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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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
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?
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
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
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.
First, if you're going to do a design that involves a "big number", it is helpful for the number to actually be "big". If you're going to have addresses of a fixed size (and there are good technical reasons for doing so) then your addresses should all be "big" so that you don't have to change your addressing scheme at some point. Among the numbers that were thought to be "big" but which didn't turn out to be are the number of cylinders in an ST-506 hard drive, the number of bytes in an 8086 segment, and the number of IPv4 addresses.
Second, initial experience with IPv4 showed that addresses would be assigned very inefficiently. It was initially expected that most networks would assign fewer than 1% of their addresses to computers. In fact, the allocation efficiency of IPv6 addresses is tiny by design, as the promoters of IPv6 expect that the minimum allocation of addresses to a single host to be a /64, which means that there are really enough addresses to give 92,000 /64's to every square meter of the earth's surface. Actually, I think that 92,000 is wrong. The number I have for the earth's surface area is 510.0501e6 square kilometers which works out to about 36,000 /64's for each square meter of earth's surface. Maybe you were thinking millionths of a square mile, because then 92,000 would be about right, but that's kind of an odd unit.
Anyway, of course when people started allocating addresses willy-nilly, people learned to use IPv4 addresses more efficiently, (my home network has more than 2 computers on it for each real live IPv4 address I get with my feed) but IPv6 will always assign addresses inefficiently. I would expect that people will make use of that fact should use of IPv6 ever become widespread.
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.
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.
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.
Each subnet has a /64 allocation so that hosts can arrive and pick their
own address in the network with very small chance of collision, even
without a server.
This is described in RFC2462: IPv6 Stateless Address Autoconfiguration.
The systems also test the addresses for uniqueness (so there's no
birthday problem either). This means IPv6 hosts will typically just
start getting an address immediately they are plugged into a network,
and on average you have more chance to be struck by lightning than
to have your (well distributed) IPv6 address selection collide
with another host: It just works.
It also removes artificial boundaries to the size of subnets.
You won't have to change your subnet plan because 20 more
computers are installed on the 'HR' network for example.
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
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.