spoons to shovel snow off of airport runways.

Re:Wrong angle

[JDevers]

Actually, your solution may be better than you have considered. Considering the typical anger rates of Americans at some point you will have a giant internal war that kills millions of people. This will do two things, first war is almost always good for the economy and second this will primarily eliminate the unemployed.

Re:Wrong angle

[Anonymous Coward]

Damned, I was waiting for a comparison between voting machines and nazis...

Re:Wrong angle

[Seumas]

Hah. Hardly. As long as there is television, Americans will be too apathetic and delusionally contented to bother "rising up" or any such thing.

Re:Wrong angle

[Anonymous Coward]

The law of Bush: Whenever Bush (or a Republican) is mentioned in a discussion/argument - the probability of the mention of oil and/or evil corporations goes to 1 (I think the argument is instantly over as well).

Re:Wrong angle

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, the Broken Window Fallacy.

Re:Wrong angle

[IamLarryboy]

Okay, I understand the desire to look for the bright side, but the economics in the parent are just plain wrong.

If it takes $75B worth of resources, that is materials, production capacity, risk and labour, to switch to IPv6, that is $75B worth of resources that cannot be spent on other productive uses. It is not the case that suddenly $75B worth of income and infrastructure is going to appear out of thin air. No, resources must be diverted from other uses. This is what is know as opportunity cost.

This is the same issue that stupid newsmen were spouting off on after the New Orleans disaster. An entire city was wiped out yet they went on about how good it would be for the economy. WTF? An entire city worth of wealth was erased and this is somehow a good thing? Ya, some people will benefit, such as construction workers and sawmills. However, this is more than offset by the losses to just about everyone else. It will be offset to the tune of about 1 large city.

Think about it. If you could create wealth in this way you could simply bash your way to Billions with a baseball bat. Wealth comes from two sources. First, from taking existing wealth and converting it into more valuable wealth (production). Second, from re-arranging existing wealth from less valuable uses to more valuable uses (trade).

Now, it very well may be that the $75B investment is worth the cost. In fact, I believe this to be the case. I bet that over the years the investment will pay for itself many times over. However, the $75B it is going to cost is most certainly a cost and infact not a credit.

Re:Wrong angle

[JWSmythe]

    In accordance with Godwin's Law...

    The voting machines were built by Nazi's, because Bush is Hitler and the NWO is taking over.

    Or something like that. I couldn't resist an open inviation like that without saying something stupid. Go ahead, mod me down. :)

Re:Wrong angle

[Sithgunner]

While I'm on the side wanting quick IPv6 deploy, that statement, surely does create new business but as long as there is no 'return' from that investment, people will not start it...and it is very unclear at the moment what the return is by deploying IPv6, when everyone is thinking same and backing off. It's just 'don't fix if not broken' and 'it works as is so why waste?', IPv6 is not all about fixing but hopefully one day some big event flourish adoption...

Re:Wrong angle

[Helios1182]

Instead the Secretary of Commerce is from Kellog, the cereal company. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Gutierrez

Re:Wrong angle

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

Well 8 years is a lifetime.... ... for a US president.

Nothing needs to last more than 8 years.

Re:Wrong angle

[ichigo 2.0]

However, the $75B it is going to cost is most certainly a cost and infact not a credit.

Otherwise agree with you, but what makes debt any better than cost?

Re:Wrong angle

[JimB]

Um, I agree, but with a DIFFERENT angle. *IF* the U.S. is hanging on to 'control' of the Internet for some valid reason (other than some perverse pride), and *IF* having this 'control' is really a national security issue, then what will it cost the U.S. *NOT* to convert A.S.A.P. ??? The only reason that the U.S. is in some kind of 'control', is because it STARTED there. The ARPANET, then NFSNET were the beginnings. If some European countries, or China, create a widespread and highly used IPv6 infrastructure, then this 'control' will move across the sea. Period. I have no idea what this 'control' the U.S. has really *is*, nor do I know how 'important' it really is (and to whom), but whomever creates 'it' usually 'controls' it. If there is something to this 'control', and not having every decision digress into "committee debate", where EVERYTHING is agrued about ad-nauseum, then the U.S. had better act damned quick. If, as some very bright people I know say, it really doesn't matter, then so be it. I personally think that any move to take this 'control' completely out of the hands of 'techies' is a mistake.

Re:Wrong angle

[SgtChaireBourne]

Is that an allusion to Tecumseh's Curse? ;)

Re:Wrong angle

[mwood]

Actually I think it'll go both ways: the left wing and the right wing will wipe each other out while the vast majority are wondering what all the noise is about and is it serious enough to stand up and look out of the window.

Yee-Ha!

[ackthpt]

A mini-tech boom! Cisco will profit an anyone who makes switches which allow your old IPv4 stuff to communicate will make a fortune.

i'm applying for a patent on decaffeinated, low-fat, sodium free, left-handed wholly organic ipv6 veeblefetzers, axolotls and potrzebies

Re:Yee-Ha!

[Carthag]

Props for using potrzebie!

Re:Yee-Ha!

[Solosoft]

I honestly doubt that alot of the big high end router manufacturers will make alot of money off the switches. Most high end routers are alot of software and some of them even run Linux. And the WRT54G(s)(l) is a consumer grade router. The big boys already can support it and probably do.

It's the ISP's that it's going to kill. For a "true" ipv6 connection they would have to make sure there consumers are using a fully ipv6 compatable operating system, have a fully compatable cable / dsl modem (im not sure if most of the current ones are compatable but im pretty sure there not). ipv6 doesn't need a router so all the money Joe Servicepack spent on his nice "D-Link" router or his 2.99 bargin bin special ... it's not all bad it could switch his network. The consumer really doesn't pay anything it's the people "behind the scenes". There is no "ipv6" button on most ISP equiptment so there not going to go "oh lets press the button" then boom the net is on ipv6. If it where that easy im sure it would be done by now.

Anywho, im not in a big rush NAT is a hack but it seems to work alright. You really need to tweak some things to work behind it (like FTP) but other then that for most end users they really don't care. Plus it keeps securing a network easy being that there is only one device to take care of for many computers.

I have stepped into the 6bone world and I think it's really cool. Being able to setup RDNS and have 18 quintillion IP's to my name. Of course once the ISP's get to it im sure it won't be as fun, but still im sure going "well your house only gets 10 IP's or somthing of the such won't be taken lightly considering a /64 is the smallest chunk you can route (18 quintillion IP's) and the compeition will simply outdo them. I can't wait till I get to press the button on my linksys router to "AP" and not router :) im sure alot in here are too.

If your intrested in ipv6 and have a WRT I made a nifty little site on configuring it. Here is the link it deals with setting up your WRT with radvd to broadcast ipv6 all over your network. Few things to edit ... sign up to Hurricane Electrics Tunnel broker and set it to run on starting then enable ipv6 on your clients and bam ... your on the 6bone. The best thing is it's free.

I even happen to setup my website on ipv6 too so if you have ipv6 This should show you

Re:Yee-Ha!

[Tony Hoyle]

ipv6 doesn't need a router

WTF??

Of course it needs a router. An ipv6 capable router - and there aren't many of those around at the moment. Sure, a lot of the cheap 2.99 dlinks could be upgraded with firmware upgrades, but that all adds to the cost.

Re:Yee-Ha!

[Solosoft]

erm I ment a NAT router ... cause if your running ipv6 over NAT you should be shot ... or hurt or somthing ... and im not sure if joe sixpacks dollar store router can do ipv6 stock anyways. (NAT Router) that is ... why would you need a NAT router to route ipv6 ... sounds kinda pointless to me.

New proposed currency unit

[Anonymous Coward]

That's about a one-third of an Iraq War.

Re:New proposed currency unit

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha. Funniest comment I've seen all day! Cheers.

Re:New proposed currency unit

[Rainbird98]

No problem with the money, Iraqi oil will pay for it!

Re:New proposed currency unit

[spectre_240sx]

joke n. 1. Something said or done to evoke laughter or amusement, especially an amusing story with a punch line. 2. A mischievous trick; a prank. 3. An amusing or ludicrous incident or situation. 4. Informal.

I believe the parent remark does, in fact, fit this definition. Thus a moderation of Funny would make a hell of a lot more sense. Get a life people.

That's nothing...

[Aqua OS X]

That's nothing.

With all the money we've saved from taxes well be able to... ohh wait, nevermind.

Uh...

[Anonymous Coward]

How much money would be spent on upgrading routers and internet infrastructure anyway? I can claim that over the next 10 years internet infrastructure will cost over $100B, regardless of whether or not it's IPv6 compatable or not.

What's needed?

[Ironsides]

Since this changeover is going to require something new, does anyone have a list or know of a place that talks about exactly what needs to be done to switch over to IPv6? Like routing tables, software upgrades/changes, hardware upgrades, network changeovers and what else?

Re:What's needed?

[Feyr]

routers with beefier CPUs and ASICS, with load ands loads of ram.
consider that some routers come with 1 and 2 gigs of ram already, using the crude-and-wholly-underestimated number of 4x as much (128 bits vs 32 bits), without even accounting for the exponential increase in the possible number of routes (last week route count was 177k)... you get the idea.

and hundred thousands of man-hours to implement and test it all

in all practicality, ipv6 is flawed as it is, due to policies (thanks IANA!). you're basicly forced to renumber your network everytime you switch ISP for whatever reason. unless your name is MCI (which means you're the isp in the first place and won't ever have to renumber). anything under that gets screwed, from the small isp with 150-200 customers to the big one with 100k.

honest, i'm not deploying ipv6 anywhere just yet

Re:What's needed?

[Anonymous Coward]

sif your mum's basement needs IPv6 anyway.

Re:What's needed?

[Michael Hunt]

You don't seem to know what you're talking about.

Any ISP with 100k customers (or even one with an order of magnitude less) is going to be assigned a /32 (or shorter) prefix, which is guaranteed to be globally portable.

The basic structure of an IPv6 address is:
0-31 Top-level network bits
32-47 16 bits for customer allocations (/48)
48-63 Customers' subnetworks
64-127 Local subnet addressing (EUI64)

If you've been allocated a /48 by your ISP, sure, you'll need to renumber every time you change ISPs. If you've been allocated a /32 or shorter prefix by a RIR, then you won't.

BGP4+ Routing tables will also be correspondingly smaller, because they'll only contain a number of /32 prefixes (a much smaller number than the current IPv4 soup, which includes prefixes as long as /24 for legacy reasons.)

I humbly submit that you do more research in future.

Re:What's needed?

[anticypher]

The original report was by Juniper and presented to a group working on upgrading the U.S. government and military networks to be dual-stacked for both v4 and v6. Since Juniper sells very expensive equipment, they want to lessen the sticker shock for all their government buyers.

There are a lot (two words) of places to look for IPv6 dual stacking.

Start with the big IPv6 hardware equipment vendors, like Cisco, Juniper, and Foundry. Look at the (relatively) free implementations that exist today, like BSDs, OpenBGPd, Mac OS-X, some linux distributions, Windoze with a patch (and soon to be included by default in Vista). That will give you some background in what to do, but since you asked such a wide open question there isn't really any one place to point you. Its almost as if you asked "I need to set up the internet, is there someplace I can learn everything about it?"

Try subscribing to some IPv6 mailing lists, or at least browsing their archives. Lots to learn there, some technical, much political. Most of the political is from clueless noobs who have just barely caught on how to configure their home NAT router, and are terrified they will now have to spend another decade learning something slightly new. The real engineers consider the migration to a dual-stacked internet as just another excercise they have to do as with every new technology.

I will admit, there is a learning curve. I have over 20 years of IPv4 experience, and it still took me a while to pick up some of the subtleties of v6. BGP peerings takes some extra work, but then again, it took years to learn all I know about v4 BGP peerings.

I would love to see some of the major internet sites start serving up content via IPv6. Slashdot, which, unfortunately, no longer seems to have anyone technically competent running it, would be a huge boost to IPv6 if they started serving up AAAA records in DNS. Add extra karma during the first few months of early adopters who can connect with IPv6, and there would be a rush of competent geeks setting up IPv6 tunnels to their home networks and pressuring their upstream ISPs to support it natively.

There is a huge amount of work to be done before the internet can be dual stacked. Apache2 supports IPv6 addresses, but PHP, MySQL, Perl and a host of other apps/languages/scripts choke or die when presented with IPv6. The IETF working group moved IPv6 from draft to standard recently, and now we just have to wait until it works its way into more and more new devices. I'm waiting on Cisco to include IPv6 standard in all versions of IOS, just like IPv4 is now.

the AC

Re:What's needed?

[westlake]

Windoze with a patch

Calling it "Windoze" won't endear you to the 95% of the market that might be persuaded to download the patch. You want IPv6 content, give your ISP a real reason to upgrade.

Re:What's needed?

[Anonymous Coward]

routers with beefier CPUs and ASICS, with load ands loads of ram.

Bullshit. IPv6 is designed to counter exactly that. Simpler packets, simpler headers, less fragmentation resulting in smaller routing tables, etc.

Get a fucking clue.

Re:What's needed?

[Danathar]

This is ONLY true if blocks of address space are not dolled out in IPv4 fashion. The problem is that in the government and commercial world multi-homing to several ISP's for redundancy is the norm in IPv4. In an IPv6 envrionment there STILL is not a workable solution to having just about everybody subnetted.

I predict (and serveral people involved in IPv6 deployment on Internet2) that we'll end up giving /32's to MANY organizations because they'll want to connect to more than one ISP. Unless somebody comes up with a reasonable way for an organization with a /48 to be connected to two different ISP's (like my agency is under v4) for reduncancy.

Re:What's needed?

[Solosoft]

Windows with a patch ?

To enable ipv6 on a Windows XP machine goto run and type "ipv6 install" wait a few minutes and boom. If you got somthing like radvd running it will fetch the info it needs and assign the address.

Cause im running ipv6 on my WRT54Gs v4 running radvd and all my windows machines picked it up right away after typing that command. I think Windows 2000 needs a patch to get it to work but im sure by the time ipv6 becomes standard Windows 2000 will be unsupported.

Please don't be spitting out shit ... thanks

Re:What's needed?

[Feyr]

everytime there's a discussion about ipv6 i bring up this point, and i get people like you that didn't read the policy giving the exact same answer.

see http://www.arin.net/policy/nrpm.html section ipv6 6.5.1.1

To qualify for an initial allocation of IPv6 address space, an organization must:
a) be an LIR; --- most ISP aren't
b) not be an end site; --- large hosting company ? i'm sure they'll appreciate having to renumber
c) plan to provide IPv6 connectivity to organizations to which it will assign /48s, by advertising that connectivity through its single aggregated address allocation; and
d) be an existing, known ISP in the ARIN region or have a plan for making at least 200 /48 assignments to other organizations within five years. ---- yeah right, 200 /48 ? so that's what, 50-100k customers? depending on your business model

Re:What's needed?

[Tony Hoyle]

You nicely stepped over the complexity there.

You had to custom modify a WRT54G with a working ipv6 stack and radvd, then sign up with a tunnel broker (precious few of these left now - most of the ones from a few years ago died), and manually edit scripts to connect to that tunnel broker.

Or you could have tried to go the 192.88.99.1 route, only to find that most ISPs don't route it any more.

Then you've got an ipv6 connection. woo. With a probable ~300ms first hop and nowhere to go because there is *zero* commercial deployment. Enjoy your address space.

Re:What's needed?

[Eunuchswear]

I'm not a LIR.

I'm not even an ISP.

I have a provider independant IPv4 /24, an AS, I'm multihomed, I'm happy.

You want me to give that up when I move to IPv6.

Why? 'Cos CISCO sell the most expensive RAM in the world?

Think of a better plan.

Re:What's needed?

[Solosoft]

Yeah nowhere to go eh aparently quite a bit of people use ipv6 although not as much as ipv4 enough to put a dent. For somthing not even finished yet I would think there is enough traffic for it.

Most of the brokers died when they killed the 3ffe:: address space. If you notice they all still run in production space.

Re:What's needed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Connecting to more than one ISP without needing a provider independent address block is exactly what the IETF shim6 working group is trying to do.

Re:What's needed?

[Danathar]

Yea...I've been there.

I give them Kudos for trying. It looks like there is progress. But it's slow.

http://ops.ietf.org/multi6/

I was in a meeting with one of the main people involved with IPv6 deployment on I2. One of the sad things is that the multihome problem has been known for some time and it was assumed that SOMEBODY would solve the problem but the years just ticked on by.

I really can't see the gov moving forward unless this problem is solved....OR every gov agency will end up with it's own provider independant address block.

Re:What's needed?

[C10H14N2]

There are a lot (two words)

But, "A lot" is singular, ergo, it's "There IS a lot," no matter how awkward it sounds. I mean, would you say "there are a database?"

Don't taunt the grammar nazis.

Re:What's needed?

[anticypher]

I hang my head in shame. I should have caught that, so I'll blame my Euro/American schizophrenic language skills.

Where it gets confusing is when using a word which describes a group or number using a singular. The English would say "The press are biased" and the Americans would say "The press is biased", in both cases the word "press" describes a group of people working in journalism. In the case of "a lot of", I could be referring to either a singular set or a plural set, so the verb conjugation would have to match the subject.

the AC
Awww fsck it, I'll blame lack of beer^H^H^H^Hcaffeine

Re:What's needed?

[anticypher]

wait a few minutes and boom

Boom? It explodes? I don't touch M$ systems much any more, now I have a new excuse :-)

Sorry, it was wind{oze|ows} 2000 that needed a patch, I'm glad to see its much simpler in XP. I do have all my networks running IPv6 now (a few ISPs and a larger number of hosting companies). One of the bigger M$ installations I've hosted reports they just turned on IPv6 in the OS, patched IIS and dotNET for some critical IPv6 bugs, and their systems just worked. They only see about 1% of their total traffic on v6, entirely from macintosh users.

Its also good to see someone hack IPv6 onto a WRT54G, I've got a stack of them lying around that are pretty useless right now.

the AC

Re:What's needed?

[Luke-Jr]

A single tunnel broker is enough-- you couldn't use more than one if they were available. 192.88.99.1 6to4 routing works 100% here... so, yeah... it all works out fine.

OK Larry, 'fess up.

[MillionthMonkey]

How many Oracle licenses did you sell them this time?

Re:OK Larry, 'fess up.

[Anonymous Coward]

One per IPv6 Address

The most important question...

[rbarreira]

Is it really worth it?

Re:The most important question...

[Roj Blake]

Is it really worth it?

You are missing the point. While it might appear that this should be a discussion about the costs and benefits of going to IPv6, this is really just an opportunity to bash america in general and it's current administration in particular.

Think I'm wrong? Read the posts. As I'm writing this the vast majority of posts have nothing at all to do with the subject at hand.

Re:The most important question...

[Roj Blake]

Yes I realize I used it's instead of its. D'oh!

Re:The most important question...

[mnmn]

When you call IANA to ask for 5 more IP addresses to use for new servers, and get the answer of "ummm uhhh umm.. heheh.. uhhh." then you'll feel its REALLY WORTH IT.

Until then, its billions going down the drain, or millions if you switch away from cisco hardware.

Outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

Twenty-five to Seventy-five Billion! That's maddness! Why ... we'd have to cancel the war in Iraq for a month or two to pay for that!

K

Re:Outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

No you fool, then the terrorists will have won!!!

Re:Outrageous

[maddog2o_2o]

Oh sure, when I don't bother to log in I get lots of upmods! :-P

Kevin

PS - I know this is shameless and bad form but it honestly cracked me up ...

Re:Outrageous

[mnmn]

Or more simply, use headless Linux boxes instead of rediculous cisco 3700 and 3800 routers.

Then it'll cost next to squat.

Re:Outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely you know by now that just about any crack at the current US administration will get you modded up on slashdot...

Re:Outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

What obvious karma whoring...
And your estimate is as "accurate" as ever...just like a good little slashdotter would comment!

Re:Outrageous

[BushCheney08]

Obviously somebody failed math. I get -$50 billion dollars out of that. A cost of -$50 billion dollars is considered huge economic growth where I'm from...

Re:Outrageous

[glitch23]

*moves hands up and down* Freeing the oppressed people of Iraq and removing terrorists or deploying IPv6 for more IP addresses. Gee, I wonder which is more important to mankind?

Re:Outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

Or we could just cut NASA's budget.

At least the Iraq War is making a difference to people and to lives.

Re:Outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

Definitely IP6. It'll last longer and be less of a hassle.

Re:Outrageous

[AngryElmo]

*ahem* That would be fine if you were connected to Ethernet on the WAN side. But when your get into serial (Frame-relay/X.21 etc) or ATM, the cost starts going up rapidly. Also, remember that Linux routers use general purpose CPUs (not specialised hardware) and you may get into trouble routing at wire-speed for 100Mbps or higher. Anyone now how many packets a Linux router can forward per second?

Re:Outrageous

[elgatozorbas]

At least the Iraq War is making a difference to people and to lives.

Undoubtedly. Question remains what difference.

Re:Outrageous

[TCM]

Anyone now how many packets a Linux router can forward per second?

How many it may be, FreeBSD can do more. :)

Re:Outrageous

[Anonymous Coward]

freeing the oppressed people of Iraq and removing terrorists

Wow. You've really drank the kool-aid. Really.

Now if only we could stop killing the people of Iraq, call off our invasion of their country, remove our army bases from their midsts, and get some funding to finish the job of removing terrorists from where they are hiding in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. This could have been done 3 years ago. And no Iraq invasion was necessary.

All you no big-government bozo Republicans sure like to spend lots of money on unnecessary wars in far away places. It's almost like you can't follow your own principles.

Re:Outrageous

[VJ42]

How can it be karma whoring?
1. He posted as AC
2. The comment's been modded funny (no karma for funny).

Re:Outrageous

[glitch23]

Oh yeah, like we make it a point to kill the people of Iraq. Those who are being targeted are terrorists and I'm sure civilians die in the process but they are not being targeted. No war has 0 civilian casualties. We did not invade their country; we had covert military ops to infiltrate various targets in order to flush out their leader. The fact an army base exists anywhere does not detract from the lives of the people who have it in their midst.

Sounds like the amount that could be saved...

[ShatteredDream]

If we eliminated most of the fraud, waste and abuse in the government. With the Department of Education not being able to account for a majority of its budget, the Defense Department losing over $12B of tax dollars in Iraq and all of the pork that goes through Congress, I can't help but think that if the Congress didn't have the power to spend money on "internal improvements," we'd not be in this problem today.

The governments in this country waste so damn much of our GDP on pure bullshit that if we actually had fiscal responsibility, this would be non-issue. We have a GDP of $11T, does anyone actually think that if the costs associated with compliance, regulation, tax payments, etc. were much easier that corporate America would be bitching about this transition? It'd be just a drop in the bucket.

Re:Sounds like the amount that could be saved...

[RebelWithoutAClue]

If everyone indeed got rid of all the wasteful expenditure, what makes you think they'd want to pay for this ?

Re:Sounds like the amount that could be saved...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Department of Defense does not account for any of its budget. They haven't been required to for a very long time. If you wonder where the inefficiency in the United States government is, it is in profligate spending of that department.

Currently, the Republican party controls the house. the senate. and the executive branch. So, if you (or anyone else in these United States) would like to make a change in the status quo, get in touch with your representative and see how responsive they are to your needs.

Re:Sounds like the amount that could be saved...

[darkmeridian]

Invest on the IRS. It is estimated that every dollar spent on more auditing will return four dollars. The IRS extrapolates from its audits that there are billions lost each year due to noncompliance but does not have the wherewithal to audit all the taxpayers it wants. Somehow, it is not politically feasible to fund the IRS.

Re:Sounds like the amount that could be saved...

[zoloto]

Very true.
It would also be simpler to also have a co-ordinated infrastructure change where all the routers, switches and computers have the equal ability to run IPv6 on their equipment then on a "transition" week, everything would switch over. Maybe not even a transition week, but a transition weekend, where everything would transition over friday, saturday and sunday where "business hours" would not be effected too much.

This can be a mandated change for a specific weekend in the united states and the cost is simply the cost of "doing business" much like many other nights IT and sysadmin people have to do already. It could also be a "worldwide" effort, but that's just my idealistic nature coming out again.

Since microsoft windows, apple os x, linux and from what I gather, most other operating systems as well, would have the automatic ability to request an IPv6 address at no hassle to the user. I would also gather that cisco and other major switching/router mfg companies have this ability already, it would be well within their power and ability to do such an operation.

Re:Sounds like the amount that could be saved...

[Quiet_Desperation]

Currently, the Republican party controls the house. the senate. and the executive branch. So, if you (or anyone else in these United States) would like to make a change in the status quo, get in touch with your representative and see how responsive they are to your needs.

I have. They are exactly as unresponsive as they were when Democrats controlled it all. What's your point?

Re:Sounds like the amount that could be saved...

[cinnamon colbert]

"By funding corporations with tax dollars the GOP only has reinforced the public's suspicion that this is the party of the rich, the privileged, and the well-connected."
Gee, and I thought the republicans liked butlers, personal cooks and maids because they promote policys to create more jobs for them...how wrong was i !!

Re:Sounds like the amount that could be saved...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you like the status quo? Or, did that term go way over your head? DOD is swimming in money these days. It's unbelievable that no-bid contracts have been given again and again to Cheney's old company and others. Republicans are in control and when good Americans like Congressman John Murtha try to bring some sanity to our foreign policy and some control to the never-ending grab-bag of money for big business known as Iraq, he gets branded a traitor. So, yes, the Democrats are trying to do something about it. And the Republicans are obstructing fiscal sanity. What's your point?

Re:Sounds like the amount that could be saved...

[Jeremi]

I have. They are exactly as unresponsive as they were when Democrats controlled it all. What's your point?

That a two-party system is not adequate to meet our needs?

Re:Sounds like the amount that could be saved...

[Quiet_Desperation]

So, you like the status quo?

Uh... no. In fact, you were supposed to get the exact opposite implication from my comment.

Or, did that term go way over your head?

It's so cute when dumb people accuse others of being dumb. :)

What is the basis for the cost?

[dotslashdot]

The FA makes no mention of WHY it will cost that much. I don't know anything about IP6, but $75b makes it seem like they plan on rewiring the whole government. The article cites that "one speaker" estimated the cost between $25-$75b. Is the speaker trying to just jack up the price? Perhaps someone can explain what is involved so we can decide if the prices quoted are reasonable.

Re:What is the basis for the cost?

[tuomoks]

A very good question (IMHO) and I know "something" about IPv6. Now, of course, if that estimate is like many other I have seen in government/corporation contarcs, like $1 million modem programs, $2 million for simple SQL queries, and so on, it may even be a low estimate. I have real problems with companies billing millions of standard UDP/TCP/IP, encryption, compress, etc interfaces. But what do I know - I just write those as slow and as complicated as I'm told. IPv6 is not "rocket sciense" but a rather well defined protocoll which, amazingly, works with IPv4.

Re:What is the basis for the cost?

[Saint V Flux]

Essentially it means increasing the length of IP addresses (because we only have a finite number and with IPv6 they claim there's enough IP address for every grain of sand on the planet) and IPv6 includes more information in the header to allow for better efficiency / functionality. As a result of this you'd need new routers, switches, and possibly network cards. The new routers and such would have to be IPv6 and IPv4 compatible because you can't switch them all at the same time. Obviously, it will cost money to make the change, but I think the $25-$75 billion is just plain made up to try to scare people.

Re:What is the basis for the cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I can't say from where those particular numbers came, but I can tell you at least part of the reason why the government pays so much for some things. When I want to, say, buy a book for work -- and, yes, I do work for the US government -- I cannot simply go to Amazon's website and order it, even though it might be cheaper from them than from anyone else. I can get an estimate of the cost from Amazon, but I cannot place the order through them, for several reasons. First, because purchasing must get several estimates (and I'm not sure how they decide which one they will use) and, second, because we cannot buy from an online-only store. The same thing applies to computer equipment or office furniture. Even though we could get it much, much cheaper through NewEgg, we simply are not allowed to do so. I'm not sure if this is Department policy, or if it comes down from Congress; I think it's the later. Now, before anyone starts screaming about politicians doing this so that their "friends" can make a fortune off of the government, these policies, as annoying as they are, are there to, in fact, stop favoritism in procurement. Because we cannot use a single-source vendor, we cannot funnel business to any particular company. I'm not certain, though, why we can't order from online-only stores. My guess, though, would be that most of our business is required to go to local vendors. Anyway, the point is that these procurement regulations drive up the cost of just about everything we buy and that is part of the reason why the move to IPv6 (or anything else) will cost so much.

Re:What is the basis for the cost?

[alan.briolat]

... and possibly network cards

IPv4 and IPv6 are layer 3 protocols, meaning that they are independant of layer 2 (the link layer, network cards)

Re:What is the basis for the cost?

[Saint V Flux]

I couldn't remember if IPv6 would affect them or not, which is why I said "possibly". That only means that the $25-$75 billion figure is definitely a bunch of bs then.

Re:What is the basis for the cost?

[g-san]

This actually goes back to a research project at DARPA last year. They had two networks, and IPv6 network and IPv4, and a team of network admins to work on each one. Turns out the IPv6 team was slower, because of the length of IPv6 addresses. Apparently it took that much longer to write down an IPv6 address, or read it off to someone over a phone, or key into a Blackberry. People thinking they could remember an IPv6 address while walking across the room also introduced several errors into the configuration on the IPv6 network. This would of course result in less work done per manhour and therefore increases the cost of a unit of work given the same amount of workers. A quote from an Admin on the IPv6 network:

"OMFG, for the last time, did you say two zero zero one colon dee five six see colon zero one one two colon five ef bee three colon nine zero zero zero colon colon one colon nine... cause I still can't ping it! Oh wait, typo! No, it's still not working... DAMN!"

Re:What is the basis for the cost?

[Tony Hoyle]

Not really. It's probably an underestimate.

Replacing nearly every router, upgrading every PC, and a costly software rewrite that will make Y2K look like a walk in the park.

The software alone could cost $75Bn before you start on the hardware.

Rememver they initially specced 20 years for the switchover - and it hasn't really happened yet (in fact it's going backwards - compare the number of tunnel brokers to the number that existed a couple of years ago... there are very few now).

Re:What is the basis for the cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

(because we only have a finite number and with IPv6 they claim there's enough IP address for every grain of sand on the planet)

Well, I'm sure it won't be long before someone makes a computer the size of a grain of sand, after that it is only a matter of time before all the beaches of the world are covered in computers instead of sand and what will we do then?

Re:What is the basis for the cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you may know something about the protocol, you obviously have nu clue of what makes things cost money, usually not the cost of the added components....

Fiscal Discipline

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when does this Administration care about cost?

Sounds Like BSA Estimate

[faqmaster]

Who did that estimate? The BSA?

Re:Sounds Like BSA Estimate

[TubeSteak]

Nope. It was the RIAA, but the BSA helped.

Part of that $50 billion range is a guesstimate based on the losses stemming from a fully encrypted p2p program utilizing IPv6.

The RIAA really hate losing hypothetical money.

Re:Sounds Like BSA Estimate

[NevDull]

Maybe they're calculating it based upon "router equivalents", in the same way that RIAA calculates "burner equivalents".

A LOT is TWO WORDS

[deafpluckin]

Dear Slashdot editors,

Please don't perpetuate the misconception that "alot" is an English word. It's TWO WORDS the first is "a" and the second is "lot".

Thanks,
Concerned Slashdot reader

Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed; alot of people make that mistake.

Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS

[QuantumG]

dist thou not knoweth how thee shalt speak?!

Language changes, get used to it.

Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS

[Anonymous Coward]

Language may change but to spell a lot alot means you don't understand the language to begin with.

Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS

[QuantumG]

No, it means we live in a free society where each and every individual gets to define the language through daily use. To spell "dist" as "did" was once considered by some as ghastly as spelling "a lot" as "alot". Get over it.

Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS

[Anonymous Coward]

You suck... like.. alot.

Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS

[HTTP Error 403 403.9]

Dear Slashdot editors,

Please don't perpetuate the misconception that "alot" is an English word. It's TWO WORDS the first is "a" and the second is "lot".

Thanks, Concerned Slashdot reader

Your rite - their is many loosers that have pour grammer.

Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS

[heinousjay]

Great, a moron apologist. Slashdot definitely needs more of you.

Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS

[allende]

I thought languange was something we all had to agree upon, otherwise if I make up my own language whichever way I like, how can you possible understand me? That speech about free individual and blah... blah... sounds all too nice, but it is just plain silly in this case.

Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS

[QuantumG]

We all know what 'alot' means.

Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS

[deafpluckin]

LOL OMG WTF

I know what those mean too.

Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS

[rubycodez]

I've shocking news for you, the language hasn't even had standardized spelling for even two of its fifteen plus centuries of existence. When even three out of ten people use "alot" it will become part of the standard lexicon and then nitpickers will complain when it's NOT used. I think you should walk around talking like a sixth century Saxon, but avoid Latin since continued use by the medical and theological fields might mean a small amount of evolution and colloquialisms might occur!

Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS

[Beowulfto]

Also, a LOT is a parcel of land having fixed boundaries; "he bought a lot on the lake". Has always been one of my pet peeves. One of many.

Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone be warned:

Following me.parent.post is a wave of stubborn shitbags arguing over "alot".

Allowing yourself to be caught up in this is punishable by a huge red "L" on your forehead.

Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS

[Anonymous Coward]

the number of people who care is alittle.

Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS

[zenneth]

Just an FYI, but I know someone who used "alot" in their masters' thesis at Belmont U. It's kind of ironic, really, because she always put forth a front of being a very literate individual. She advised a high-school student that "alot" was indeed a legitimate word and when that student's teacher marked the "word" out and corrected the mistake, said student was quite unhappy. She defended herself for her mistake, as well, by using her thesis as an example. Just struck me as funny when I read the parent's post.

Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS

[glitch23]

Too bad they don't ever remember that when they spell "a little" they don't type "alittle". I guess they should of paid more attention in school. Those who spell "a lot" as two words should notice the intentional grammatical error I inserted.

Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people assume that if you don't use standard English, it means you are uneducated. Some people like to educate others about what the correct usage is.
Get used to it.

Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS

[deafpluckin]

Link to John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.

Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree 100%! And from now on, I declare that the new way to say "have a nice day!" is "QuantumG sucks moose cock!"

"Freedom fries," of course, will remain unchanged.

Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow....how can people be this stupid and be allowed to right?

(right = joke)

Ahwwww... common!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

U CANN...

Greetings from the losers :-)

And the contract goes to...

[PetoskeyGuy]

Haliburton's new IPv6 division.

Re:And the contract goes to...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, crap. I have modpoints, but you're already at 5....

Thanks for the laugh.

The reliability of the source?

[dada21]

The Department of Commerce does not have a very good track record of forecasting market trends. I think this report is especially callous as investors might heed this "warning" and invest in IPv6 companies prematurely.

_No one_ knows IPv6's cost. The market will see a few early adopters, then a steadily growing medium-sized business buy-in, followed by a boom of users or a bust due to newer technologies.

For a government agency to print these assumptions makes me think they either needed some media spotlight or the researchers wanted their stocks to go up.

but

[Anonymous Coward]

how much of that is money that would have been spent anyway? Upgrading routers and stuff when it's time came around to be replaced - it may take some time, but if all the new equipment bought is IPv6 compatable then it will only actually take the flick of a switch to make the transition - it just may take more time until the complete transition is possible.

Re:but

[luvirini]

A raising number of all types of Networking gear is fully ipv6 ready without anything special. I was actually surprised a bit at buying a very low end home router/gateway and finding it to have full ipv6 configration options. Thus in few years the big cost will be the actual configuration of things, not the hardware or software.

Dirty little secret...

[joey_knisch]

Most routers run *nix. IPv6 transition thus requires a "firmware" update.

Not that most equipment companies will do this mind you. They are quite happy having you purchase brand new networking equipment.

Re:Dirty little secret...

[Anonymous Coward]

Most routers run *nix. IPv6 transition thus requires a "firmware" update.

What kind of high quality crack are you smoking? Most routers run Cisco IOS not fucking *nix. I don't know where you people come up with this bullshit...

Re:Dirty little secret...

[dew-genen-ny]

Urm..... bullshit!

Most routers run Cisco IOS.

Admittedly I believe the Junipers run some sort of BSD but there's probably 20:1 Cisco to Junipers.

IPv6 is a mess

[Marrow]

http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html

Do we really have to throw this much money into the volcano?

Re:IPv6 is a mess

[rcw-home]

Last time I read a rant like that, it was from someone in upper management with a preconceived but dangerously incomplete notion of how something complex was supposed to work.

I'm very, very glad that IPv6 is an alternative to IPv4 and not an extension to it, and I'm also very glad that there is no "magic moment".

Re:IPv6 is a mess

[imroy]

God, what an asshat. This is from the same guy who wrote qmail and seems to consider himself god's gift to programming. He totally ignores (or doesn't know about) 6-in-4 tunnels, IPv4 mapped addresses, or dual-stack solutions. A lot of thought has been put into IPv6 and the process of transitioning to it. It won't be fast or easy. There will be problems, but not the smug alarmist ones that DJB came up with.

Re:IPv6 is a mess

[n0dalus]

Do we really have to throw this much money into the volcano?

I'm glad there are other people questioning the use of an "upgrade" to IPv6. I think one of the biggest problems with IPv6 is the mandatory IPSec (encryption) between hosts. This makes it almost impossible to do any filtering of packets, and you can't know if any outgoing traffic is wanted or unwanted. From a business perspective, I don't think administrators will be that happy to have their firewalls become almost useless for filtering data. I think internal networks will all keep using IPv4 for this reason.

Keep in mind that there are really good reasons to want to filter traffic. For example, when I connect to an FTP server and ask for a file, my firewall knows what port I've asked the firewall to send to and will allow the incoming connection. IPv6 users will only be able to use "passive" protocols (say goodbye to DCC transfers on IRC, and lots of multiplayer games). Lastly, who wants to remember an IP address like 2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334/64.

Re:IPv6 is a mess

[Anonymous Coward]

I think one of the biggest problems with IPv6 is the mandatory IPSec (encryption) between hosts. This makes it almost impossible to do any filtering of packets, and you can't know if any outgoing traffic is wanted or unwanted.

Do you even know what you are talking about?

Yes, IPv6 mandates IPsec support, but that does not mean every connection must be encrypted.

Also, you can still filter IPsec packets based on their destination. If you do not want encrypted packets going over your firewall, just block them and force clients to use plain IP. You can even encrypt the outgoing packets yourself so there is still security.

Think. You admin the gateway, so you control what goes through it.

Re:IPv6 is a mess

[Daniel Phillips]

Last time I read a rant like that, it was from someone in upper management with a preconceived but dangerously incomplete notion of how something complex was supposed to work. I'm very, very glad that IPv6 is an alternative to IPv4 and not an extension to it

But naturally, unlike that someone from upper management, your opinion is not based on any preconceived but dangerously incomplete notion, hmm?

So why exactly are you sure that it was a great idea to replace ipv4 entirely instead of extending it?

Re:IPv6 is a mess

[Craig Davison]

He doesn't ignore 6-in-4 tunnels. He mentions RFC 2893. IPv4 Mapped Addresses have nothing to do with this, because you can't use those addresses over the network.
Disregarding what you think of him personally, he does have a point. Re-read the comparison to the transition to MX records. ISPs would have started selling cheaper IPv6-only connections years ago if those hosts could connect to the existing IPv4 address space. Today nothing is IPv6-only.

Re:IPv6 is a mess

[sxpert]

IPv6 users will only be able to use "passive" protocols (say goodbye to DCC transfers on IRC, and lots of multiplayer games)

Bullshit.
on the contrary, IPv6 will allow multiple people behind that firewall to have dcc transfers, and do ftp much more easily. no more ftp or irc modules required to nat shit around, no more H323 gateways and gatekeepers needed because person A in his 192.168.0.foo network can't connect directly to your 192.168.0.foo machine on your own network (duh, to his H323 client, this would be like connecting to localhost)

Lastly, who wants to remember an IP address like 2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334/64

guess you ultimately don't know jack about what you think you're talking about.
hey, dude, that's what DNS has been designed for.
see, if your computing skills were about half of what your BS-spouting skills are, you would have noticed by now that the docs refer to AAAA records to store that info for you. besides, the router affecting the IPv6 addresses with dhcp would also serve as your dns server, and store that info. Whenever your box asks it's IPv6 address to the router in question, it says

machine1: hello, I'm foo.bar.baz, what's my IP ?
router: ok, foo, your ip is 2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334/64

now, machine2 wants to communicate with machine1

machine2: hello, it seems you are the manager for bar.baz, what's the address of foo ?
router: erh, lemme look... there it is. foo is 2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334/64

now, can you explain where you see a human being remembering the address in question ?

Re:IPv6 is a mess

[n0dalus]

on the contrary, IPv6 will allow multiple people behind that firewall to have dcc transfers, and do ftp much more easily. no more ftp or irc modules required to nat shit around...

The whole point of a firewall is to drop packets that could be malicious. Just because all the computers on the network have their own public addresses doesn't mean you should pass along everything that gets sent to it.

[regarding long IPv6 addresses] now, can you explain where you see a human being remembering the address in question ?

If you've ever tried to troubleshoot DNS problems you would know how important it is to know important IPs. AAAA records just aren't helpful when the DNS server is broken.

Re:i remember one time...

[Anonymous Coward]

As a general rule, your ass is cleaner than your hands. Penn and Teller did a great bit on this on Bullshit!

tfa

[convolvatron]

this is entire estimate is meaningless. v6 was designed to
be rolled out incrementally. no one beleives that all
the endpoints are going to be upgraded.

so if some of the major backbones start peering v6, thats
a good definition for switching, but i seriously doubt its
going to involve tens of billions of dollars.

the incremental cost of new larger customers being assigned
v6 blocks instead of v4, and having to push it to the endpoints
or put in nats? the dns servers (the only thing of any
substance that was mentioned)...do the v4 roots cost billions
of dollars a year?

What's the cost

[QuietLagoon]

not to make the transition?

Re:What's the cost

[TubeSteak]

Probably not communicating with China.
http://news.google.com/news?q=china+ipv6

IPv6 setups that are backwards compatible with IPv4 lose a lot of the features that make IPv6 worth implementing.

Re:What's the cost

[physicsphairy]

Somewhere between twenty-five and seventy-five billion dollars.

Re:What's the cost

[Daniel Phillips]

not communicating with China [is what will happen to you if you don't start using 80v6

And to support this, you provide a google search that turns up, ah, just 33 hits on china+ipv6, including some nonhits. Doesn't that present a problem for your argument?

Re:What's the cost

[sxpert]

it's well known that China is a big 10.0.0.0/8 network behind a big ass natting filter/firewall :D

Re:What's the cost

[Anonymous Coward]

The US seems to think climate change will cost them too much, and the cost of not making the transition is slightly higher there.

Why should they be bothered about IPv6 when they're still sitting on most of the netblocks? I can see it being left until the rest of the world is leaving them behind, when they're suddenly panic and rush it through.

Or perhaps they'll just claim that only terrorists use IPv6 ;-)

Holy Address Space, Batman!

[DanielMarkham]

That's a lot of bucks, but studies like these are easy to take in isolation instead of looking at the big picture.

The U.S. economy is what? About 12 Trillion dollars a year? In 1999 the internet economy was closing in on 150 Billion, by now it has to be through the roof.

Poor software? It costs over 200 Billion a year (sorry no link). You have to put these numbers in perspective. When you are dealing with 300 million folks or so, and the world's largest free market, any kind of estimate for anything is going to be big. The common cold costs over $30 Billion a year.

Just keep it all in perspective. The internet economy will blow right through this obstacle if it gets in the way of sales

My Blog

Re:Holy Address Space, Batman!

[Valacosa]

In 1999 the internet economy was closing in on 150 Billion, by now it has to be through the roof.

And in 1928 the American economy was simply booming. By now we should have gold paved streets and...and...diamond encrusted toilet paper!

Re:Holy Address Space, Batman!

[Achromatic1978]

diamond encrusted toilet paper

Ow, my ass! Think of the poor haemmorhoid sufferers!

Umm...

[kadathseeker]

Just phase out IPv4. Have all new equipment/software include IPv6 by default. Time for "Best of Bash.org":

Some cool info: Tibeten monks, after twenty years or so of practise in the Himalaya, control their brain stem - they can control their heart beat, blood pressure etc.
After thirty years they can connect to the internet purely by meditation, setting TCP stacks in their neurons and stuff.
Right now I am chatting with a monk who is sitting naked in an ice storm on his towel, his only possesion.
He's using ipv6.

Re:Umm...

[Jambon]

Right now I am chatting with a monk who is sitting naked in an ice storm on his towel, his only possesion

Well, at least he's well prepared should he need to, oh, hitchhike across the galaxy.

Re:Umm...

[kadathseeker]

He's using IPv6. Not only is he well-equipped, he can communicate using the galactic standard. They're just a little ahead of us, those space aliens and tibetan monks.

I blame Al Gore

[Daveznet]

This is all Al Gore's fault; he invited the internet. If it wasnt for him none of this would have happened.

Re:I blame Al Gore

[sharkey]

This is all Al Gore's fault; he invited the internet.

In all fairness, it seemed like a great party (with porn and online dating and Simpsons quotes and Natalie Portman naked and petrified), so you can't really blame the internet for accepting his invitation.

Re:i remember one time...

[Anonymous Coward]

As a general rule, your ass is cleaner than your hands. Penn and Teller did a great bit on this on Bullshit!

as a general rule, i wouldn't trust penn and teller when it comes to ass related things. regardless of what they say.

Somebody Must Be Able To Help

[Niraj59]

The last nine frontpage stories were posted by ScuttleMonkey. Someone on /. must have a job opening for him. Maybe * * Beatles-Beatles can hook him up. ;)

Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency

[shanen]

Exactly the same kind of foolishness that keeps the US from going metric. If you prefer to see it as an opportunity to invest in new metric tools or IPv6 hardware and software, then it looks like an opportunity. The people who fight against such changes want to harp on the total costs, and generally refuse to consider rational transition strategies.

To me, it mostly comes down to efficiencies. The reason we measure things in the first place is so we can perform mathematical operations on the resulting numbers. Metric units are easier and more efficient for the mathematical operations, and therefore confer some competitive advantage on the people using them. It might be a large or small advantage, but it's always there.

IPv4 has some design limitations. IPv6 will address many of those problems, and the networks (and countries) that use that system will have competitive advantage.

What I find amusing is that many of the same people fighting against IPv6 on grounds of cost are the same people who want to argue the damage of Hurricane Katrina wasn't so bad. After all, it will give us the "opportunity" to invest billions of dollars in rebuilding things. Hey, why don't we destroy a major city every year? Look at all the "opportunities" we'd have. However, moving to IPv6 is NOT to be equated with random destruction, but is rather a rational form of evolution.

Re:Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency

[robertjw]

Exactly the same kind of foolishness that keeps the US from going metric.

Cost has VERY little to do with the reasons US hasn't went metric. There are two reasons we aren't metric, first is familiarity. Everyone in the country has a good idea of how fast 30 mph is, but has little concept of what the corresponding speed in kph would be. Likewise, most people know approximately how much a gallon is, but only have the concept of a liter from a bottle of soda.

Second, and probably more important, is that the metric system is not always more convenient. I disagree that the only reason we measure thing is so we can perform mathematical operations on them. We measure things so we know what to charge, if they will fit in a particular space and for any other number of reasons. Your point aside, there are many practical mathematical operations that are easier in the standard system than in the metric. How much, in whole measurements, is 1/3 of a meter, 2/3s of a meter, 1/64th of a meter. For everyday uses like construction or cooking the metric system can be difficult to work with.

Getting back to topic, an IPv6 conversion is much different. There aren't that many people in the world that actually understand IP addresses at all, only a very small percentage have any idea how it works. Most people think you just type in google.com and it magically works. IPv6 requires a rework of most of our infrastructure, and more importantly to businesses, could result in the alienation fo some of the valuable customers that now support the Internet. I think the people that see the damage of Hurricane Katrina are just being optomistic. It happened, lets try to make the best of a terrible situation. Opponents of IPv6 are just trying to avoid the difficulty before it happens.

Re:Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency

[shanen]

If you have nothing intelligent to say on the topic, why did you reply at all? Do you just like arguing?

If I were a fan of stupidity, I would be especially fond of the part about "whole measurements". Quick, tell me how much is 1/10th of a foot? Okay. Then how about 1/3 of an inch? I can instantly tell you 33-1/3 cm for your foolish question, and in measuring it I can just stop at the required degree of precision.

Don't take it too personally, but you really sound like the kind of ignorant and illogical [American] person whose posts I'd prefer to ignore. You can make that easier by designating me as your "foe". My slots are reserved for friends for several constructive reasons. There's nothing constructive in your post, so no loss for you, and my settings will mostly ignore your post-foe-setting posts.

Re:Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency

[maglor_83]

Your point aside, there are many practical mathematical operations that are easier in the standard system than in the metric. How much, in whole measurements, is 1/3 of a meter, 2/3s of a meter, 1/64th of a meter. For everyday uses like construction or cooking the metric system can be difficult to work with.

33cm, 66cm, 16mm.
What's 1/1760 of a mile, 1/3 of a yard, 1/12 of a foot?
What's 1/1000 of a kilometer, 1/1000 of a meter?
Metric is simpler to calculate and convert. That's all. There is no reason that construction or cooking is made any harder by switching to metric. Just the values are different. Plenty of other countries have managed just fine, there is no reason the US can't as well.

Re:Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency

[Anonymous Coward]

furthermore, how many inches are in 20 miles and what sort of moron would consider such a system better?

dont even get me started on fahrenheit... if time machines get invented, first thing someone needs to do is go back and kill that guy. frozen salty water and the human body temperatue? could you get more poorly thought out caliberation points

Re:Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll gets a woody posting to slashdot, film at 11.

WABOS. Your argument boils down to "look at me, I have flaws in my inflamatory argument and if you respond I'll call you names"

But the self-confidence it gives you must really reel in the girls^H^H^H^H^Hwomen, right?

tripod.com, huh, you WISH. Were they out of accounts at bipod.com?

Re:Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency

[vonsneerderhooten]

What's 1/1760 of a mile, 1/3 of a yard, 1/12 of a foot?
(off the top of my head)
errrr....Yard, Foot, and Inch?
The point others have made is the point I will state here. It's what we're used to.
Complacency is a wonderful thing, isn't it?

Re:Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency

[Neoprofin]

What's a tenth of a foot? 1.2 inches, any moron could tell you that.
What is 1/3 centimeter? Three and a third millimeters?

How is your example any more definitive than his? If you're going to come off like an arrogant prick (which is what happens any time you talk down to someone, even if their idea wasn't formulated as well as it could have been) you may as well use examples that don't fail for the exact same reason.

Re:Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency

[shanen]

If you're too dull to understand such trivial math, I really have no reason to pretend to discuss such complicated matters with you. Or are you just too stupid to understand that his 'point' was supposed to be that it is hard to divide 100 by 3? Do you understand why I compared his 'argument' to dividing 12 by 10? Do you want to consider a treatise on the 'virtues' of prime bases?

You may regard it as some form of arrogance. I simply regard it as keeping my mouth shut unless the topic is one that I understand well enough so that I can say something clearly. However, even then I normally attempt to apply appropriate qualifications or restrictions on the scope of my statements.

Whatever. The impression you have created is that you're a thin-skinned fool of one sort or another. Is there any reason I should care what sort of fool? Why don't you just mark me as a "foe" and we shall happily ignore each other?

Re:Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency

[Pienjo]

It's what we're used to

Speak for yourself, please. There is no we, especially not in these matters.

Complacency is a wonderful thing, isn't it?

You misspelled 'stubbornness'

Re:Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency

[MasterC]

...damage of Hurricane Katrina wasn't so bad. After all, it will give us the "opportunity" to invest billions of dollars in rebuilding things.

This is known as the "broken window fallacy" or Parable of the broken window.

Re:Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency

[Anonymous Coward]

We all ought to mark you as a "foe", since none of us seem to be smart enough on this topic to justify a respectful response from you.

Re:Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency

[jandrese]

The point is that Imperial measurements are based on numbers with lots of divisors. The idea being that if you only have a tool marked with increments of your number, you don't want to have to try to figure out halves and thirds of some measurement. Frankly, people spend a lot more time (in general) cutting things into half, thirds, and quarters. Even the strange number for converting feet into a mile (5280) is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15, 20, and so forth.

Also, I'd like to see your ruler that has 1/3 measurements marked on it. I know they must exist, but I've never seen them.

Of couse Imperial has it's own set of problems too. It's hard to convert units for one (5280 is much harder to multiply by then 1000) and it's not as easy to remember the numbers, but in practice workers don't run into these problems nearly as often as they're asked to cut something into thirds. Scientists have to do this a lot, and it's no surprise most of them have gone metric as a result.

Re:Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency

[mindstrm]

Both your points about metric make sense, and basically boil down to familiarity. I have no idea how much 1/4 of a quart is, or 1/4 of a mile. Although it appears that imperial measurements break down into simple fractions easier... this only seems convenient to you because you have them memorized.
I assure you that 2.4mm or 4.0 mm are more intuitively obvious as to which one is bigger than 1/4 vs 7/32nds or whatever.

Canada was in the same boat, and we had no problem switching to metric. It's not nearly as hard as people seem to think. We put up conversion charts in grocery stores, and so on. People still posted prices in both systems. After a decade or so, imperial is all but dead in Canada... nobody was horribly put out because of the change.

Re:Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency

[robertjw]

Although it appears that imperial measurements break down into simple fractions easier... this only seems convenient to you because you have them memorized.

Perhaps, but bottom line is a base 12 system does have more factors than a base 10. I find it difficult to believe that a system that evolved over such a long time period as the imperial system did doesn't have some inherent benefits.

Canada was in the same boat, and we had no problem switching to metric. It's not nearly as hard as people seem to think.

I don't think it's so much the difficulty, it's more just the idea. The average American still has a very patriotic and independent view of the world. We want to be different, changing to the metric system would make us more uniform with the rest of the world and we don't want that. I doubt the US will ever make a full conversion, our politicians are too concerned about the support of their constituency. The first guy that says we should change football from 10 yards for a first down to 10 meters is NOT going to get re-elected. So, ultimately we have changed in the areas that work significantly better in the metric system and have kept the imperial system where it impacts everyone's daily lives.

Re:Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency

[shanen]

Fine. Your first few words convinced me you're an idiot. All I want from an idiot is the "foe" red dot. It's just a mutual convenience. Unfortunately, supplies are limited, and mine are in use for friends.

Re:Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency

[vonsneerderhooten]

Though i'll probably get flamed for this as well, we in my post refers to the American population. There was no way of inferring that from my post of any of my previous posts. I apologize for not making that crystal clear.

'stubbornness'
It seems that I will have to make this crystal clear to you as well.
Complacency (kem-plsn-se)
1 : calm or secure satisfaction with oneself or one's lot : SELF-SATISFACTION
Myself and many Americans are very happy with the imperial system of weights and measures. No tangible benefits to switching.

We aren't running out of IPv4 space

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space

grep for "iana reserved"

Even more wrong

[XanC]

Wealth isn't created by spinning your wheels for no reason. It may well be that the transition is worth doing in the long run, but simply spending money for no reason isn't a net plus. It's why we don't tear down our houses and rebuild them every year.

Re:Even more wrong

[Jugalator]

It may well be that the transition is worth doing in the long run, but simply spending money for no reason isn't a net plus.

Of course they have to look at the long run, they can not exactly wait for it to happen so they only need to look at the short term, since then they'll need to both rush a transition (and you do not want to rush a nation-wide infrastructure transition) and even risk losing connectivity with parts of the world before they're done. That wouldn't be such a big deal if there was no profits to make from global Internet connectivity, but there are obvious reasons this is very useful, even essential to many companies' survivability today. I have to wonder what's Google's stance about this for example, as they've worked mostly internationally from the start, especially with their business model of AdWords.

So by doing this, there's a cost, sure, but is not doing it even an option? Sometimes necessary progress cost money.

Not that you're saying so, speaking in general I think it's pretty naïve to believe the Internet population isn't steadily increasing, especially in the fields of ad hoc networking and mobility, where you often want direct IP address connectivities for p2p networking. One can read a surprisingly technical press release from Nokia about this and the IPv4 growing pains here, so there are clearly markets that would thrive under IPv6 that they can't easily do today, which should say "profit!" to any analyst of the growing mobile market.

Time to invest...

[HockeyPuck]

Time to invest in Cisco.... stock price is low now... with $25-75B....

And it's because...

[Nicolay77]

... IPv6 doesn't embed the IPv4 address space and everybody has to buy a new IP and have all domains with TWO different IPs to make the transition possible?

This really is a shortsightedness of their protocol design. Until now all IP versions have contained the address space of the previous version. Until IPv6 came around.

Re:And it's because...

[rcw-home]

Why would I want to have the IPv6 routing table permanently shackled to the mess that is the IPv4 routing table?

Also, have you heard of: "::aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd"?

What previous version of IP are you talking about? You aren't seriously referring to Arpanet's NCP to IPv4 transition in 1981-1982 are you? Arpanet had roughly 200 hosts back then!

Re:And it's because...

[imroy]

Uh, what previous versions of IP? The Wikipedia article on the Internet Protocol says "Versions 0 through 3 were either reserved or unused". And even if there were versions before IPv4, the deployment would have been what? a dozen machines? We're talking multi-user mainframes and mini-computers at universities, not home PC's. Nothing like the hundreds of millions of hosts using IPv4. Why would the designers of IPv1 through IPv4 have made the addresses a superset of the previous version, when so few hosts actually exsisted? Why go to that trouble when it wasn't really a problem?

Re:And it's because...

[adrianmonk]

... IPv6 doesn't embed the IPv4 address space and everybody has to buy a new IP and have all domains with TWO different IPs to make the transition possible?

Huh? RFC 4038 says this:

IPv4 packets going to IPv6 applications on a dual-stack node reach their destination because their addresses are mapped by using IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses: the IPv6 address ::FFFF:x.y.z.w represents the IPv4 address x.y.z.w.

This seems to imply that IPv6 does contain the address space of IPv4.

Of course, for it to be useful, eventually people will have to start using other addresses that are not part of IPv4. But no protocol design can get around that problem.

Re:And it's because...

[Eunuchswear]

IPv6 fans want to replace the "mess" of the current IPv4 routing table by a nice heirarchical structure.

Well, fuck that.

Transition guide is needed

[antarctican]

What I most want is a decent howto on IPv6 transition. I know the basics, I know the theory of how it's suppose to work. But I'll be damned if I know how numbering works (I know there's some odd pre or suffix in the numbering, no?), I have no idea what theses AAAA records are, etc.

And before someone says to just go read the RFCs, no, what needs to be made is a transition guide for those already familiar with IPv4. Myself, and most others, probably don't want to sit reading dry RFCs. Give me a lesson pack on how DNS records differ, or how the numbering works in relation to IPv4.

That will be one of the most useful things in getting techies prepared for the change.

And if something like that already exists (it probably does, I just haven't found it yet), someone please post it so we can all get up to speed.

If I understood it, I'd probably take the extra time to make all my future software IPv6 compatible.

Re:Transition guide is needed

[rcw-home]

I have no idea what theses AAAA records are, etc.

Explain to me how you can have an understanding of A records and IPv4, and a very basic understanding of what IPv6 is (not going into how it works or anything) and NOT know what an AAAA record is? I'm genuinely interested in the thought process.

Here: AAAA records are to IPv6 as A records are to IPv4.

And before someone says to just go read the RFCs, no, what needs to be made is a transition guide for those already familiar with IPv4.

Why would you purposely ignore information from its most likely source? If it helps to think about it this way, RFCs are like a blog from the 60's.

If I understood it, I'd probably take the extra time to make all my future software IPv6 compatible.

Most people who write socket code just cut and paste it from other applications anyway.

Successful techies have one thing in common: they are eager to learn. Be successful. Be eager to learn.

Re:Transition guide is needed

[antarctican]

Explain to me how you can have an understanding of A records and IPv4, and a very basic understanding of what IPv6 is (not going into how it works or anything) and NOT know what an AAAA record is? I'm genuinely interested in the thought process.

Very simple, I've never looked into how DNS in IPv6 works, I said I'd only looked very basically at IPv6. And this is exactly the kind of guide needed, "A record in IPv4 == AAAA record in IPv6"

They exist for many other fields, there needs to be a "IPv6 guide for IPv4 developers" or some similar book. Something which puts IPv6 components in terms of IPv4, something that might have a section (since we're talking DNS above) giving an example IPv4 BIND record for a domain, and then an equivilant record for IPv6 to help people relate to the changes.

June 2008 deadline

[jhines]

From the fine article,

"The government is supposed to be on a relatively rapid path toward IPv6 migration since the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) mandated (PDF file) this past August that the federal government move to IPv6 by June 2008."

But yes, there is an annual IT budget that is impacted by this.

Re:June 2008 deadline

[wolf31o2]

Not at most places...

Windows 2000/2003/XP have IPv6 support (though 2000's isn't the greatest)
Linux/*BSD/MacOS have IPv6 support
Cisco/Juniper/Foundry have IPv6 support

Not only have these operating systems and devices *had* IPv6 support, but most of them have had it for years already. Just because people don't turn it on doesn't mean the device cannot handle it. I wouldn't be surprised if we came up with a massive amount of IPv6 penetration already if devices just turned it on by default. Sure some of your cheaper devices don't support it, but most end-user type devices are field-upgradable for exactly this reason. Heck, my *cell phone* is capable of IPv6. What is really stopping IPv6 adoption is that there's no compelling reason to use it. You don't get access to new content. You don't get access to anything that you cannot reach via IPv4, under most cases.

75 billion? who cares, it isn't going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

IPv6 isn't going to happen, because it doesn't need to happen. I can get to all the web sites I need. So can you. My coffee pot isn't on the internet, and if it needed to be, I'd use NAT, or invent some new multiplexor protocol that sits on IPv4. Don't you people realize this???

I love the guy up their who said IPv6 will *create* $75billion in the economy. How the hell will it do that?

I'll issue my usual challenge to the IPv6-fans: If you love IPv6 so much, cut yourself off from IPv4 completely. Don't use an IPv4 address. Don't access IPv4 sites. That's what has to happen for IPv6 to be a reality. If you're running IPv6 on top of or alongside IPv4, you haven't "switched over" yet. You're just goofing around with some nonstandard network protocol. Might as well use fidonet.

Go ahead, I'm waiting......

Re:75 billion? who cares, it isn't going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody (as in, zero people) will switch to HDTV either. It's too expensive, right?

Re:75 billion? who cares, it isn't going to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Poor comparison. You actually get direct, tangible benefits by switching to HDTV. Those football games become incredibly clearer?

As for the switch to IPv6; look I like IPv6 as much as the next guy, but where are the direct tangible benefits? Ummm... my IP address switches from 192.168.3.2 to 01:23:45:67::EF? Sorry but as much as NAT sucks, it works good enough.

Re:75 billion? who cares, it isn't going to happen

[cli_rules!]

To support parent further - hasn't NAT become (mostly) a Good Thing from the security perspective?

Re:75 billion? who cares, it isn't going to happen

[TCM]

No. Thanks for playing.

Re:75 billion? who cares, it isn't going to happen

[vertinox]

IPv6 isn't going to happen, because it doesn't need to happen. I can get to all the web sites I need.

I'm sure the train barons said the same thing about traveling to cities on rail when asked about that new fandangled auto-mobile.

Re:75 billion? who cares, it isn't going to happen

[adrianmonk]

I'll issue my usual challenge to the IPv6-fans: If you love IPv6 so much, cut yourself off from IPv4 completely. Don't use an IPv4 address. Don't access IPv4 sites. That's what has to happen for IPv6 to be a reality. If you're running IPv6 on top of or alongside IPv4, you haven't "switched over" yet. You're just goofing around with some nonstandard network protocol.

This could be pretty feasible with network address translation. It's very similar in concept to using a private IPv4 address such as one from the 192.168.0.0 network. Just as the outside world doesn't care that you are using addresses that aren't publicly-routable, the outside world won't care if you are using addresses that can't even be represented with IPv4.

In fact, if the software to do this is available, that might be a good idea for a home wireless network. It would certainly prevent some unauthorized people from trying to hop on your network...

Re:75 billion? who cares, it isn't going to happen

[marcushnk]

My coffee pot isn't on the internet, and if it needed to be, I'd use NAT, or invent some new multiplexor protocol that sits on IPv4. Don't you people realize this?? I'll issue my usual challenge to the IPv6-fans: If you love IPv6 so much, cut yourself off from IPv4 completely. Don't use an IPv4 address. Don't access IPv4 sites. That's what has to happen for IPv6 to be a reality. If you're running IPv6 on top of or alongside IPv4, you haven't "switched over" yet.
no problem.. I'll just ring all the guys that manage the web sites you need and like to visit and get _them_ to convert completely to IPv6.
Let's see how useless IPv6 is then...

Re:75 billion? who cares, it isn't going to happen

[toddestan]

And why not? Yeah, we all know that NAT isn't designed to be a security mechanism, but that doesn't stop the fact that it acts like one. And is pretty effective one at that.

Re:75 billion? who cares, it isn't going to happen

[dodobh]

You don't get the point. Sooner or later, China and India will start requiring more address space. IPv4 just doesn't have that, and these countries are already capable of running IPv6. Europe is going v6 as well. That leaves the US and its local content (which can suddenly become irrelevant to the world).

Re:75 billion? who cares, it isn't going to happen

[Nurgled]

NAT doesn't act as a security mechanism. If all you have is NAT, then all you've achieved is that packets leaving your network get their source address rewritten and some state stored in a table so that the reverse can happen to returning packets. If I send a packet to your router with a destination address of 192.168.2.1, it'll happily pass that packet through to the host on your private network that has that address. The software that filters that out is not part of NAT, but is instead a firewall. The waters are muddied by the fact that both stateful firewalls and NAT gateways keep a connection state table, and so many implementations share the same state table between the two components making it hard to conceptually separate the two.

Re:i remember one time...

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes me cringe is when I got to a pub and you see blokes going for a piss, not washing their hands then grabbing a load of bar snacks. Never ever ever eat free peanuts/pork scratchings/cheese etc in a pub.

IPv6 is already in a clear uptrend in mindshare

[broward]

http://www.realmeme.com/Main/miner/technology/ipv6 Dejanews.png

It will come faster and bigger than most readers here believe.

Re:So...

[ctheory]

/golfclap Not to mention, 50B is...I don't know...kind of a huge number to be throwing around as a cushion. Upper level management, even if it is Government, still doesn't have a f'ing clue about technology. Gotta love it.

Cisco Isn' t The Answer, It's The Question

[cmholm]

No, is the answer. Ok, I've been looking for an excuse to paraphrase someone's Windows-oriented .sig. Seriously, one of the problems with the Cisco gear we've gotten in the last few years is that while they'll route IPv6, the frickin' admin interface is still IPv4 only. Thanks, Cisco.

Re:Cisco Isn' t The Answer, It's The Question

[Tony Hoyle]

Yeah, wierd that.

I can create ipv6 tunnels on a cisco, but the damned admin interface can't see them or do anything with them.

And cisco are the better routers - it's basically unheard of for a cheaper router to understand ipv6 *at all*.

Add the that the poor software support (eg. debian ipv6 seemed to stall in 2003 and never got off the ground, windows supports the ipv6 stack but there's zero application support, etc.) and that $75Bn starts to look on the low side.

It wouldn't surprise me if that was just the estimate for the government switchover. The total cost to industry could be 10-100 times that, if it ever happens (which is looking unlikely - the space is ripe for someone to come up with an alternate proposal that isn't such a major shift & preserves the existing hardware).

No tax write-offs

[Dekortage]

And, sadly, all the old IPv4 gear can't simply be shipped to Third World countries for a big tax break -- well, it could, but it won't work if everyone else is switching to IPv4. Back to the haves and have-nots.

This is the commerce department estimate...

[Bored Huge Krill]

...and therefore assumes that it will be carried out under a no-bid contract awarded to Halliburton, who will bill Cat-5 cables at $10,000 each. Sounds a fair estimate to me :-)

Re:This is the commerce department estimate...

[ded_guy]

But you *need* that $10,000 cable. Otherwise your packets will sound green and not strawberry-like.

$75 Billion isn't that much

[Anonymous Coward]

$75 Billion? So What? The United States government spent a lot more than that on Iraq!

Re:$75 Billion isn't that much

[robertjw]

That's exactly the problem. After spending so much in Iraq, on homeland security, and securing our borders from the dangerous Mexican population that just wants to come over and work in slaughterhouses we won't have anything left for the IPv6 conversion.

Re:$75 Billion isn't that much

[Saint V Flux]

Except that the war in Iraq costs very little compared to most wars we've fought, homeland security is a joke, and we do nothing to secure the borders. That means we have plenty of money for IPv6 (although the government isn't responsible for maitaining the internet anways....).

Re:$75 Billion isn't that much

[robertjw]

we do nothing to secure the borders

Actually, I was watching 60 minutes last night and there's a congressman that wants to spend $20 Billion to fence off the whole mexico/US border. That's why I brought it up.

Mis-allocation of funds, thanks to Bush Neocons!!

[v3xt0r]

So let me get this straight, we can easily afford to spend $100 billion to conqour Mesopotamia, but we can't allocate an (almost) equal amount of money to reinforce (or keep up with) our technical/communications infrastructure, even though it IS a matter of national security?

Interesting priorities!! =(

Is that all?

[Xaroth]

I mean, if they really think it can be done for that, I'd be willing to pony up the $25 myself.

Oh, wait.

The cost of increasing the address space

[Anonymous Coward]

The point of the transition to IPv6 is the larger address space that comes with it. (IPv4 uses 32 bit addresses, IPv6 128). The currently available 2^32 IP addresses is more than sufficient address space for today's computing platforms. IPv6s very, very much larger address space will provide address space to meet the expectations of rapid growth in internet addressable embedded devices. Still, a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're starting to talk serious money. $75billion sounds like a lot to put all the toasters in the US online.

Where's this cost coming from?

[jd]

• Windows Updates: Free. Microsoft Research already provides a stack which is (therefore) already paid for.
  
• Linux Updates: Well, you want the USAGI patches if you want top-of-the-line IPv6 support, but either way it's free.
  
• *BSD Updates: The KAME stack is already in there.
  
• Cisco Updates: Any reasonably recent version of IOS or PIX will have IPv6 as standard. Therefore it's already paid for, therefore it is free. If you've already got a support contract, updating the firmware should also be free.
  
• E-Mail Updates: Most e-mail clients (and servers) should already support IPv6
  
• Web Updates: Apache is about the only server that matters and that already supports IPv6. I believe all the major clients do, too
  
• Multiplayer Games: Probably the one area that doesn't have IPv6 as standard, but it should be possible to provide IPv4-over-IPv6 tunnels for those
  

As far as I can tell, the sum total cost for all of this uber-expensive upgrade would cost (in old English currency) about 2'/6, and would take the United States less time than it currently takes for Joe Average to reboot from a BSOD. For this reason, I would like to make the US Government and the various Internet providers a special deal. I will set up IPv6 for them, with full one-year warranty, for a mere $15 billion, paid in advance. If this sounds satisfactory, just mail me the keys to the server rooms and passwords for the servers and routers, and I'll get started.

Re:Where's this cost coming from?

[dotoole]

No doubt a hefty chunk of the cost will come from that most valuable of commodities - time. Upgrade for windows: free. Upgrade for *nix routes: free. Cost for paying a large workforce to patch the entire network infrastructure of a major country: $25-75 Billion.

Re:Where's this cost coming from?

[TubeSteak]

Hmmm.... I dunno... could it be.... hardware?

To implement IPv6, lots of old hardware will either need to be updated or completely replaced.

Guesstimates lik $25~$75B usually take into account things like hardware costs and the employee hours required to update/replace/support whatever is being changed.

I'd really like to see the Commerce Dept report when it gets released so that I can understand why they quote such a huge range for the cost.

Re:Where's this cost coming from?

[Burdell]

OS and software updates are easy; people updates operating systems and other software all the time.

Infrastructure updates are hard. Routers last a long time. Cisco's dependence on CEF (Cisco Express Forwarding, aka Customer Enragement Feature) and hardware forwarding means that routers that can forward tons of IPv4 traffic can't handle a little IPv6 traffic (for example, the widely used 7500 series). Telling the boss that you need to spend $300,000 to replace one router (that oh by the way works just fine except for a feature nobody is asking for) doesn't go over well, especially when you have more than one router.

One of the widest used dialup concentrators is the Ascend/Lucent MAX and MAX TNT series. I believe UUNet used to use these for example (I don't know what they use now but I haven't heard of them changing); a lot of "national" ISPs resold UUNet dialup ports. TNTs have no IPv6 support at all even in the latest software updates (again, IIRC it is a hardware limitation). A lot of people still use dialup, especially when on the road; it is shrinking, so it is extra hard to spend big $$ replacing hardware that is operating just fine, but it isn't going to go away any time soon.

I work for a relatively small ISP, but we'd have to spend millions of dollars to support IPv6 across our network. AFAIK no customers are asking for IPv6; one friend asked informally if we had any plans and I said no and he went on to other questions.

Re:Where's this cost coming from?

[Anonymous Coward]

"routers that can forward tons of IPv4 traffic can't handle a little IPv6 traffic (for example, the widely used 7500 series)"

The "widely used 7500 series" had hardware accelerated IPv6 forwarding in 2001. Try again, you might need to read the manual (I know, life is hard) to figure out how to enable it. We've got some old 7200 series with a fair bit of IPv6 traffic and they're fine.

Re:Where's this cost coming from?

[adrianmonk]

For this reason, I would like to make the US Government and the various Internet providers a special deal. I will set up IPv6 for them, with full one-year warranty, for a mere $15 billion, paid in advance. If this sounds satisfactory, just mail me the keys to the server rooms and passwords for the servers and routers, and I'll get started.

You also need keys to all the offices where there are desktop machines that have static IP addresses. Or any desktop machine that can't be automatically remotely reconfigured to use IPv6. Hey, speaking of that, is someone in some dark corner still using Windows 98 or Mac OS 9 for something important? Probably. Do those support IPv6?

Oh, and by the way, what about the downtime of the servers as they are restarted? And do you think you'll be able to complete that firmware upgrade on the Cisco router and reconfigure the router with no downtime? If not, how are you going to ensure that the entire network being down doesn't cost the organization money?

Re:Where's this cost coming from?

[Burdell]

Try again. For service providers, CEFv6/dCEFv6 only showed up in 12.2S on the 7500. That has only recently really been considered stable, and I've read real world reports that IPv6 still has problems on the 7500.

Re:Where's this cost coming from?

[jd]

TCP Software's TCP/IP stack for Windows 98 supports IPv6. Not sure about Trumpet. (In the Win95/98 days, Trumpet was THE TCP/IP stack - Microsoft's stack didn't even come close.)

Re:Where's this cost coming from?

[thesnarky1]

Multiplayer Games: Probably the one area that doesn't have IPv6 as standard, but it should be possible to provide IPv4-over-IPv6 tunnels for those.

What do ya mean? I'll bet nethack will work on IPv6 within a week!

Re:Where's this cost coming from?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, in 2001 it was an EFT.

If anyone wants the feature someone has to trial the EFT. Most of the issues we've found in Cisco IPv6 EFTs were multicast related, which is frustrating for us, but hardly an issue for the average ISP that doesn't even do IPv4 multicast let alone IPv6 Embedded RP.

So what happens is that lazy ISPs (as in the post above) tell their customers "it isn't available", and tell Cisco "customers don't want it", and then when their customers complain that service is poor and the ISP isn't interested in helping with new technologies the CEO gives a big speech about how cutting edge his people are for having... I dunno, ADSL, or a WAP website or Linux support or something.

Even Cisco's competitors don't get it. Several of them wrote us long, boring documents explaining how they could meet our requirements, but conveniently skipping the fact that they didn't have a complete IPv6 solution. When we called to follow-up we'd get the marketing run-around for a while, until a technical person could be found to say that, No, they can't meet our requirements. We were just supposed to see the lower bid and say "Ooh, cheaper than Cisco" and then they just hoped we didn't really need IPv6 after all.

If you have a business requirement for something Cisco don't yet support, they can either volunteer to support an EFT or they can lose your business. They understand that, and are able to make it happen so that you get the service you need.

Re:Where's this cost coming from?

[laffer1]

The holdup is ISPs. Large ISPs must start using ipv6. To do that, linksys (cisco), dlink, and other home network manufacturers must ship routers with ipv6 built in. Until i bought an airport express, I never had seen a home router with ipv6 before. That isn't even my main router, as its behind a ipv6 friendly freebsd box. I successfully set up a tunnel to HE via ipv6 at home and was rather impressed.

In order to translate, we are looking at the following:
1. isps must be REGULATED to switch starting with large providers like SBC/ATT, Comcast, Charter, and Verizon. (dial up/dsl/cable)
2. upstreams will upgrade when dialups/dsl/cable are on ipv6.
3. This will force ecommerce sites to upgrade, at least provide tunnels.
4. Other sites will follow suite. Had my current hosting company offered ipv6 w/ an ipv4 tunnel i'd be using it now.

The other factor is that most of you on slashdot think about large companies and the government switching. The government still ran 286 machines until y2k hit. Heck i bet they still have some somewhere. Home users can't afford to re-buy everything. Its like the HDTV arguments only worse. I live in michigan so you can adjust for cost of living elsewhere, but i don't think people can afford the switch where i'm at unless them make at least $50,000 a year. $7/hr at Macdo isn't going to cut it. You're asking them to buy a new computer, figure out how to patch their xp install, and then get an ISP with ipv6. I don't see them doing this. Worse yet, its a force upgrade to vista when it comes out. Most home users won't buy linux (and thats what THEY need to do), or purchase a Mac with built in ipv6.

So real cost to home user: $300 dell or $500 mac mini + $50 new router + cable comapny redistributing modems (most likely) or a rebuy of modem for dsl/cable + replace any other computers in the house. Best case $350 presuming dell starts bundling the update or isps send it on cd/dvd.

The cost would be higher for small business because it must buy multiple pcs. Granted anyone with a mac or xp + patch is ok on the software end. You still have the cost of the router. You add this to buying new tvs and pvrs (vcr is good for what in hdtv land?) and you've made the consumer broke. I don't want to hear any comments from people who make above $30,000 a year because you don't understand.

Another factor is schools. I think cisco, dell, microsoft and the government should start donating ipv6 equipment to public schools soon if they want this to happen. Universities should all be on internet2 soon as well.

There is a reason the government is predicting a high number because they know they have to pay for their upgrades, help out state governments who help out local governements and schools. If you've been in a public school lately, many are high tech with 5-7 year old pcs or macs. I guarantee its running the original OS too.

One idea might be to have large companies like cisco and sun offer to upgrade one large backbone provider for free. That will force the others to upgrade when that large provider gives out ipv6 stuff. Sun and cisco get to say they made the big push for ipv6 too.

Re:Where's this cost coming from?

[if(!Nano-Tech!)(nano]

So real cost to home user: $300 dell or $500 mac mini + $50 new router + cable comapny redistributing modems (most likely) or a rebuy of modem for dsl/cable + replace any other computers in the house. Best case $350 presuming dell starts bundling the update or isps send it on cd/dvd.

so most home users will need to buy a new pc?
no.

IP is software, there shoulld be no nead to replace the PC to get it functioning with IPv6 - an example? i have a Pentium 1 here, which is quite happly (whilst sluglishly) running OpenBSD on the IPv6 network i set up to see what it is like, the PC still has its orrignal 10Mbit network card

the only peice of hardware that will need replacing is the home modem/router, as that aquires its own IP address - though it is possable that manafactures will realease firmware updates that alow the use of IPv6 on the devices, most home users will chose to buy a new device or have it upgraded by a profional, eather way there being a cost.

Does anyone actually use english measures anymore?

[coyote-san]

Not to be dense, but does any manufacturer in the US still use english measurements? (Not consumer-facing products or places where legacy items are measured in english units.)

I believe car manufacturers switched to metric components years ago.

I'm sure aircraft manufacturers are also metric.

Consumer electronics? Considering that the last domestic manufacturer closed years ago I think it's a safe bet that it's entirely metric now.

Other industries?

I really enjoy...

[Anonymous Coward]

The wanna-be baby-boomers, trying to make a stand on /., like mommy amd daddy did years before...

It is kind of cute, actually...

a pedant's view

[m()p3s]

Hate to be a pedant (well, actually I love it!) but I thought editors were suppose to fix stuff like this up...

There is no word 'alot'. It is two very distinct words, an 'a' followed one space later by 'lot'. This mangling of English will be the death of me.

Re:a pedant's view

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought editors were suppose to fix stuff like this up... You're new around here, aren't you?

Re:a pedant's view

[Anonymous Coward]

Ihere are far better things to complain about that "alot". It at least makes a certain amount of sense, and is in a similar style to previous changes in English (like the 'n' migrating off the front of some nouns and on to the preceding article).

It's things like the invention of nonsensical words by attempting to force a misunderstanding of latin on to English (virii, and - i kid you not - scenarii), and chronic Homonym abuse (they're their there, here, hear, hare, you're, your, to, too, two) that are the worst. A mashed up word and a typo here and there are not serious barriers to communication.

Pick your battles!

Re:a pedant's view

[Anonymous Coward]

speaking of nonsensical words, obviously: s/Ihere/There/

I wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

how much government money was spent on the enlightening report recommending "that federal agencies develop a business case for moving to IPv6, centralize their migration tactics and define metrics to help track transition progress".

one-year warranty

[robertjw]

Is that warranty good from the time you start the work, or in 10 years when you actually get it done.

Re:Does anyone actually use english measures anymo

[game kid]

Consumers, too. Everyone likes to check their car's EPA kilometres/litr--no wait...

How to pay for upgrades?

[akmarksman]

How about NOT building that "Bridge to Nowhere" in Alaska. That would save some money.

Re:How to pay for upgrades?

[akeyes]

You watched that show on the Discovery Channel, too? http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/engineering/b eringstrait/interactive/interactive.html

Re:How to pay for upgrades?

[akmarksman]

Actually I live here..and the majority of the residents are AGAINST the bridge.

Re:How to pay for upgrades?

[sxpert]

it's me or this crap just looks like YET ANOTHER sweet deal for halliburton ?

Re:Does anyone actually use english measures anymo

[robertjw]

Other industries?

• Construction - lumber is still purchased in feet
• Bakeries - Donuts are still sold by dozens
• Daries - Milk is still sold in Gallons and half Gallons
• Agregates (one of the largest industries in the US) - Rock is still sold by the standard ton of 2000 lbs
• Oil - still measured by the gallon, quart and barrel

Seems like there are still quite a few people using standard measurements.

Cut costs down using freely available software

[hubertf]

Check out this IPv6 deployment guide for a number of solutions how to save money with freely available software (NetBSD, Linux, ...) in the transition to IPv6.

New Orleans

[wheatwilliams]

Hmmn. $25-75 billion? We could completely storm-proof New Orleans for less than that.

the funny thing is...

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing is that we really don't need to move to IPv6 at all. We don't need more digits in the protocol, we just need more numbers. Think about it! Someone just needs to invent more numbers. I know, there's 'A', 'B', and stuff. But they're not really numbers and that why it hasn't worked and why we're going to a protocol with more digits. But just think about it, more numbers is the better solution, then we could stay with IPv4 and not have to replace hardware! Why hasn't anybody thought of this before?

Re:the funny thing is...

[ilovepolymorphism]

For a second I thought you were being serious....

That's right - people will buy anything!

[NotQuiteReal]

Even if they don't need it - like lots of devices that will have their own IPv6 address, even if there is no reason to! (The proverbial Internet aware toaster will be a big seller!)

We must move to IPv6, because the Internet just doesn't seem to be working right (or at least I tell myself that, because I wouldn't want to fix it if it weren't broken). I look forward to a time that each of my Happy Meal toys will be able to be connected to the Internet, yes we need IPv6 Now!

Bah! As others have pointed out, there will not be much cost, if it rolls out more slowly. As you update hardware, get stuff that can do both IPv4 and IPv6 next time... eventually a critical mass will be reached and the switchover will happen.

Re:That's right - people will buy anything!

[rob_squared]

(or at least I tell myself that, because I wouldn't want to fix it if it weren't broken) That's some false logic there. That's like saying, "my car's working just fine, so there shouldn't be any problem when I run into that tree."

Re:That's right - people will buy anything!

[mwood]

I think that if we could strain out all the hot stock tip and, uh, "enhancement" emails, the Internet would work just fine for years to come. Oh, and the zillions of zombified DSL nodes that constantly poke at my systems asking if they are listening to NetBT *now*.

But that's traffic problems, not address-space problems.

That's ridiculous

[Phil Karn]

That estimate is just ridiculous. IPv6 has been in Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Windows XP for at least several years. BIND has had support for AAAA records for some time. It's in Cisco router images. We just have to turn it on and use it!

And we don't have to wait for our ISPs, either. I've been using 6to4 (IPv6 tunneled over IPv4) for years. It's especially useful on home networks where multiple servers have to share a single IPv4 address on a cable or DSL modem.

6to4 works very well. A 6to4 tunnel coexists nicely with an IPv4 NAT on my home router. The computers on my home network can run conventional clients through the NAT just as they always have, while servers running on those computers can be contacted directly from the outside using IPv6.

While not every Internet application yet speaks IPv6, the important ones already do. SSH is the most important, but popular SMTP, IMAP and HTTP implementations do as well.

I cannot believe the handsprings users are expected to perform on retail commodity routers with kludges like "port forwarding" when 6to4 tunneling is both simpler and far more general and powerful.

Re:That's ridiculous

[evilviper]

And we don't have to wait for our ISPs, either. I've been using 6to4 (IPv6 tunneled over IPv4) for years.

Yeah, I'm sure 6to4 is going to work perfectly for everybody, particularly the US government. Who needs to buy new routers, when you can just tunnel everything? Woohoo!

Re:That's ridiculous

[Lxy]

And we don't have to wait for our ISPs, either. I've been using 6to4 (IPv6 tunneled over IPv4) for years.

That's great for home use. What about businesses with many odd devices requiring static IPs? You eventually have to give back your tunnel broker IPs in exchange for your ISP's. Why renumber twice when I can just wait and renumber once?

Re:That's ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

- Yeah, I'm sure 6to4 is going to work perfectly for everybody, particularly the US government.
- Who needs to buy new routers, when you can just tunnel everything? Woohoo!

Don't tug on Superman's cape, son.

Re:That's ridiculous

[Tony Hoyle]

6to4 is dying. The number of tunnel brokers has plummeted, so badly that recently I had to abandon looking for one in europe and use the US (btexact, the one I used a while ago, is now fubar and there's no obvious resolution time).

The anycast address, 192.88.99.1, is no longer routed by many ISPs (none that I have access to anyway, and that's quite a few... I have lots of old accounts).

Oh, and don't forget that the 6bone gets switched off next year, and that was the primary source of ipv6 hosts.

Unless the ISPs start handing out ipv6 addresses all that software capability will mean nothing as there will be no network to connect to.

Re:That's ridiculous

[sxpert]

guess you should have looked a little better.
http://www.sixxs.org/ is a fine tunnel broker.

Re:That's ridiculous

[sxpert]

besides, the 6bone is obsolete as described in http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3701.txt?number=3701
The 6bone was a test network. it has served it's useful purpose, but now isn't needed anymore, as the production IPv6 network is currently undergoing deployment.

Re:That's ridiculous

[anticypher]

Don't tug on Superman's cape, son.

Do you think evilviper knows of the legacy of KA9Q's packet drivers and all the technical contributions and advances he's made to networking over the years? I seriously doubt it, but then again, this is /.

the AC

Re:That's ridiculous

[evilviper]

I'll admit, I didn't even notice to whom I was replying...

Asian Homes will use up IPv4, cellphones would

[billstewart]

As Asians get broadband at home, they're going to start burning a lot of IPv4 addresses, and to the extent that they deploy cellphones as IPv4 instead of IPv6, they'll also burn up lots of addresses. China's the main fast-growing player right now, but India may gradually get its act together and catch up. Japan and Korea are already heavily wired and/or wirelessed (insert canonical old-people-in-Korea joke here).

But there are hard problems and easy problems

• Linux, BSD, MacOS, and newer Windows versions all support IPv6 natively, though some of the support is rough (e.g. if your default DNS server doesn't know IPv6, things fail strangely or work slowly.)
• BIND and Apache support IPv6 if you want them to, and Firefox mostly does. So do some LDAP servers.
• Cisco, Juniper, and other major router vendors support IPv6 on newer equipment, but often their IPv4 support is in fast ASICs while the IPv6 uses slower CPU-driven processing so most ISPs haven't turned it on on most equipment, and IPv6 does take a lot more memory for tables because the addresses are bigger, and it seems that running dual-stack slows down everything compared to running IPv6-only and IPv4-only.
• Dialup Internet support comes from a really wide variety of equipment - some stuff can be easily upgraded, other stuff is antique. Fortunately, most dial users are clients who can use NAT or tunnel servers so they can ignore the problem.
• Home firewall routers like you've probably got under your desk don't support IPv6 - if you've got a Linux-based model, it might be upgradeable, but it might not have the horsepower to keep up with a fast broadband connection.
• Lots of NAT, proxy, and tunnel variants, 6to4 gateways, etc. exist, and can be used to hide non-IPv6 equipment from the scary new IPv6 network, or to let IPv6 equipment pretend to be IPv4 when talking to older networks, so there's a lot of transition support possible for people who want to use it - but it's potentially a lot of work.
• Lots of custom applications were written for IPv4 only, and would have to be rewritten to support IPv6 - it's a level of pain similar to getting Y2K bugs fixed. Some of them can be worked around by hiding behind 6to4 gateways, some can't. Sometimes it's just a database schema change, sometimes it's not.
• ISP network management databases often just know IPv4 - supporting IPv6 not only means changing out lots of tools, but also input screens for users, etc. Some ISPs are better at that than others, but as with equipment replacement, major software changes require money, and most ISPs aren't making much.

Re:Asian Homes will use up IPv4, cellphones would

[Tony Hoyle]

cellphones are mostly NATted. There's little or no reason for them to have an IP on the public internet, so it's rare to find it.

There really isn't a shortage yet - I just asked for a /29 and was offered a /28 for 'future growth' - If they're still giving it out like that that then there no panic.

Re:Asian Homes will use up IPv4, cellphones would

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you want to use them for the features advertised, like full mobile desktop systems via them.

$25 billion

[zmq503o1]

$25 billion sure buys a whole lot of Linksys routers!

Crude oil, Snake Oil, whatever

[billstewart]

Sure, Halliburton's happy to take on the job. :-)

On the other hand, the folks who brought us Y2K consulting would all like their piece of the pie as well. Much of Halliburton's work in Iraq could be done by other people if they had the same political connections, but there are some parts of the oil business that Halliburton are not only the best at what they do, they're almost the only people capable of doing it, and only Schlumberger are close.

Re:Crude oil, Snake Oil, whatever

[RM6f9]

Isn't it about time for "Office Space 2"???

Re:Crude oil, Snake Oil, whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

they're almost the only people capable of doing it

That doesn't excuse the no-bid contracts. In fact, it makes it more suspect. Bidding should be easy if they really were the only ones.

$75B Sounds low-ball to me.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd guess that it'd cost you a couple billion dollars getting the really big peers using IPv6 between each other and just tunneling IPv4 traffic around. By the time you get the players to the table and you get Cisco, Juniper and the big consulting firms all into it and the couple really big ISPs to show up at the table you've already blown a few million. By the time the pissing contests are all done, I could see that "project" costing a couple billion, easy. It's going to be a money grab any way you cut it.

When you step back and look, you can migrate it down, start at some top level peers and push it down. ISPs can roll it out, smaller ones would have it easier but it's doable. A couple of big schools could switch over to IPv6, there is enough support between Linux, Windows and MacOSX that all the students could show up one year and it could be an ipv6 network. You start looking at businesses and that's when it starts to look like a mess. Every layer 3 device in the business will have to be evaluated, many replaced, many might not even be really audited as it is. It looks like y2k all over again. I don't even think most IT guys have IPv6 on their mind when they buy stuff.

I'd wager, you could get all the top level peers to IPv6 and that would cost $5B or there about. Maybe you could get the 10 biggest ISPs to switch, that'd probably cost another $20B, I'm just swagging $2B a pop for the big 10, probably lot's of infrastructure upgrades to make it happen. So that's $25B. Start looking at corporate networks, who knows? I'd imagine it would cost a pretty penny just to get them peering IPv6 and using IPv4 internally; of course by this point there might be some really good reasons to use IPv6 across the board because you'll be losing access to things from IPv4.

You take another step back, I setup IPv6 at home for my own good, not super easy. All my network jock buddies are IPv4 savvy and while they know specs and such, none seem to have a lot of IPv6 known-how for real. I think there is a pretty big void there. On the up tick, I think this is going to happen, it's just a matter of when, I also think that if we play our cards right we might be able to clean up a lot of the bullshit that is out there right now.

Using lots of NAT/proxy/gateway servers

[billstewart]

A lot of the government's computer and network equipment can be upgraded fairly easily to support IPv6 or dual-stack environments, as long as the PCs are new enough to run XP (many of them aren't, but a couple of years of transition period can help that, and maybe we can get them to use Linux or BSD on the older boxes.) Some routers have enough horsepower to run IPv6, others will need to be replaced, but that's all pretty straightforward. And web servers and email can be easily configured for IPv6, so that takes care of a large part of the government's users.

But there's also a lot of custom server applications that would need to be rewritten to support IPv6 (not even counting the stuff that needs to be rewritten to support IPv4 instead of SNA, or to use DNS instead of hard-coded IP addresses :-). Most of it can be kept going by hiding it behind 6to4 gateways of various sorts, so you'd end up with a lot of 10.x IPv4 islands connected to the rest of the world by IPv6, and optionally tunneled with each other, somewhat the way a lot of the SNA stuff is really running as emulations and tunnel servers on top of IPv4 these days.

Re:Does anyone actually use english measures anymo

[lachlan76]

When I met Andy Thomas (the Australian astronaut) a while back, he said that all of the measurements that are used in the shuttle designs are all imperial. I'm not sure whether that's everywhere though.

BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Not real;

http://www.snopes.com/photos/skirts.asp

Custom Software Upgrades are Expensive

[billstewart]

Yes, lots of the equipment gets old and eventually needs replacing, but the government really does keep equipment around long after it'd be obsolete in the commercial world - after all, a desk grunt who's typing memos at 100wpm and sending a bit of email is only generating information at ~100 baud, and as long as you stay off the Upgrade-Microsoft-Office-Every-Year treadmill, the main reason not to be using a 386 PC is that too many web pages want newer memory-hogging browsers, and even upgrading to a 3GHz Pentium doesn't mean you need a bigger router for the office if he's not downloading a lot more material.

But upgrading custom software is a much different scale of project than simply upgrading boxes and reconfiguring some web servers. There's a huge amount of mission-critical big nasty badly-documented stuff out there running on mainframes, PCs, and Unix boxes of various sorts that knows about IPv4 and might or might not know about DNS and DHCP. Finding all of it isn't quite the same level of effort as finding Y2K bugs, but it's still a huge hard-to-estimate job.

Re:Custom Software Upgrades are Expensive

[muchmusic]

the problem comes from being online at all - if someone is online often, the content the access dictates the platform they need to access that content - being online means keeping your hardware relatively up to date, for the average user at least.

Question and Fear

[Anonymous Coward]

I have another question: What is the cost of NOT moving?

I have a fear as well, that the USA will once again shun worldwide standards and not make the changeover. It would fit right in with our gallons and feet and inches and nationalistic cell phones and NTSC broadcast "standard". Annoying to live on an island, it is.

No no no...

[mindaktiviti]

We're not providing free nation-wide medicare on top of setting IPv6, you only need to cancel it for a week.

OT: This confirm script is really scarying me. It's always so ironically appropriate for the conversation. For example right now it's "unarmed".

How does IPv6 work?

[Lord Byron II]

I know the basics: more IP space, future of the Internet, yada, yada... but how does IPv6 look different than IPv4 to the end user? Will I have to throw away my Linksys router? Will Windows need new drivers? Will "dhcpcd interface" still work in Linux?

Can someone point me in the right direction? I've looked for this information before and I keep running into very technical articles and articles about how things will change for ISPs and network administrators. What is the average high-speed cable user going to see?

Re:How does IPv6 work?

[Tony Hoyle]

You'll need to upgrade the firmware on your linksys router - no stock ipv6 firmware is available at the moment, but you can do a custom hack using some of the linux images if you're into that kind of thing.

You still need dhcp for some things (wins, ntp, etc.) but the ip addresses and routes are autoconfigured. Heck, you can still NAT if you don't want your ipv6 addresses to be made public (cisco suppports this not sure about linux though).

Windows has the drivers in it (not installed by default) but hardly any software works with it, so unless you get your kicks by doing 'ping' you're not going to see much from it. (Firefox works, but there are few ipv6 web sites, and by few I mean *few* - probably less than 100 in the entire world).

Oh, and forget about memorising IP addresses - without DNS you're hosed.

Re:How does IPv6 work?

[Luke-Jr]

There's certainly more than 100 IPv6 websites in the world... even Armagetron Advanced's website supports IPv6.

Cost of transition

[netrangerrr]

The cost estimate we (Army CERDEC IPv6 Team) have done for the Army IPv6 transition leads us to believe essential $0 acqusitions costs if all IPv6 transition is done within regular tech refresh cycles. If we're buying IT gear anyway, IPv6 comes as regular product improvements over the next 3-5 years. The money DoD is spending at this point is aimed at getting MORE CAPABLE networks and at operations costs to train admins to run two IP stacks (v4 and v6) until we can phase out v4. By more capable, we are referring to new IPv6-only services like network mobility (NEMO) and multihoming (SHIM6).

The best, simplest solution.

[Twisted64]

I have it. The method to force the world into adopting IPv6 right NOW. Get google to make the switch, and to totally ignore IPv4. All IT businesses will grind to a halt until the change is made. For an even faster adoption, get all porn websites to change. The change won't be visible until the sun goes down (for the average user), but I predict the phone lines will melt, be they copper or optical fiber, from the desperate horny men trying to get IPv6 addresses.

You know...

[vertinox]

I hope that $75 billion includes fiber to the curb in every house in America.

I love IPv6 and all, but lets do the fiber first and then deal with the protocol.

Re:You know...

[superpulpsicle]

Fiber is a must in 10 years. I don't see how we can last another decade at home with 1-5 mbps broadband.

Re:Does anyone actually use english measures anymo

[Anonymous Coward]

standard? i think you mean imperial, the standard the world decided on is metric, you guys (and england) are the odd ones out

My favorite widget: Google Calculator.

[bergeron76]

Is the Google calculator widget.

It's a bad sign when some of the most popular portals are to your arch enemys content.

Software is nothing.

[Inoshiro]

What about the man-hours on each site, setting up a new IPv6 address on the machines there, and new AAAA records for the machines, etc?

What about all the machines which are not updated or updated infrequently, which don't have people around to make them IPv6?

IPv6 has not been designed to allow an easy transition from IPv4. You can't just throw in new A records, or say that ISPs now hand-out IPv6 addresses, or any of the other hundreds of time-intensive things that are required for an IPv6 switch over.

There is no special room with a switch:
IPv4 [is no fucking transition phase in any of the IPv6 designs.

Re:Software is nothing.

[jd]

Most IPv4 machines, these days, are autoconfiguring through DHCP, with the DNS records generated by Active Directory. All you're doing is telling them to pull the configurations via DHCPv6, and Active Directory will generate the AAAA records for you.

If you want to go stepwise, then you have an IPv4/IPv6 two-way proxy and start from the machines closest to the external network (eg: everything in the DMZ, the gateway router, the site's master DNS server, etc) for IPv6 conversion. With the internal system remaining IPv4 at that point, everything internal can see itself. With the proxy, any external site referenced by name and not IP address will also be visible - regardless of whether it is using IPv4 or IPv6.

Most of the major corporate sites will have two gateway routers in parallel, switched by means of VRRP or (if the routers are BSDian) CARP. So, you upgrade the offline router if necessary, then run a dual IPv4/IPv6 stack. Then you fail-over the connections to the upgraded router and you repeat for the router that had previously been in use. Depending on settings, this should give you a downtime of 30 seconds or less.

(If the routers are truly in parallel and load-balancing, then you would only drop to half bandwidth during the firmware upgrade and reboot. So long as you work off-hours, a half-bandwidth drop is going to be insignificant.)

IPv4 to IPv6 migrations are non-trivial for those who are new to IPv6 and/or haven't got any way of running a dual-protocol proxy and/or have set their topology such that ANY update is going to be difficult to impossible. None of these are the case in the majority of corporate networks.

Again, I would be more than happy to do more than talk. I could very easily upgrade the entire of either Slashdot or Kuro5hin (routers, servers, DNS, everything) to a dual IPv4/IPv6 configuration with full connection to the 6bone, with zero (yes, zero) downtime.

Now, I can fully understand not many others could offer the same boast - I've been using IPv6 since it first came out for Linux 2.0.20, so I can genuinely claim to have more hours than most on the new protocol. I also understand if either the Slashdot or K5 crew would rather pass on the offer. A low uid and bunches of karma is not the same thing as knowing the person or having any reason to trust them. Besides which, it seems a safe bet that SOMEONE at one of those sites has experience with setting up IPv6, simply because they're geeks.

Having said that, if anyone at all would be interested in (safely) testing my claims, tell me some hardware you have access to, and I'll tell you how to turn it into an IPv6 setup that is visible via IPv4. That way, there's no risk and if I turn out to be right, you're not obligated to admit it to anyone if you don't want. You'd not even be obligated to say if you tried at all.

If you want to be absolutely anonymous, I'll even make my e-mail visible - as if half the folk here and at K5 didn't already know it! - and you can post queries to that. Short of paying people to give IPv6 a try, I have no idea how much easier and safer I could possibly make it.

Isp already supports ipv6, you insensitive clod!

[Anonymous Coward]

My isp already supports IPv6, you insensitive clod!

(It's xs4all, an ancient dutch isp, which has some fame for hosting for instance karin spainks scientology pages)

My question is...

[Anonymous Coward]

By holding back on IPv6, are we logically seperating ourself from the rest of the internet?

If we are, I can think of a few good reasons why our current government is...

Two things to keep in mind here.

[Vorondil28]

You forget that (1) the transition is designed to take about 20 years during which IPv6 and IPv4 will run in parallel. This thins out that 75 billion per quarter quite a bit, and (2) the amount of money saved in the private sector over the years post-transition will slowly make up for the initial cost. Remember, we're dealing with business-men here -- if IPv6 is a huge money-drain, the cost-benefit analyses would show as much and no body would want to migrate to it.

IPv6 has costs at the core and the edge.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

IPv4 has some design limitations. IPv6 will address many of those problems, and the networks (and countries) that use that system will have competitive advantage.

IPv6 has some problems, too.

A big one is that some of the fast hacks for routing table lookups don't scale to the bigger addresses. So (absent a breakthrough in hacks) you have to do more brute force work (or switch to slower hacks). Which means you need to throw more instructions at each packet. Which means you need more processing power in the networking boxes - the core routers, edge routers, and BRAS boxes.

You need more than just a software upgrade if you still want to do everything ELSE that you're doing to the packets. You need more processing power per unit of bandwidth. More processors and faster clocks in the packet processor chips. More and faster memory. More of a balancing act if you have to distribute a stream across multiple processors - and greater likelyhood you'll have to do that. And so on.

That's just to stay even, in ADDITION to any multiplier for providing additional services.

So what you're asking the ISPs to do is replace the old routers with newer, faster, more power-hungry devices - when the old ones were doing just fine. There's no value proposition for them to do so until, for some other reason than "being nice", they HAVE to do it. It's a competitive market with tight margins. First guy to break from the pack incurs a big expense and gets squeezed out if his competition can continue with IPv4 and undercut him.

It gets done in Japan and some other countries because they're setting up for lots of mobile devices, and expect to need lots of address space to handle them (and simplify handing them off between base stations). They DON'T expect to be able to get enough IPv4 addresses to handle it after a year or two, so there's no point in deploying IPv4-only boxes just to tear them out before they really get rolling.

In the US - expect IPv6 to be deployed first as a network internal thing for particular carriers catering to mobile users (cellphone, IPTV, and the like) as they work their way through "the convergence". At some point there will be a tipping, where some killer app needs IPv6 support exposed to the users, and carriers providing it will start eating the lunch (and customer base) of those that don't. Then it becomes "change or die" for the rest.

Re:IPv6 has costs at the core and the edge.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, you're arguing that IPv6, with its shorter prefixes and tiered routing, requires *more* processing power? Do you have a study to back this up or are you just repeating bullshit you heard from somebody else?

What a deal!

[Yenin]

So each IP will only cost 0.00000000000000000000000002 cents. Sounds like a good deal to me.

He'll know what to do...

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll just put this in the hands of Al Gore. He'll know what to do.

Why? You can almost fight another Iraq war ...

[p2sam]

with that kind of cash.

Speaking for the EU and UN

[nick_davison]

You know, it's an awfully large amount of money that you guys could better spend invading somewhere.

How about you guys keep IPv4 and righteous control of its domain name servers. We'll just take those spare extra bits in the IPv6 address space, the really expensive ones you don't really want anyway. Of course, we'll need a naming system for it, but you don't care about what you can't use, right?

Heck, to show our understanding, we'll even open up some new top level domains in our new system, just for you. We trust .jebus and .id will cover everything you could need? We were going to offer you part of our new .sci space as well but we understand you prefer to cover that with .jebus these days?

Re:Speaking for the EU and UN

[Thundersnatch]

You know, it's an awfully large amount of money that you guys could better spend invading somewhere.

Well, we were going to invade France, but Chriac surrendered before the Marines even landed. So we've got the money to burn.

What is the cost?

[crovira]

Around 30,000 dead Iraquis citizens and 2,100 dead US Citizens and a smattering of other people from other nations.

Or are we merely just talking dollars and cents here?

Re:What is the cost?

[dbrutus]

You have to subtract out the normal killing rate the Baathist regime would have undertaken absent the war. That puts quite a dent in the numbers. Depending how you estimate that last one, it might even turn the net into a count of lives saved.

Re:What is the cost?

[jurv!s]

I'm interested in your theories and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

meh.

[Anonymous Coward]

last i heard we were supposed to be using IPv6 by 2004. never happened.

really, i don't see the hubbubb, at least for us. China, Europe, et al, certainly you guys will want to use IPv6! however, the introduction of private ip ranges (192.168.x.0 for example), IP Masqerading, and NAT has made the IP address crunch all but an issue for us.... for now at least. We'll still have to transition eventually, and paying less now would be the prudent choice (HAHA, since when have you heard of Americans being prudent! :D ). IPv4 has a capacity give or take in the several billions which is more than enough for us ATM.

really, do we need that what? million IP addresses per square inch of surface area on the earth that IPv6 offers?

IPv6 is NOT for people. It is for machines.

[crovira]

While people are puttering around with patches and kludges and crap they are not taking advantage of what their machines could be doing with the IPv6 address space and with end to end connectivity.

Stop thinking that the internet is about anthrocentric communication.

Its not and never was.

See http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml for a clue.

$75B is $250 per person

[mre5565]

$75 billion / 0.3 billion people = $250 or about the cost of an ipod, 6 months cell phone service, 3 months cable TV serice, one car payment, a week's rent, etc.

This is easily affordable if that's all it is.

Re:$75B is $250 per person

[PFI_Optix]

Conversely, $250 a person is a LOT of money considering the fact that the vast majority of those people would not benefit from IPv6 any time in the near future.

I recently bought a new TV. I could have bought an HDTV monitor (sans receiver) for $400. Instead I bought an analog TV for $150. Why? Because I didn't want to pay $250 for a technology I have no use for now and see no use for within the next five years.

The right way to make this a cheap and painless conversion is to simply have all new devices support IPv6. Eventually enough large companies will adopt it that the price will fall substantially to finish making the switch. I see no reason to hurry into something like this.

Re: cost of IPv6

[FlippyTheSkillsaw]

I've tried to get this point across before, and I'll continue to. The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 will indeed cost quite a bit even just for upgrading hardware. Here's why:

The transition will happen incrementally and will involve a period of IPv4 and IPv6 overlap where any given internet entity needs to have both an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address--obviously, most will have plenty more than a single address. Presumably your browser will then attempt a DNS query for the IPv6 address and fail over to IPv4, though some may give priority to IPv4 for various reasons. The overlap may be in terms of hours or it may be in terms of years for any given entity. We have the means to translate the entire IPv4 space into an IPv6 range, so many people won't notice when their ISP switches.

The cost, aside from technical hands to make the transition, will come in terms of hardware. If you run your router with 20% free memory and 70% CPU load, then you are in the green by today's standards, but when you add in IPv6, you need to upgrade memory and you start dropping packets to load. This doesn't take into account any extra fun that your router may need to do.

I don't know what percentage of active switches do IPv6, but many of the older switches will start broadcasting the IPv6 because they don't understand it. Now your switch is a hub. That will choke any network that needed switches in the first place. Even a single switch that doesn't do IPv6 could take out a large chunk of your network.

So to sum it up, the transition period will crank up the router requirements by 150 to 200% of the current requirements, which will blow much of the internet into the packet-dropping red. Many switches will need upgrading, which may include hardware. Network techs will be paid for all of this. Don't forget that any company that plans to have continued coverage will also need to have an escape plan in case things don't work like they are supposed to.

Insightful????

[JWallyR]

WAY WAY overrated. "... crop of economic vandals..."? That's thoughtful and interesting?

No, that's GROUPTHINK. Seriously, congrats that he can bash Bush and all... but (Score:5, Insightful)? Give me a break.

Cost

[buss_error]

IPv6 Transition to Cost US $75 Billion?

Yeah, but only if you have four 6313's. If you have more than four, Cisco will want LOTS more money.

MOD PARENT AS INSIGHTFUL

[woolio]

These damn moderators... 9/10 of them can't differentiate "funny" from "insightful".

25-75 billion means the high amount is 3X the low amount..

If I take a 10-question test and get between 3-9 questions right, then should I always pass???

Meanwhile...

[Aaron W. LaFramboise]

Meanwhile, some of us have been ready for five years or so. Even back in 1996, everyone knew IPng was coming. And hardware has had minimal support for it for almost as long. I'll bet most networking equipment has been purchased subsequently, and probably by people who knew about IPv6, too. I just wish they'd implement working Internet multicast routing by the time IPv6 reaches the 50% usage mark. Universal access to Internet multicast was one of the promises of IPng, and it really really needs to happen.

$75B Is Nothing...

[Anonymous Coward]

$75 billion should be nohing next to a war that costs $300+ billion or a tax cut for the rich that totals over $1 trillion over the next decade. And shouldn't it also count for something if this $75 billion is actually going towards something useful? In other words, should it really count as a major expense if it is going to pay off?

No, the reason the US didn't go metric

[Sycraft-fu]

Is because there's no compelling reason to the average person. The US government actually likes metric, and all government contracts (like construction) are done in metric. However selling it to the average citizen is much harder. See for normal things in life, all you need to know is roughly what something is. Like how long a foot is, how much a pound weighs, how much a gallon is. Then you memorize a couple conversions and you are good. You don't need to do inter-unit conversions.

Well inter-unit conversions are where the metric system becomes useful. It's not hard to remember 12 inches in a foot, despite what metric proponents claim. However while it's trivial to calculate the energy required to heat a cubic metre of water 10 degrees celcius, trying to calculate a similar thing with the US system would require conversion lookups and a calculator.

Thing is, you just don't do that in everyday life. I got real good at it in chemistry, and then proceeded to never use it again other than for geeky trivia purposes. It's just not the kind of thing you need to do as an average individual. Hence metric is a tough sell. Trying to legslate it probably wouldn't go over very well, thus we are stuck where we are.

I think there's a little confusion on that

[Sycraft-fu]

First off, I'm not sure that there's more households on the net in Europe and Japan than the US. I'd want to see a reliable source on that. However all that aside, that's not the real problem, companies and major backbone infastructure is and in that the US is far ahead. Though the Internet has been growing globally at a fantastic rate, espically since 2000, it it is still heavily US based. There's a lot more large (and thus expensive) infastructure that needs to be upgraded.

Also the US has an additonal problem in that a lot of the net here was developed before other countries started really taking off. That translates to old equipment, some of it has been replaced, of course, but an amazing amount of it still works fine and thus is still in place.

Well, when you are building new infastructure, it's not that hard a sell to pay whatever small amount extra to get IPv6. When you already spent $500million on a facility that still works fine, hard to get another $500million to upgrade it for a feature nobody is really asking for yet.

This is peanut...

[loolgeek]

Guess how much did it cost to US for migrate from Windows 95 to Windows 98, to Windows 2000, and finally to Windows XP ? Even if it costs 50B it is really nothing compare to what we waste (time and money) with crapy software.

Paving the way

[sjames]

IPv6 would roll out in a lot faster if the standards were a bit more friendly to partial implementation.

A few simple classes of automatically granted prefixes would do wonders along with a few simple routing rules. For example, to accomodate situations where NAT is used as a workaround to scarcity rather that for security, why not an address in the form of prefix, IPv4 address (of NAT device/firewall), arbitrary Ipv4 address. Addresses in that prefix could automatically be encapsulated into IPv4 to the firewall. The source address would make the right thing happen for the reply.

Doing things like that could create an incentive for the edges to upgrade even if their providers can't be bothered to do so. It would provide value even if individual workstations/PCs were upgraded (OS) for IPv6 support. Intermediate routers wouldn't even know the difference.

Once things like that are in place, we will see other convieniances come into play, such as the ability to specify prefix per zone or system wide for DNS and have individual RRs just specify suffix.

Another useful convention would be that every router currently speaking BGP MAY take it's peering address(es) as IPv6 prefixes with no need to apply (or pay) for an allocation. It's not as if v6 addresses are scarce. The scarcity is routers with enough memory to hold larger routing tables. That's why I think routing it on the back of the existing v4 tables will help.

Re:Paving the way

[Pienjo]

A few simple classes of automatically granted prefixes would do wonders along with a few simple routing rules. For example, to accomodate situations where NAT is used as a workaround to scarcity rather that for security, why not an address in the form of prefix, IPv4 address (of NAT device/firewall), arbitrary Ipv4 address. Addresses in that prefix could automatically be encapsulated into IPv4 to the firewall. The source address would make the right thing happen for the reply.

Doing things like that could create an incentive for the edges to upgrade even if their providers can't be bothered to do so. It would provide value even if individual workstations/PCs were upgraded (OS) for IPv6 support. Intermediate routers wouldn't even know the difference.

What you describe has been available for *ages*. It's called "IPv4 mapped IPv6 adresses", and it basicly boils down to the entire ipv4 range being a subrange of IPv6 (From the top of my head, the 3ffe:: is used for this). Still, it hasn't quite caught on.

FYI: The opposite is available too, in a way. It's called 6-to-4, and enables *everybody* with an IPv4 address to use IPv6. You even get an entire /80 range to play with. No provider support needed.

It would provide value even if individual workstations/PCs were upgraded (OS) for IPv6 support.

The majority of the workstations/PCs doesn't even have to be upgraded. Windows XP natively supports IPv6 (it's merely disabled by default, but a simple 'ipv6 install' on a command line fixes that), Linux has been having support of it for the last few years, so unless you're running an ancient machine that would need updating for several other reasons, consider yourself IPv6 capable. MacOS X has been having IPv6 support since the early OSX days, IIRC. The list goes on and on.

Heck, even Internet Explorer and Firefox can use IPv6. What more client support do you need ?

Re:Paving the way

[sjames]

I'm aware of mapped and 6to4 tunneling, but those don't do exactly what I have specified, and that's why they haven't seen massive use. 6to4 tunneling requires a 3rd party and doesn't necessarily take care of the routing for you. Consider, at home I have a network NATed behind a single static IP on DSL. At work, I have a workstation with a static v4 address. I wish to talk to my home machine at (for the sake of argument) 192.168.1.200.

Certainly, I can play various games with ipip tunnels and creative routing. OR I could aggregate my home static IP, and the non-routed IP of the target machine into a v6 address and just use it. The traffic will not need to go through 192.88.99.1 at all. It won't matter if my work machine is also behind NAT. The networks on either end can be either v4 or v6 native. If v6, it's easy to make machines selectively available by having (or not having) the appropriate alias. I can also filter the traffic at the firewall as usual (using choke routing rather than NAT).

The scheme would still use 6to4 to reach native v6 networks and if I "go native" at home, would use mapped v4 addresses to reach the v4 world.

The objective is to remove any sense of 2nd class-ness and get ARIN out of the way (IMHO, they're rapidly becoming the net's answer to the DMV, with enough addresses for every person on earth to have more addresses than there are network capable devices, do we really need $2500 worth of admin overhead/year to allocate it?). While we're at it, let's get the big ISPs out of the way. As long as supporting v6 is seen as a marketing bullet point, there will be barriers to entry.

This is the result of my thinking about why some net technology spreads like wildfire, and v6 languishes after 10 years. Simply, innovation on the net happens only at the edges, the core is too busy trying to figure out how to charge extra and/or cram push technology down our throats to innovate. My ideas (not really full proposals at this point) are meant to let the edge innovate and benefit from IPv6 without regard for what the core and administration does or does not do.

Essentially, the idea is to provide worthwhile benefits to turning on and using v6 on individual machines (where it is readily available) without requiring anything of the various legacy routers, allocations (or allocation authorities), and providers other than "get out of the way, progress is happening". This includes providing a way for a native v6 network to participate with a simple addition of a router box (probably a Linux or BSD machine) to easily participate.

Re:Paving the way

[raxx7]

I'm aware of mapped and 6to4 tunneling, but those don't do exactly what I have specified, and that's why they haven't seen massive use. 6to4 tunneling requires a 3rd party and doesn't necessarily take care of the routing for you. Consider, at home I have a network NATed behind a single static IP on DSL. At work, I have a workstation with a static v4 address. I wish to talk to my home machine at (for the sake of argument) 192.168.1.200. Certainly, I can play various games with ipip tunnels and creative routing. OR I could aggregate my home static IP, and the non-routed IP of the target machine into a v6 address and just use it. The traffic will not need to go through 192.88.99.1 at all. It won't matter if my work machine is also behind NAT. The networks on either end can be either v4 or v6 native. If v6, it's easy to make machines selectively available by having (or not having) the appropriate alias. I can also filter the traffic at the firewall as usual (using choke routing rather than NAT).

6to4 automatic tunneling should do just that. At work, configure 6to4 on your workstation (I assume it has a public IP address). At home, configure 6to4 on your gateway, based on it's public IP address. Assign your other home computers IPv6 addresses with the same 2002:some:thing: prefix the gateway got. radvd supports this. There, your other home computers now have a public IPv6 address and should be reachable from the IPv6 Internet. The packets won't be going through a 3rd IPv6 IPv4 router either. 3rd party is only needed to connect hosts on 6to4 tunneling to native IPv6 hosts or IPv6 hosts on other kind of tunnel. Your workstation at work and gateway at home will route exchange their IPv6 in IPv4 packets directly between themselves.

Re:Paving the way

[raxx7]

I'm aware of mapped and 6to4 tunneling, but those don't do exactly what I have specified, and that's why they haven't seen massive use. 6to4 tunneling requires a 3rd party and doesn't necessarily take care of the routing for you. Consider, at home I have a network NATed behind a single static IP on DSL. At work, I have a workstation with a static v4 address. I wish to talk to my home machine at (for the sake of argument) 192.168.1.200.

Certainly, I can play various games with ipip tunnels and creative routing. OR I could aggregate my home static IP, and the non-routed IP of the target machine into a v6 address and just use it. The traffic will not need to go through 192.88.99.1 at all. It won't matter if my work machine is also behind NAT. The networks on either end can be either v4 or v6 native. If v6, it's easy to make machines selectively available by having (or not having) the appropriate alias. I can also filter the traffic at the firewall as usual (using choke routing rather than NAT).

6to4 automatic tunneling should do just that.

At work, configure 6to4 on your workstation (I assume it has a public IP address).
At home, configure 6to4 on your gateway, based on it's public IP address. Assign your other home computers IPv6 addresses with the same 2002:some:thing: prefix the gateway got. radvd supports this.

There, your other home computers now have a public IPv6 address and should be reachable from the IPv6 Internet.

The packets won't be going through a 3rd IPv6 IPv4 router either. 3rd party is only needed to connect hosts on 6to4 tunneling to native IPv6 hosts or IPv6 hosts on other kind of tunnel.

Your workstation at work and gateway at home will route exchange their IPv6 in IPv4 packets directly between themselves.

Re:Paving the way

[raxx7]

I just remembered something.
What I've described above is described in RFC 3056 and is supported, for example, by Linux's tun6to4 network device.
However, you may be configuring a "6to4" tunnel and always route your non-local packets to a 3rd party 6 to 4 router. For example, I've seen howto's that use the sit0 device. The sit0 device doesn't know about RFC 3056 and will always send packets to the 3rd party router.

what is going on over there?!?

[SethJohnson]

Actually, the current estimate on the war in Iraq is $350 billion.

Wait a minute! I thought this Iraq affair was part of the IPv6 migration plan. Cheaper gas, faster internet I was told.

Now that I've checked around on some websites, it looks like the current story is something about preventing torture and human rights abuses. Either that or implementing them abroad-- the photos and the text aren't matching up.

Anyway, the big obstacle seems to be these fundamentalist zTerm zealots kidnapping our telecom engineers and holding them hostage trying to block multimedia internet content and return us to tools like lynx and gopher.

Seth

Mobile IPv6 - the nucleus

[thaig]

The usual theory is that mobile IP will be the nucleus of IPv6 and may actually end up being larger in terms of the number of devices than the rest of the internet since lots of people have phones but not necessarily PCs.

Even if there were less phones, there would still be an incentive for business to IPv6-enable their software and hardware if there was a large market of mobile users to supply with servies.

Cheers,

Tim

Re:Does anyone actually use english measures anymo

[BKX]

Not true. The english Imperial system is completely different from the US customary system, even though they share the same names. For example, a US standard ton is 2000 lb, while that same measure is called a short tonne in the Imperial system. A standard Imperial tonne (also called a long tonne) weighs 2240 lb.

Another example would be the gallon, and this one will blow your mind, as its completely ridiculous and you probably had no idea. In the Imperial system, a gallon is ~4.546L, no matter what. (Regardless of gallon type, a gallon has 128 of the appropriate ounces, so a comparison requires us to use a neutral 3rd-party unit. The liter seems excellent.) A US LIQUID gallon is ~3.785L, which everyone is vaguely aware (at least in theory ("a gallon's a little smaller that two 2L pop bottles.")). A US DRY gallon is ~4.404L. I really have no idea what these differences are from, but they're there.

Checkout http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_Imp erial_and_US_customary_systems

Transition will take a lot longer

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt that even half of the US government agencies can go ipv6 by 08 as planned.

Also, although there may be some hype here and there, the reality is that even Japan has a long way to go.

There is just so much stuff on the net by major vendors that don't seem to be even started in implementing ipv6. It might be pretty easy for PC's, linux, Windows etc. It's a whole different story for devices with embedded controllers with very limited memory etc.

Re: cost of IPv6

[Eunuchswear]

I don't know what percentage of active switches do IPv6, but many of the older switches will start broadcasting the IPv6 because they don't understand it. Now your switch is a hub. That will choke any network that needed switches in the first place. Even a single switch that doesn't do IPv6 could take out a large chunk of your network.

Huh? Switches don't do IP, they switch packets based on the MAC address. They'll work with IPv6 just like they did before.

Re: cost of IPv6

[FireFury03]

We have the means to translate the entire IPv4 space into an IPv6 range, so many people won't notice when their ISP switches.

I don't believe IPv4 will be completely turned off within a reasonable length of time of the introduction of IPv6 at an ISP.

For a while we'll have IPv4 addresses for end users just as we do now, but also hand out IPv6 networks to them as well. (This is the start of the transition - IPv4 is still used by the masses, IPv6 traffic gradually increases)

At some point I suppose the ISP may well stop giving people global scope IPv4 addresses - give all the customers RFC1918 addresses and NAT everything at the ISP's border. (IPv4 usage is in decline - only a small percentage of traffic is IPv4, most is IPv6)

Eventually IPv4 will be turned off completely, but because they coexist I don't see a time when translating between IPv6 and IPv4 will be necessary (at least for the ISP).

I don't know what percentage of active switches do IPv6, but many of the older switches will start broadcasting the IPv6 because they don't understand it. Now your switch is a hub. That will choke any network that needed switches in the first place. Even a single switch that doesn't do IPv6 could take out a large chunk of your network.

I'm sorry, you are wrong. Switches don't know or care about network layer 3 (IPv4/IPv6/IPX/NetBios/etc) - switches only care about layer 2 (Ethernet). This is why your Ethernet network can run any of IP, NetBios, IPX, PPPoE, and anything else that runs over Ethernet regardless of what switches you have.

/48s are for typical business end-users

[billstewart]

Your question d) about how many users it takes to assign 200 /48s sounds like you're thinking about home internet service. Typically an ISP gets a /32, and provides /48s to business end-user customers, who would typically do things like assign a /64 to a building. So that's an ISP with 200 dedicated-access business customers - not really small, but not all that large either. On the other hand, an ISP that does a lot of dialup business is unlikely to assign a /48 to every dial POP - probably a /64, or possibly even a longer prefix, if anybody who still cares about dialup five years from now wants real IPv6 instead of IPv4 behind a 6to4 gateway or NAT.

There are conditions when it makes sense to provide /64s to smaller customers - I wouldn't be surprised to see home broadband service assigned that way, since that lets the ISP's /32 support four billion customers, each of whom can support 64K LANs each with host addresses assigned based on the 48-bit MAC address. Whether small-business-office customers get /64 or bigger remains to be seen - a typical standalone office really doesn't need a /48, but the politics of address space assignment may encourage ISPs to do it anyway. On the other hand, a gas station clearly doesn't need more than a /64.

Re:/48s are for typical business end-users

[Anonymous Coward]

"I wouldn't be surprised to see home broadband service assigned that way, since that lets the ISP's /32 support four billion customers, each of whom can support 64K LANs each with host addresses assigned based on the 48-bit MAC address."

IPv6 isn't designed that way, can't be deployed that way. A /64 is the minimum subnet for autoconfiguration, and non-autoconfigured networks aren't going to be used by home users because the administration is too expensive. So, some early ADSL users may get /64 but they'll quickly find that it restricts them from having subnets (which they're often used to with wireless, or to separate out visitors from local traffic) and I expect ISPs will settle on /56 allocations to small homes and businesses, which would be in line with new advice expected from future IPv6 allocation rules.

Re:/48s are for typical business end-users

[billstewart]

You need 48 bits for autoconfiguration, so that'd be a /80 as the minimum - the other 16 bits in a /64 seem to be there for subnets within an allocation, unless I've missed something major. All the early descriptions looked _so_ much like some of the Novell Netware config stuff from decades ago :-) Administation doesn't have to be expensive, because a DHCP server or equivalent can do parts of it, but you're still highly likely to have a human in the loop to decide which permissions the wireless subnet has vs. the wired ones.

Cut off US

[Anonymous Coward]

The rest of the world can move forward to IP6 and then we will se if we still need the link to the US from out super IP6 network. Funny that that richest country in the world can't afford it when Europe and Japan can. hi hi

Scalable addresssing for multihoming is just hard

[billstewart]

I've been trying to think about the multihoming problem for maybe five years, and the answers don't seem to be getting any better (:-) IPv6's advocates made a big deal in the early days about how they were going to give us magical solutions for scalable addressing and routing, and we weren't going to have all the end users in another big swamp with all the anarchy of IPv4 address assignment and just longer addresses, but the main thing that seems to have been done about it is have ICANN price IPv6 space high enough to discourage casual experimenters from getting their own space.

Some of the original motivations for end-users getting their own address space have gone away - DHCP means the cost of readdressing computers has gone to nearly zero, especially for desktop machines, and DNS means that you really _can_ move a server, though you might need a week or two of overlap on the address space for everybody's caches to time out (and IPv6 might force you to do some kind of tunneling deal with your old ISP), and firewalls mean that you might not by exposing most of your IP devices to the outside world anyway, just your public servers.

But even that doesn't mean that routing becomes much simpler, because that's only useful if you can aggregate - for instance, you could get /48 of provider-assigned address space from ISP1, and advertise that space on your connection to ISP2, so the global routing tables still have two entries for you even though they're assigned somewhat more cleanly. And aggregation doesn't always work well for geographically dispersed end-user customers - it's one thing for a university to aggregate the addresses from a bunch of buildings that are all in the same city, but if you've got a retail store chain with a thousand stores, should they all be part of one /48 at headquarters and route their external traffic there through IPSEC tunnels, or should each branch get provider-assigned address space from whatever ISP is nearby and try to tie that mess together, or some hybrid of both? For performance reasons, especially with VOIP, you'd like to keep latency down, so it's better to keep traffic in the same half-continent or so if you can, but it's not clear that there's an obvious answer.

IPv6 was supposed to free us from the evils of NAT. But the easiest ways to do multihoming either get into the swamp scalability problems or else do some kind of NAT or tunnel things to let you advertise one set of address space from two ISPs. Maybe that's not such a huge problem?

magnet-train

[Anonymous Coward]

the Transrapid (magnet-rail) of Shanghai was actually developed and build in Germany. But the high costs and the huge need for rail-space in a highly urbanized environment hindered its adoption in germany as of yet. There are three tracks in planning, though.

Pretty reasonable price...

[Atario]

...on an address per dollar basis.

(65,536 ^ 8) / ((25 to 75) * 1,000,000,000) =~ 1.36e28 to 4.53e27 addresses per dollar.

So, about one address per atom of your body, for only a dollar. Not a bad deal.

Re: cost of IPv6

[toleraen]

I'm thinking by "active" switches the GP may be referring to multi-layer switches, which provide routing and other services at the network and transport layer. Probably not, but one can be hopeful.

Re: cost of IPv6

[Octorian]

While you're right that switches pretty much don't care for most uses, I can think of two cases where fancy managed switches actually might care...
1) Management traffic (telnet/snmp/etc. for monitoring/configuring the switch)
2) IGMP Snooping (without this (or something similar like Cisco's CGMP), multicast traffic effectively becomes broadcast traffic on the switch)

Of course this isn't counting multi-layer switches, which effectively are routers built into switches. (which most definitely do care about IP)

One problem NAT causes

[Nurgled]

Here is an example of a problem with NAT and private addresses that I face frequently:

In my house I have several computers which all have addresses with 192.168.0.0 addresses. My router, which does NAT, has the address 192.168.0.1. My local web/email/nameserver box has the address 192.168.1.1. Client machines have various addresses that are unimportant here. At my office there are also several computers. The office network, which existed long before I worked at the company and is not under my control, also uses addresses in the 192.168.0.0 range and uses the same subnet mask.

Occasionally I work at home. When I do this, I establish a VPN login to my office which gives me one address on the office network. Now the system that logged into the VPN is now a member of two networks with the same subnet mask. Worse, many of the servers at the office have IP addresses which exactly match computers on my home network. Hopefully you can imagine the resulting problem. I can renumber my machines to use the 10.0.0.0 prefix, but then I suddenly find that I need to create a VPN connection to a client site for support and they use 10.0.0.0.

One can envisage schemes for crazy NAT arrangements between the networks to make them appear to be on different prefixes, but this functionality is not readily available as standard. My solution is a little more mundane; I just add entries to my routing table for specific hosts that I need to connect to and keep my existing route for 192.168.0.0/16 pointing at my home LAN. This works, but each time I need to connect to a new server I must find its IP address and add a new route for it.

This would be so much easier if all of the involved systems had globally-unique addresses, even if those addresses were not actually accessible over the public Internet directly due to a firewall. I'm not the only person in the world that uses a VPN, either.

75 billion seems fair

[Anonymous Coward]

If a hammer costs $4000, then 75 billion seems about right for ipv6.

The cost of *not* switching to IPv6

[SgtChaireBourne]

They should have focused on how it will *GROW* the economy by creating $75 Billion in new jobs and infrastructure.

I think more interesting than any of these very lame articles individually is the fact that collectively they've all chosen to spin IPv6 negatively. That includes the red herring about address space. So, who is benefitting directly from keeping the US on IPv4?

There are serious security problems with IPv4 that are costing a lot of money every day. With all the squawking about rolling out IPSEC, why not just skip that step and go to IPv6 which has IPSEC built in? Or can key vendors *cough*M$&cough* provide systems or applications that can handle IPv6 yet?

The routing for IPv6 is both simpler and more hierarchical than for IPv4, that's also got to be a cost saver.

Re:The cost of *not* switching to IPv6

[mwood]

IPv6 and IPsec are in Windows and have been for some time. They even work pretty well, to the limit of my ability to test them. They interwork well with Linux.

No, I think it's just the service providers balking at the cost of some firmware upgrades and accelerated plant replacement/capacity expansion. What they should be thinking is, "what will FCC do next, once they've rammed through the cutover to digital TV?" ISPs may not have much say in scheduling this upgrade, if they don't choose to move soon. Someone with clout may have noticed that our infrastructure generally is falling behind the curve and decided to force the pace. It's called "industrial policy" and a number of influential people seem to think the U.S. ought to have one. Maybe we do.

What the hell is IPv6?

[Simonetta]

What the hell is IPv6? No seriously.

Anything that costs $75 billion dollars should never be refered to by an ancronym.

Re:What the hell is IPv6?

[mwood]

IPv6 is a new version of IP with larger addresses -- 128 bits instead of 32 bits. One can carve up the address space with all sorts of special areas for special purposes, apply rules to help with route aggregation, and still wind up with enough plain addresses to give one to each electron in the universe, or something like that. With people talking seriously about scattering dust-sized network nodes over the landscape by the billions we need to think seriously about expanding the available address space.

There are other changes that most will notice less, but addressing is big (and so IMHO is the requirement for packet-level security features).

It's kind of like IETF's recognition that "yeah, maybe we *do* need that OSI stuff after all." :-}

That's the problem.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Why build IPv6 into anything when no one's using it? It's just extra cost. Maybe a few cents, but extra cost nonetheless.

I agree with you, but unfortunately, in the real world, we'll probably cling to our IPv4 like a crackwhore to crack until all ISPs are charging $300/month for a real Internet IP address, people are finding all the things that will never work well on NAT, and those who dialup into real IP addresses actually get the DHCP equivalent of a busy signal, just as we'll probably cling to something as archaic as oil until gas is $300/gallon at the pump, and just as we cling to Windows and Office even after we've been charged thousands of dollars in upgrades and STILL frequently upgrade hardware or wipe the hard disk to live with or eliminate spyware.

Nothing will ever change in a purely capitalist situation. The current system will remain until it becomes so stupendously expensive that corporations are actually willing to produce the alternative for a reasonable price, and consumers figure that one more month of this will be more expensive than a year of the alternative and the cost of switching, and there's a significant amount of marketing that said users are even aware of the choice.

That's still theory, of course. I've never seen it happen. Ever.

Re:Does anyone actually use english measures anymo

[welshie]

Think: The space shuttle was designed in the 70's. That was before most of the USA knew much about SI/metric units.

(NASA had to go metric partly when doing the Apollo-Soyuz project, when actually meeting the requirements of a standard androgynous docking module meant meeting metric measurements)

The whole docking interface on the Shuttle was an afterthought, developed for the Shuttle-Mir project.

The US-designed aircraft that I've flown (designed in the 1950s/1960s are designed in feet and inches). I guess that new designs are more likely to be dimensioned in millimetres, even if the publicity/marketing departments might translate the wingspan etc to a near feet and inches for American publicity).

(or for UK tabloid publicity, they probably get translated into tabloid units - 8 times as long as a double decker bus)

How Much??

[dlhm]

$25 - $75 Billion!!! what kind of estimate it that?? If I told my boss that construction of a building would cost between.. 2 million and 8 million bucks I would get fired. Anyone can say give an estimate with such a broad range, it's just stupid. It takes someone a little more educated to say that it woudl cost between 2.2 and 2.5 million.. Come on.. quit makeing stupid broad guesses..

Re:How Much??

[Anonymous Coward]

So what makes YOU educated enough to make an arbitary figure like that?

Dumbass.

Re: cost of IPv6

[AGMW]

I'm obviously going to get shot down in flames here for my lack of knowledge, but why can't the two systems be run together during the change over period (however long that may be).
Assign IPv6 Nos to all the IPv4 addresses and map them somehow. Limit the expansion into IPv6 to Nos that can be also assigned to the remainder of the IPv4 numbers so IPv4 and IPv6 "punters" can still see everything on the internet.
IPv6 Only Nos could also be available to people/corporations who don't necessarily want to be publicly available, indeed they should be encouraged to do so. Actually, there's maybe the opportunity for such groups to return old IPv4 Nos to the pool if they upgrade lock, stock and barrel to IPv6, thus keeping the IPv4 setup available for longer, which would help spread the changeover costs over a longer period of time.
How much breathing space do we have in IPv4? I guess if we really are up against the end-stop, then this won't work, but assuming we have a few years left, gradually change equipement over to IPv6 until it is all IPv6.
If we run out of IPv4 Nos too soon, then IPv4 "punters" will be only able to access a sub-set of the Internet, not being able to reach the non-IPv4-mapped IPv6 Nos. This might be sufficient incentive for them to upgrade their IPv4 kit to IPv6, or it may not, but it will be their choice.

Of is that just not possible?

Re: cost of IPv6

[mwood]

Already done. There's a prefix reserved for "4in6" addressing: you drop your IPv4 address in behind it and you have an IPv6 address. That isn't the hard part; the hard part is getting router manufacturers to do the firmware changes needed for 4in6 routing policies and the ISPs to buy the firmware upgrades. I'd guess that the router builders are about done and it's the ISPs who need prodding.

*sigh* I've had my pppd asking the ISP for an IPv6 address for a couple of years now, just in case, but so far they're not interested.

Re:Scalable addresssing for multihoming is just ha

[Danathar]

If you are interested in keeping track of what is going on in this area the IETF has a working group that is fairly active trying to figure this problem out.

http://ops.ietf.org/multi6/

There are some interesting solutions. Some look like hacks, but there are smart people thinking about it.

670 quadrillion addresses per square millimeter

[Peter Trepan]

I looked up IPv6 on Wikipedia and found the following info:

IPv4 supports 4.2 billion (4.294 × 10^9) addresses, which is inadequate for giving even one address to every living person, much less support the burgeoning market for connective devices. IPv6 addresses this problem by supporting 340 undecillion (3.4 × 10^38) addresses. For scale, this would allow an average of about 430 quintillion (4.3 × 10^20) unique addresses per square inch, or 670 quadrillion (6.7 × 10^17) per square millimeter, of the Earth's surface. In other terms, assuming a population of about 6.5 billion humans, there are enough IPv6 addresses such that every atom of every person on Earth could be assigned 7 unique addresses with enough to spare (assuming 7 × 10^27 atoms per human).

They haven't just planned for the next wave of cell phones. They've planned for the Technological Singularity.

$75 Billion dollars!!!

[cciRRus]

*pinky to mouth*

75 BILLION DOLLARS!

Yikes!!!

Amazing ignorance

[couch_warrior]

First of all, the US Government is, at least in the US, going to be one of the early adopters of IPv6. AT&T, MCI, and Sprint have yet to announce plans for IPv6 availability. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has already manadated adoption of IPv6 for Federal agencies, and they have already done network inventories and are developing transition plans. I have yet to read a single comment on this thread by anyone who has even the foggiest of clues what is going on. Gee whizz, you managed to activate the IPv6 stack on your Linux box at home. Wow, what an accomplishment! Compared to your home network, converting a typical agency with over 100,000 PCs, 5,000 servers, and 500 routers all located in over 200 field offices is like building a space shuttle compared to building a rubber-band powered balsa airplane. Here's a few trivial problems to chew on- How does my firewall stop viruses, when the virus can use a level-3 encrypted channel to talk to its author? What's the procedure for differentiating between vulnerable and necessary ports in Longhorn and Vista once you do away with NAT and your PCs become visible to everyone in the world. No BS, I want port numbers and specific vulnerabilities I have to check for, along with the security product that will detect and block illegitimate access attempts while allowing the proper access to make real websites, java, .net and oracle work. How many addresses should I allocate to each facility, server, and PC, and what DHCP software do I use to assign and manage them? And how to I stop neighbor-discovery spoofing? Should my voice-over-ip network be deployed in the initial deployment? Will that disrupt vital voice services? What about multi-cast video-over-ip? Is it cost effective? How do I deploy it to PCs, but control the usage so that it doesn't suck up all my network bandwidth and create an accidental DOS for my web servers? Are those questions too easy? I've got a list a mile long that I have to solve before we convert. So how about a nice big cup of shut-the-f#ck-up for all the useless little kiddie network engineers out there. Your constructive criticism is as ignorant as it is unwelcome.

Military applications of IPv6

[CarpetShark]

Well, except that the military is probably quite interested in IPv6, since it'll give them lots of shiny new IP addresses for their shiny new cyberwarfare robots and guided missiles and soldiers with HUDs, etc.

Re:Does anyone actually use english measures anymo

[lachlan76]

Well now that it comes to mind, BRL-CAD (the US Army's modelling program) uses millimeters by default. I'm not sure if this has any meaning though.

Hell, this is easy money to raise...

[Puppet Master]

Just tell "Dubya" that IPV4 is being used by terrorists and we need
to upgrade to IPV6 to fight the "War on Terror"... He'll get congress
(opposite of progress) to approve $75B in no time.

Re:Does anyone actually use english measures anymo

[Archimboldo]

For construction, baking ... etc, the English system makes perfect sense. Many operations consist of halving, doubling or even trebling. Less common is dividing or multiplying by 10. Actually, the only advantage I see to metric, a big one I'll admit, is that the rest of the world uses it. For scientific stuff, we can as easily perform any mathematical operation in feet/pound/seconds as we can in cm/gm/sec. Who says 1 decimeter instead of 10 cm or .1 m anyway? Long live the King!

That's all new spending

[billstewart]

The Pentagon has a regular budget that covers routine costs - but the Bush Administration has kept coming to Congress for additional funds for the war. I haven't kept track of how many $80B blank checks they've asked for, but $215B sounds about right for the total of extra requests. That doesn't count the fact that the Pentagon's budget was supposed to allow us to be prepared for about 1-and-a-half wars already - so the cost of the war includes part of the regular budget as well as the special additional funds.

My personal opinion is that the Pentagon and Administration lied to get us into the war, so Congress should tell them to use their existing budget to fight it, and if that means reallocating funds from other programs, then they'll have to decide what they most want to spend it on.

Re: cost of IPv6

[FlippyTheSkillsaw]

I don't know what percentage of active switches do IPv6, but many of the older switches will start broadcasting the IPv6 because they don't understand it. Now your switch is a hub. That will choke any network that needed switches in the first place. Even a single switch that doesn't do IPv6 could take out a large chunk of your network.
Woah, I was tired when I wrote that. I was specifically thinking about layer 3 switches and everything is jumbled up.

As many pointed out, the majority of switches out there function at layer 2 rather than layer 3. Those are the ones to worry about anyway. It is a moot point: any layer 3 switch will probably be able to handle IPv6, currently or software upgrade, anyway.

Re: cost of IPv6

[FlippyTheSkillsaw]

Ha!

Big-router companies are as slow as molasses on a cold day.

Couple that with software revisions that don't work on some hardware preventing people from upgrading and you have a lot of software to update.