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IPv6 Readiness Report
MythoBeast writes "In the latest episode of the Intellectual Icebergs podcast, Brett Thorson of Ravenwing provides a very good review of how ready our industry is for IPv6. He also provides a pretty good implementation guide for those who want to set up IPv6 at home."
(mid-90s silicon valley story - friend of mine was visiting a friend, the house phone rang, somebody answered it and gave some technical advice about windows. "Who was it?" "Just a wrong number, but it was an easy question.")
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I didn't bother to listen to the podcast, but luckily this is Slashdot so no one will hold it against me.
Geoff Huston's "IPv6: Extinction, Evolution or Revolution?" is probably the most insightful thing I've ever read about IPv6 deployment, although the conclusion is pretty negative.
But assuming that IPv6 is worth deploying, Microsoft is way ahead in getting computers IPv6-enabled. Their work on Teredo should make life a lot easier for P2P developers.
That may be a joke, but in reality IPv6 is ready. My UK ADSL provider, Andrews & Arnold, provide me with an entire block of IPv6 addresses. They will even route it to you natively if your router will support it, otherwise you have to use a 6-over-4 tunnel. My network uses it by default over IPv4; it's kind of neat when e-mail has IPv6 addresses in the headers. ;-)
For installing IPv6 on any *BSD: Pretty much the same. All the *BSDs have been IPv6-ready for a long time, under the KAME project banner.
For installing IPv6 under Windows: You go to Microsoft Research and install the stack. Unless it's already on the CD - it is, for some versions of Windows.
For actually implementing an IPv6 stack? Well, for that you want the RFCs on the IETF website, and the IPv6 evaluation kit (TAHI) that is listed on Freshmeat. I didn't type all the damn information for the various testing packages into the record for nothing!
Aside from that, I really can't think of anything you could need a guide for.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Seems like a market then exists where you could on-sell your IP addresses for $$$. Prices go up too high, market forces then result in IPv6 implementation. What's the problem?
The way ipv4 addressing is structured. 209.112.155.123 and 209.112.155.124 are in the same block. They don't have to be next door neighbours in the real world, but they do have to be 'close' to each other from the networks point of view. That will mean they belong to the same ISP, in the same city, and quite probably a fairly small chunk of that city.
IP addresses, by virtue of the numbers that make them up have to be hooked up to the network in a specific place in order for packets to find them. They exist in 'blocks' for convenient routing. The "routing tables" that you hear about describe where to send traffic addressed to a specific block should go. For example a backbone router A might know that traffic destined for 209.x.x.x goes "thatta way"... and and another router B further down the line might know that 209.112.x.x goes "through that pipe there"... and so forth, until it finally reaches a router C that says hey that destination block is right on the LAN here!
If 209.112.115.122 were suddenly "sold" to a guy in another city all his packets would would still end up at Router C, where they would be undeliverable because the owner isn't connected directly to that router.
As a rough analagy it would be like "selling your home address", but not your home. Even if you transfer the address to a guy in china all the mail is going to end up at your door step. Sure you could make special arrangements to have it forwarded back to china (and you can do this with ip too)... but that has two repurcussions:
1) The guy in china still needs a chinese address for the forwarded mail to arrive at so he's accomplished nothing!
2) Any mail addressed to him, even from his next door neighbour is going to be shipped around the world because it won't know its supposed stay in china until it arrives at your place. The chinese post office will see the Dutch (or whatever) address on the evelope and ship it off for a round trip through Holland...
Tell me again why you don't need IPv6. Only, this time, say how you're going to meet these criteria whilst you're at it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
IPv6 doesn't support fragmented packets. It forces both sides to restrict the MTU of that connection to the smallest MTU of any intermediate network component. In consequence, firewalls don't need to check for fragmentation and don't need to reserve any space for extra state information.
The practical upshot is that your bottleneck (the firewall) can handle far more connections with far lower latencies, which means B2B (business-to-business) and e-commerce network traffic can run much more smoothly and the system can manage much higher numbers of connections.
More connections with lower latencies, more business transactions. More transactions, more profit.
QED.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I listened to the audiocast and picked up an important point- the commentator said IPsec (an integral part of IPv6) has historically proven undeployable except in small networks and would not enhance security.
He is probably unaware that just a few weeks ago, the IETF released a series of updates to IPsec [RFCs 4301 - 4309] and a new automated key exchange (IKEv2) [RFC 4306] to update IPsec to simplify and standardize implementations and automate key exchange. Also, many a few large organizations (DoD, MIT, pharmaceutical companies, etc...) have extensive public Key Infrastructures (PKIs) ready for IPv6 IPsec. A new deployment guide on updated IPsec and IPv6 will be published shortly by the IPv6 Forum.
"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
To be exact, ARPANET switched from NCP to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983. NCP had a few shortcomings
The difference between IPv4 and IPv6? The size of the address space and the human representation of the addresses (hexadecimal instead of decimal).
While we're on the subject, it took over 8 years from the publication of Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn's A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection (May 1974), which described TCP, for ARPANET to incorporate TCP/IP.
It's also important to note that the size of the Internet in the 1980s was nothing like it is today. The Internet only had 562 hosts in August 1983, 8 months after the changeover. The same source states that the Internet had 353,284,187 hosts in July 2005. (Source: Hobbes' Internet Timeline, with data taken from Mark Lottor's zone program reports, and the ISC)
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
No. NAT PROVIDES NO SECURITY WHAT-SO-EVER. No matter how many times it is said, people still don't get it. It REALLY doesn't provide any security. All it does is add a couple simple steps before someone can address your inside machines. NAT is the equivalent of locking your door with a rubber-band.
Here, instead of repeating myself over and over again, just look at the last time I talked about it:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169925&cid=14
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Anyone who has an IPv4 address has an entire block of IPv6 addesses. With 6to4 you dont need any support from your ISP (well, as long as they're not actively blocking such traffic).
"For any 32-bit global IPv4 address that is assigned to a host, a 48-bit 6to4 IPv6 prefix can be constructed for use by that host (and if applicable the network behind it) by prepending 2002 (hex) to the IPv4 address. Thus for the global IPv4 address 207.142.131.202, the corresponding 6to4 prefix would be 2002:CF8E:83CA::/48. (IPv4 addresses use decimal notation while IPv6 addresses use hexadecimal notation). This gives a total prefix length of 48 bits, the same as an end site is supposed to be allocated under normal IPv6 address alocation leaving room for a 16 bit subnet field and a 64 bit address within the subnet." - Quote from Wikipedia 6to4 entry
Or their routers aren't routing v6. Or their routers aren't configured for 6to4. Assumedly that would have to be done at the edge, as it would confound fast switching algorithms and push a core router over. Or the core routers between your ISP and your destination's ISP aren't configured for v6. Or your ISP is not getting v6 routes via BGP. Or another half-dozen reasons it won't work.
/48 subnet and the traffic for that subnet is carried between the anycast 6to4 relay router (or other 6to4 gateway) and your 6to4 gateway entirely over IPv4.
WTF are you talking about? You clearly need to go read up on IPv6 because what you just said is complete rubbish. Your ISP does _not_ need to know anything about 6to4. Every IPv4 address is assigned an IPv6
I assume by "that would have to be done at the edge" you mean the edge of the ISP's network, which is incorrect - the encapsulation/de-encapsulation is done at the edge of *your* network. The ISP only sees IPv4 traffic.
They are not blocking traffic when they are not configured to support it.
If the ISP isn't "configured to support" 6to4 then they shouldn't be calling themselves an ISP since they aren't "configured to support" IPv4 in that case.
A Tier1 provider can't just throw things in their configs and hope everything's OK.
Well, firstly, most (all?) tier 1 providers already do _native_ IPv6 and secondly, why exactly do the tier 1 providers need to do any reconfiguration to carry 6to4 traffic?
http://blog.nexusuk.org