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A Humorous Introduction To IPv6
zollman writes "Jonathan Richards, in the London times, explains how the introduction of IPv6 will change the Internet. From the article: 'As use [of the Internet] grew, it became clear that the old protocol, IPv4, wasn't big enough, so a new one was created using 32-bit numbers. That increased the number of available addresses to 340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion -- enough for the foreseeable future.'"
IPv6 uses 128 bit addresses. IPv4 uses 32 bit addresses.
Um, I guess it as somewhat informative (if you didn't you about IPv6 already, if you didn't you should leave /. right now). I don't see how it was funny though. Am I missing something obvious?
Philosophy.
I somehow forgot to laugh.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
And 93% of statistics are made up. This article is just dumb.
While the article points out the benefits of using these new '32-bit numbers', it does ignore the obvious drawbacks -- namely, they will be twice as fast to clog up the tubes that make the Internet work.
Always weird to see what journalists feel aren't real words and need to be quoted. These "16-bit" "addresses" allow "packets" to "reach" their "destinations".
Does IPv6 change the internets tubes into dump trucks though?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
IPv4 uses 32-bit numbers. There are four octets. Octets contain eight bits. So each address is 4 x 8 = 32 bits.
IPv6 uses 256-bit numbers broken into 32-bit chunks.
Next thing you know, this guy will be telling us they're building more tubes.
Somebody should check his calculation of the very large number. His math doesn't check out in at least one instance. From TFA:
1)"...and there are six billion humans on Earth...," said David Kessens
2)50 billion - the number of e-mails dispatched every day wordwide
3)32 - The average number of e-mail messages received per person per day
My USA-genius-math works fifty billion emails daily divided by six people peoples to be between eight and nine messages per person per day.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
I have no idea what those numbers mean.
Finally, the internet will be large enough to contain the growth of /.!!
From the kernel.org FTP:
linux-2.1.8.tar.gz 6032 KB 11/09/1996 12:00:00 AM
Goten Xiao
Forget the incorrect numbers of bits and the lack of humour, I'm more worried by the submitter's reference to the "London times": there's no such thing. The newspaper is called "The Times". Where did the "London" come from? It's a national newspaper, so calling it "British Times" would be less wrong...
All those who believe in telekinesis, raise my hand.
Is that enough to allow 100 brazilian users?
More stuff to clog those tubes. Better get that two-tiered internet going quick. Otherwise, we will have to dump this stuff into our modems!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I for one welcome our new 128 bit overlords.
The very last thing in the article is "8 The average age at which a child gets a mobile phone in Britain."
Now, it seems to me that not every kid out there gets a mobile phone. Shouldn't this push average WAY up? I can't believe that eight year olds need cell phones. Who are they calling? Why are they calling? What is wrong with today's society?
Dang whippersnappers. How can I be 18 and feel old and set in my ways? It just ain't right.
Google: "All your data are belong to us."
I don't know how he decided 2 ** 32 is anything other than 4294967296. Maybe he used this snippet:
Now how he decided the successor to IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses is beyond me. The Wikipedia article says it uses 128-bit addresses (of course, that could easily be changed...).
512k of addresses should be enough for anyone!
Every mobile device is individially addressable right now by its number and network (12223334444@serviceprovider.com) - effectively a single IP address. Since this is also its voice number, it's easy to remember and convenient. We won't be running out at anytime soon (10 billion mobiles per service provider capacity).
Each IP address can also directly address 64K computers, via the existing port structure. IP addresses can also be reused (over and over) on intranets and subnets, via NAT. Yes, it's a terrible thing - but we've already solved that problem, and the solution is in use (and works) worldwide.
Issues like bandwidth control and management are only symptoms of limited bandwidth. Every day that issue will become less and less of a problem (at the endpoints). Core network technologies are expanding bandwidth at an incredible rate. In 1995, core networks used T1 lines! Now, they are deploying OC-768. The bandwidth controls will be meaningless long before a conversion to IPV6 could be completed.
All in all, if IPV6 were being deployed in the early 1990's it might have made sense to avoid some of the pain we went through. Now, its like the pre-IP protocol stacks - its time has passed.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Dang kids. It's the UK. Even the gangs are laughable. What is there to be scared of? Those tiny European cars zipping about everywhere? Yeesh.
Google: "All your data are belong to us."
Probably the simplest way to get an IPv6 address these days is using 6to4.
Every IPv4 address has been assigned a big block of IPv6 addresses, with a prefix of 2002:[IPv4_address]. If you've got a 6to4 address, and want to send a packet to another 6to4 address, it just gets encapsulated and sent directly to the destination over the IPv4 Internet.
However, if you want to send a packet from a 6to4 address to a "real" IPv6 address with a 2001: prefix, then it needs to get routed through a 6to4 gateway.
If your ISP has a clue, then you should be able to traceroute to the 192.88.99.1 anycast address, and reach a gateway that's somewhat close to you. For a fun time, try it from different computers on different ISPs to see where you end up.
The nice thing about 6to4 is, if you can get your router set up with a 6to4 address, then it can advertise that prefix on your LAN, and all your LAN computers can have a public IPv6 address.
At some level, it's like the ultimate stateless NAT traversal system: you can send packets directly from one LAN to another without needing to do any of that port forwarding nonsense. It really shows you how the Internet was designed to work in the first place.
Well anyway, here's the Wikipedia article on 6to4:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4
...serviceprovider.com does not want you telnetting into 12223334444@serviceprovider.com, and IPv6 isn't likely to change their attitude about that.
A properly designed protocol would not be of a fixed bit count, period. Such as 'first byte is how many bytes of data follow, or 255 to indicate 254 data bytes and then another count byte, repeat until non-255 count byte'. Static sized objects are Wrong and separate the inferior code (or protocol) from the superior. You'd think the design of the next generation protocol would incorporate that wisdom. Maybe the next next protocol (and there WILL be one).
People who've been behind the scenes know that in reality not anywhere near 2/3 of IPv4 is currently being used up. Large swaths of IP thats supposedly being used are abandoned. Entire Class A segments are assigned to companies that were large at one time but have since been swept aside and they get to keep their unused Class A networks for some obscure "historical" purpose. If abandoned chunks were released for use to currently functioning companies we wouldn't need IPv6 for 20 more years!
... and in the DRM, bind them.
They gave each address a "16-bit" number, which meant that the total number of available addresses worked out at about four billion (2 to the power of 32).
On what planet does this sentence even come close to making sense?
That last number is 107908475819842.8359375, so you're off by 0.8359375 or 1.94631866179406642913818359375e-10 internets
Honestly, why do we need 128 bits? 64 bits is enough address space for every square meter of the surface of the Earth (including the oceans) to have almost 92,000 IPs. I understand we don't want to run out, but now, we're seriously hindering the convenience of IP. It's hard enough to remember and type in a xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx address. How big a hassle is it going to be, when we need to type xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx?
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
No wonder it's not implemented yet. The big companies just keep laughing at the silly consumers who 'think' they need it.
I would file this under complete and utter stupidity, with outright incorrect information thrown in to boot.
IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses
IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses
Theres the incorrect information part. I'll leave it up to the reader to recognize the utter stupidity part.
340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0 new web addresses created by internet chiefs . . . so we won't run out of space soon, then...
I for one welcome our new internet chiefs. I'll just be a good injun and step into line...
BTW, can someone please let me know who the internet chiefs are? I just want to know who to complain to when I want to bitch about the internet. Thanks.
But the Internet is just a series of tubes, right?
Am I the only one in the world that has realised the way networks are currently allocated IPv4 address is extremely wasteful? Ask yourself, what are the IP addresses for? Sending/Receiving packets to/from Clients and Servers, the leaf nodes of the network. So why do routers need public IP addresses? Do they need to request web pages, send emails, etc? They just need to forward the packet onto the next router til it gets to its destination. Why can't networks be designed so all intermediate routers use 10.* ? The only routers that would need public IP addresses would be on the borders of each internet providers so things could be routed through to the destination properly. Each border router could also then drop packets from the 10.* private range as their internal routers should never be sending packets out to the world. I've noticed some internet providers in australia starting to use this idea, but nowhere near to the extent possible.
Some day, I'll be able to make an entire sentence of a single word:
Then I'll know I'm good.[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
I set up my Windows-using friends' PCs to use the same address: 127.0.0.1. Do this worldwide and we can reclaim the IPv4 addresses and be good for another 10 or 20 years.
:).
Borgified computers share a common mind they might as well share a common IP address
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
...you insensitive clods!
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Over here in the colonies, we generally refer to it as "The London Times" because most of us have a local "Times" such as the New York Times.
That's exactly why it's wrong to call it the "London Times". Unlike, for example, the New York Times, it's not a local paper. It's a national newspaper.
It's interesting to speculate on why the USA newspaper scene tends to be dominated by local newspapers (the NY Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times are all seen as more important than the few national papers like USA Today) whereas the British press is dominated by national newspapers. Even the one well-known "local" newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, turned into a national newspaper eventually (and changed its name to The Guardian, about 40 years ago).
But - whatever the reason - it is a fact. The Times is not "The London Times" any more than it is the Birmingham Times or the Liverpool Times or the Newcastle Times - it is The Times.
This article is actually on the front page of the Drudge Report right now (www.DrudgeReport.com), a heavily trafficked news website that is read by a lot of politicos. I think that the intended humor here was that the rest of the world just learned about IPV6, when it has been around for a lot of time. I'm guessing a couple years from now there will be headlines about the "new DVD's" that can store 50+ gigabytes of information on them. "That sort of capacity ought to last us for a while."
IPv6 mandates hierarchical addresses. In fact, if you use automatic address assignment, you don't get a choice. Every router WILL have a subgroup of the parent's IP block, and every IP address WILL have a prefix that matches the host router's prefix. This means that routers can largely dispense with routing tables. If the prefix matches the prefix of the router, up to the prefix length of that router, it goes on the local network. Everything else goes upstream. If you are on a peered network, you need to add one prefix check per peer. This means that a router with N ports and M tunnels has an absolute maximum of (N + M - 1) prefix tests. On a huge, 256-port router, with no pipes used for redundancy, you're looking at 255 tests.
That's one hell of a difference, when it comes to latency.
Ok, so what are the other differences? Well, IPv6 mandates IPSec. If you comply with requirements, you WILL use encrypted connections. So, sure, the Government can mandate that ISPs send them all the traffic. Let them. Give them all the triple-DES or AES-encrypted streams they like. Won't do them much good. From a privacy standpoint, IPv6 is about as good as it gets. Even the UK's requirements of handing over encryption keys if there is a reason to believe you have them is of no use - IPSec is opportunistic, per-unit of time, per-session. You don't know the keys, you have no reason to, and most Operating Systems won't let you have them even if you did want them.
Mobility. IPv6 mandates mobility for computers AND for networks. IPv4 - well, it's possible but (a) both providers need to support it, and (b) routing won't be optimized. Ever. With IPv6, upstream routers become aware of your move and the routing becomes corrected over time. You don't need cooperative ISPs, it's built-in. It will simply work.
Zeroconf. Again, you can do this with IPv4 - if the ISP (or network admin in a corporation) is feeling uber-generous. With IPv6, zeroconf is the norm. You can use DHCPv6 if you really want, but you're not stuck with it.
Multicast. This has existed within IPv4 for many decades, but the bloody ISPs won't enable it in their routers, so you can't use it. This is sheer bloody-mindedness on their part, as multicast doesn't place a greater strain on their networks. It would actually reduce it something fierce. It doesn't require any additional effort on their part, other than to enable PIMv2 on the upstream and downstream connections. Everything else is automatic, as multicast has been natively supported on the backbone for at least a decade. Two settings. Two tiny, insignificant settings, and they could cut network traffic at peak times by an order of magnitude.
(FTP-over-multicast exists. I'm sure bittorrent-over-multicast would be doable, if it hasn't been done alrea
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)
The /. education icon, with 2+2=5, would have been more appropriate for this article.
:wq
To give some examples of what goes wrong when you ignore ALT: The IBM PC was able to address the absurdly huge limit of 640K of RAM. Microsoft Excel to this day cannot address more than 65,000 rows in a single spreadsheet, which is nowhere near enough for high finance and some datalogging applications. The maximum addressable drive (partition) size used to be 8GB. Oh, and we're going to run out of IPV4 addresses right about the time my refrigerator needs a static IP to host my lettucecam.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
IPv5? haHA!
Boy, these guys don't seem to learn from their own mistakes. "Oooooh, 340 undecillion should be enough for everyone"
IPv4 also needs lots of add-ons (VPN et al) to do the work we need done on a network, in IPv6 it's part of the protocol. The other 'hope' is that IPv6 use will do away with the need for Network Address Translation (NAT) as it makes a bit of a mess in various uses.
:-).
Interestingly, I can see the main driver being political. Countries like Japan are far ahead with IPv6 use (because they weren't given enough IPv4 numbers), leaving the US perceived to be "behind" in technology. Can't see that last very long
= Ch =
maybe the submitter is a misguided thesaurus junky.
'cause this article is just bad.
IPv6 has been activated in the linux kernel and most desktop linux users connect to the internet using an adsl modem router,
. html
Most current cheap modem routers don't support IPv6 and linux users cannot get an internet connection without disabling IPv6. See link below
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-77686
But windows works?????
Desktop linux is getting a kicking.
"Currently there's four billion addresses available and there are six billion humans on Earth, so there's obviously an issue there,"
Yes, but what is the issue? That we don't have enough addresses to assign one to every human?
Perhaps the biggest issue is, that this has not led to immediate problems yet.
Obviously there is a large number of humans living in too poor circumstances to ever get close to Internet.
I can't wait to start getting registrar solicitations for the 10 million new possible variations of my domain name.
Or accidentally stumbling upon one of the septillion new blog spam sites.
Oh, and about 22% of the people that have static IP addresses as defined in the RFC are now deader than DECnet, so subtract those too.
It depends on how you subnet things. In a /24, yes, .0 and .255 are lost, but in a /23, you only lose one pair of .0 and .255; you can use the other two.
and IPv6 is in use in some countries, including the Netherlands
That is way too generalistic a statement. It is used in a few academic intitutions and I can think of one consumer ISP that hands out IPv6 addresses (www.xs4all.nl) and then only if you ask for it. The rest of us here in teh Netherlands are stil on regular old IPv4.
This sig is just as redundant as the rest of this posting
- where research doesn't matter
- where facts don't count
- where quotes can be fabricated
- and where it is always, always, always George W. Bush's fault!
It's nothing to do with DNS.
The DNS names won't change, they will just be mapped to an IPv6 address using an AAAA record.
To realize how unremarkable the expansion of the IP number set is, think about the lack of fanfare that occurred when ISBN numbers (used to identify books) went from 10 digits to 13 digits, effectively for the same reason. It didn't get as much press because it wasn't high tech so average people didn't think it was revolutionary (which it wasn't, and neither is this, really, except that such a big number looks cool when you write it out).
Yes, coherence.. :P
Now, it seems to me that not every kid out there gets a mobile phone. Shouldn't this push average WAY up?
Um, if a kid doesn't get a mobile phone at all, do you treat that as getting the phone at age infinity? If so, then the answer to your question is yes, and there may be a job for you in Bush's Social Security Administration.