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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?
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.
I have no idea what those numbers mean.
Finally, the internet will be large enough to contain the growth of /.!!
Hey genius, not every human has a computer to receive emails on ...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Perhaps that's referring to the number of messages per one email account?? or people with email?? cause not everybody in the worlds has email...
I'm just not a people person, you can count me out.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Hey genius, his supposed statistic was emails per person per day, not emails per account per day. RTFA ;)
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
Yeah, it only works out to 8.3 emails per day. But I think he's only including people that are on the internet. People who get zero emails aren't counted. This probably makes sense since only about 1/4 of the planet is online.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
This apparant discrepancy stems from the fact that not everyone on the planet has an email address.
We can solve for the assumed number of email accounts in use by:
50 billion emails sent = 32 emails received * number of email accounts to receive them
50 billion emails sent / 32 emails received = 1.56 billion email accounts to receive them
According to the this page with World Internet Usage Stats, the number of people online is: 1,022,863,307. Meaning that the average person has 1.5 email accounts. True, some have a lot more email accounts, but there are also a lot of people who only have the one their ISP provides them. While I won't say these are the correct numbers, they are certainly in the ballpark.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
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."
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Of course all Slashdot comments are made up. Did you think they formed on their own? Crystallized perhaps?
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...).
Exactly, a person without a computer can't receive emails. Therefore they receive 0 emails per day. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be included in the statistic. I'm sure there's lots of people with email addresses who receive very close to, or exactly 0 emails per day.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
Consider a fatal disease running amok on an island in the middle of the ocean, after running its course it had killed 1000 of the original 2000 islanders. There had been no arrivals (word of the disease spread) and no departures (the island was in quarantine). Would you say that it had a fatality-rate of 50% ? Or would you put it close to 0% by including the population of the rest of the world ?
If it is fundamentally impossible for you to receive an email, I don't see the point of including you in the statistics. Both figures are valid (thus proving that you can prove anything with statistics by varying the problem domain), but one makes a lot more sense than the other...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
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."
sibling comments about only including online persons in the count for the final number are likely valid. another possibility is the fact that one email sent != one email received. mailing lists are the most common case of this. of course, that still depends on how the 50M's being counted.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
I would say 50% of the people on the Island had died. However, If I was on the evening news, I wouldn't say that this disease has killed 50% of people, because it's wrong. I would say that the disease killed 50% of the people on the island. Just like this guy could have said that each person "on the internet" receives 32 emails per day, instead of saying each person receives 32 emails per day.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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
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.
You forgot to convert from english-emails to british-english-metric-emails.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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?
There aren't quite 5 billion people using email at the moment. Perhaps this is the source of the discrepancy.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
That last number is 107908475819842.8359375, so you're off by 0.8359375 or 1.94631866179406642913818359375e-10 internets
How would one go about calculating the average age at which a British child first receives a cell phone?
# of kids with phones weighted by age then divided by all kids in the UK? Not sure it's doable without a national inquiry involving every child with a cell phone.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
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.
Ok fine. The average person that has email recieves 32 a day. But if you didn't have email, how would you recieve any. It's stupid to argue that people without email should be included in an average that has an obvious prerequisite. This is pedantry at the basest level.
Sophistry. The set of people who can receive email are the identical set to those who are "on the internet". Saying the one is the same as saying the other, and you can't read any more information into saying either.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
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.
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.
How would one go about calculating the average age at which a British child first receives a cell phone?
Take an unbiased sample of a thousand kids and extrapolate to the UK population. This will give you a suitable answer to within plus or minus a few percent.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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.
Can you explain to us non-genius-math types what unit a people people is?
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.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
If I had a nickel for every time I hear that... well, I'd have some nickels. And I do.
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.
How about the UK Times then? Or the Times of Britian?
IP version 5 was reserved for Internet Stream Protocol Version 2 (ST2, RFC 1819), however it turned out that IPv6 was better, so they stopped working on it.
That's not really true. That person can get a freemail account with web interface and access the mail from an internet cafe.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Of course each person on the internet having an email account receives at least 100 SPAM emails per day ...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That's not true. They may be in an intranet without internet access, and yet they may receive emails (from others on the intranet). Granted, today this is probably quite rare, but I'd be quite surprised if that didn't exist at all in the whole world!
Not to mention that I tend to get mail locally on my own Linux computer, sent by Yast Online Update.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
Not rare at all. Here in Norway, and I'm sure elsewhere, most government computers have no internet access, but access to a huge intranet - in the interest of confidentiality. Also, most hospitals... Some high-security companies... etc...
toresbe
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.
How would one go about calculating the average age at which a British child first receives a cell phone?
# of kids with phones weighted by age then divided by all kids in the UK? Not sure it's doable without a national inquiry involving every child with a cell phone.
Well, "average" is rather loosely defined. You can calculate the mode (which is one of the three values statisticians use that are generally understood to be averages by non-statisticians) by taking a sample of children of varying ages and finding the age at which the proportion with a phone increases from less than 50% to more than 50%.
s/mode/median/.
Think before posting. Think before posting.
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
Thanks, no problem. I was trying to figure out a way to extrapolate from marketing data, but that would have left out all the kids who got "hand me down" phones. I guess ya just call a bunch of people up and assume that you get reliable data.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
telnet was just intended to be the simplest example. sure, service providers probably don't want me telneting into my phone, but they very much do want me doing interesting things with it - things involving moving data around in both directions. the same question goes for pushing, say, streaming video, IM invitations, you can't do that to an email address. and providers most certainly want that (provided they get money for it; data plans are a first cut at that, and they're looking for other ways).
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Congratulations, you can't read. You appear to be able to string words together, but it isn't apparent that you understand what they are for. My comment was about email messages, and neither it nor its parent mention IP addresses. I leave it up to you to try reading them again.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
That strikes the nail on the head. IPv6 isn't really because of a lack of IPv4 addresses its for new and future applications. There are so many IPv6 addresses available that it'll be cost effective to dedicate an address to things that would normally only have a local network address.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
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).
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.