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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."
We can't move to IPv6 until the spam problem is solved. With the additional address space that IPv6 offers, spam will increase by a googol if the spam gangs are not stopped. More spam is stopped because of RBLs now than any other method. IPv6 would make that obsolete.
I believe that the design of IPv6 was flawed in ways that it has inhibited adoption which could have been much more rapid. The IPv4 address space should have been a subset of the IPv6 address space. This would allow easy interconnectivity to Ipv4. The other direction, for going from Ipv4 to Ipv6 is trickier, but could involve manipulation of DNS. When a ipv4 peer requests a IP for a DNS address, the DNS server will reply with a private IPv4 address, the router/gateway associated with the DNS server will catch the connection to this IP and reroute the connection to the proper IPv6 address. It does only work with DNS addresses, yes. A special block of Ipv4 addresses should have been set aside for this purpose exclusively. Problem solved. Most people use DNS anyway. Other solutions could be devised to access a ipv6 address without DNS from ipv4, a protocol that would allow users to configure a forwarding route on the router via some utility, so that all connections to a private IP are rerouted to a specified IPv6 address. This could have eventually been built right into clients as well. This would have allowed a gradual switchover. The problem with the current switchover plan is that since there are so few Ipv6 users, there is not much incentive for websites to make themselves accessible on ipv6, but at the same time, users see no benefit from moving to ipv6, since there are not many websites avialable from it. So in order to access the internet, people need two seperate Ip configurations, people are not going to bother with ipv6 since it is pointless to them, all of the websites are on ipv4. Thus we get nowhere. It is absolutely true that there must be a gradual transition period where both protocols will be used and where both protocols must be interoperable.
Well, end-to-end connectivity would certainly make VOIP solutions considerably less hacky. Is that a bulletproof business case? Probably not, but it's an example of a useful application and it took me a couple of seconds to come up with it. I'm sure there are others if one were to actually think about it.
While I don't claim to be the world's leading expert on IPv6, I don't believe (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong) that it makes routers, proxies and firewalls go away. It does make NAT kind of redundant, but it doesn't seem to me as though that has much (any?) of a negative impact on security provided there is a proper firewall in place. It just means that the router doesn't need to do another lookup on each packet to figure out where it's actually supposed to go. NAT works as a stopgap measure, but it won't prevent the inevitable from eventually happening.
There was no business case for the transition from ARPANET's old NCP protocol to TCP/IPv4 in the 1980s - but there were technically compelling reasons. Luckily the ARPANET pioneers realized that a new protocol was needed to easily integrate the new services and applications they were thinking of deploying. Soon the WWW, e-mail, etc. exploded as they were simple to deploy on a powerful TCP/IP infrastructure. IPv6 makes it cheaper to deploy new network services and applications (like imbedded IPsec and QOS routing) by adding new extension headers to define new services. It also scales massively and offers both private networks and E2E options. You'd be amazed at how much extra code/infrastructure is necessary to get around NAT today to make many applications work.
We are currently working on a paper, with help from subject matter experts of the North American IPv6 Task Force, on HOW to get a return on investment from IPv6 technologies by adding new IPv6 based network services to enhance reliability, security, QOS, and mobility support in networks.
"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Once that's been done, it's just a case of those same ISPs offering a CD to accelerate Internet usage (ie: which use native IPv6 rather than the gateway) and conversion is complete. Complete conversion of the Internet, by converting each ring in turn transparently to all outside layers, should be possible over the course of a few months at most. A solid concerted effort could probably achieve everything up to the end-user level in a matter of weeks, without a single person realizing what was happening.
Of course, I don't seriously expect that to happen. Not because it can't, but because the level of cooperation needed is likely beyond most businesses today. It's purely a political problem, not a technological one.
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)
Verizon DSL (NYC) not ready. Oh so NOT ready. CableVision (NYC) so not ready. All of my old linksys routers don't even support IPv6. Only thing I have ready for IPv6 is my damn Linux box.
Yeah, so far, I can ping myself all day... I'm just getting myself ready... any day now... really... c'mon... do it. do it.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
i for one can't wait for the GUIDs to run out
i've got a dedicated dual core amd64 4000 with 4 gigabytes of ram at home constantly generating new GUIDs and storing them in an oracle database on a 10 gigabytes storrage array (expandable if necessary)
that way, when the world runs out of GUIDs i'll make a fortune selling them
otoh i hope the G stands for global and not for galaxy, or i could be in big trouble using up the GUIDs from the other side of the universe... i wouldn't want to provoke an intergalactic war because of entire nations running out of GUIDs or something
maybe i should start looking into this IPv6 thing too? afterall, if nobody really wants them, they're bound to be cheap for the time being
The people who don't care will be switched without knowing it, as soon as their suppliers decide that they want to or have to. If Microsoft decides that every XP user should have IPv6 enabled for some reason, the fix will come along through MS Update and you'll get it whether you know what it is or not. If your ISP decides that IPv6 is necessary, it'll be enabled whether your client requests an IPv6 address or not. When both have happened, hey presto! you have IPv6 and you didn't click a single button. Home-router manufacturers will lure most of their customers to swap out their old routers for new somehow...otherwise profits aren't sustainable...and IPv6 will come along for the ride when the vendor decides it's good for him.
"Consumers won't do it" is irrelevant. Consumers won't be asked. The few who never patch or upgrade will eventually find more and more applications dying or getting cranky, or they won't care because they never use new stuff and the old stuff still works okay.