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.'"

Comments

IPv6

[Sinistah]

IPv6 uses 128 bit addresses. IPv4 uses 32 bit addresses.

Re:IPv6

[The Darkness]

IPv6 uses 128 bit addresses. IPv4 uses 32 bit addresses.

I thought the same thing at first. After re-reading the summary I concluded that when they said 32 bit numbers they meant 32bit.32bit.32bit.32bit (128 bits) for ipv6 to help explain it to the laymen who is used to the 8bit.8bit.8bit.8bit representation of ipv4.

Of course, those of us familiar with ipv6 addresses realize they aren't represented that way but as :: delimeted hex. ;-)

This is humorous?

[Caspian]

I somehow forgot to laugh.

Re:This is humorous?

[ConceptJunkie]

Sorry for being so harsh, but I hate it when nerds belittle non-nerds to make themselves feel better. Yes, this guy is a bad journalist - should it really be on the front page of slashdot though?

You must be new here.

Re:This is humorous?

[CastrTroy]

He's writing a freaking article. He's not talking to his friends at the bar. He's actually writing an article in The Times that millions of people may read. If I wrote an article in the news paper saying that G.W. Bush is a communist, then would I be let off because i'm not a political scientist? If you're going to bother to write something that millions of people may read, then you had better make sure you have at least the basic facts correct. It seems to me like the author read somewhere that there was going to be 340..... addressees, and then made up the rest from what he thought sounded right, without doing any actual research.

32-bit numbers vs. Tubes

[zollman]

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.

Quotation Fingers

[XanC]

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".

Re:Quotation Fingers

[ThinkingInBinary]

This really pisses me off. I'm so sick of reading newspaper articles that read something like this:

YoYoDyne, Inc. has created a new revolutionary product, a so-called "widget", which "frobs" and "fiddles" with so-called "gizmos".

...where all of the quoted terms are legitimate technical terms. If I turned the tables, and wrote a letter to the editor, saying:

I found the "article" published in the so-called "News" section of your "newspaper" to be quite interesting.

...you know that they would be annoyed, because the quotes and the "so-called" make it sound like the term is not really what it's called, and that it's not really true. If writers are concerned that a reader doesn't know a term, there's no point in putting it in quotes to reassure the dumb reader that they're not dumb. It's much more helpful to write something like this:

YoYoDyne, Inc. has created a new revolutionary product, a widget (a small gadget used to modify gizmos) which frobs (gently adjusts) and fiddles (adjusts more aggressively) with gizmos (common elements of world-domination machines).

Sure, it's a little choppier, but good writers can weave things together better (I could if I weren't lazy and I wasn't posting on Slashdot), and this form provides much more knowledge. Frankly, reporters shouldn't be writing about stuff they really have no clue about. I think if someone's going to be writing about internet addresses, it isn't much to ask that someone explain the rudiments of bits and bytes and binary numbers to them before they run off and misinform the public.

Re:Fuzzy Math

[CastrTroy]

He just doesn't have his facts straight at all. IPV4 uses 32 bit addresses, which gives you about 4 billion addresses. IPV6 on the other hand uses 128 bit addresses (please correct me if i'm wrong), which gives you an unbelievably large number of addresses, which will be able to address every atom in the universe with it's own IP address. This time we aren't running out. Of course, you could assign multiple addresses to each machine, and get rid of the need for ports...

Does IPv6...

[0racle]

Does IPv6 change the internets tubes into dump trucks though?

humor

[Silon]

It's funny. Laugh.

It isn't. No.

Re:Fuzzy Math

[CastrTroy]

Actually, he did get the number of addresses wrong, there's actually, 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,45 6. Not 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0 as he said. This means he is actually off by 463463374607431768211456. Which Means that he forgot about 107908475819842 IPV4 Internets.

Re:Fuzzy Math

[Anonymous Coward]

Which Means that he forgot about 107908475819842 IPV4 Internets

you should remove 2 from that figure as i recieved 2 internets from my mother earlier today

Wait a sec.

[PatTheGreat]

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.

Re:Fuzzy Math

[CastrTroy]

Did she attach them in emails. I have lots of problems with my mother attaching giant files in Emails too.

6to4 Routing

[paul248]

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

Re:Fuzzy Math

[skraps]

Here are some interesting order-of-magnitude comparisons.

Re:Fuzzy Math

[shadowmatter]

Whenever my staff sends me an Internet around 10 AM, and it's delivering slowly, they just try sending it through different tubes until a fast one is found. Maybe your mother can try the same thing with delivering her giant e-mail attachments.

- sm

Re:Why 128 bits?

[jguthrie]

Two reasons:

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.

Better yet, since it's a WEB PAGE...

[The Monster]

Rather than explaining each term parenthetically, it would be better to introduce any jargon terms in the form of a nice clickable link to the definition, or even allow an on-hover tooltip that explains the new concept. This is a technique I'm trying to use in my own writing; any attempt to explain an idea fully will bore more knowledgable readers to tears, while failing to do so will leave the newbies behind.

Some day, I'll be able to make an entire sentence of a single word:

Heh.

Then I'll know I'm good.

Re:Better yet, since it's a WEB PAGE...

[jdbartlett]

Totally! Why don't all newspapers use hyperlinks?

Ok, how long an answer do you want?

[jd]

First, let's assume for a moment that address space was what IPv6 was about. It isn't, by a long way, but let's assume it was. Would it still be useful? Yes. Why? Because routing sucks using IPv4, that's why. An address of w.x.y.z could be absolutely anywhere on the Internet. The backbone routers on the Internet need a router table entry for every friggin' block of IP addresses whose next hop cannot be inferred from the broader IP block. With CIDR, this problem is actually a lot worse, as you can't simply say that some C-class network is in that general direction. Any of the subnets could be absolutely anywhere. You don't know if 130.88.12.118 is a machine inside the 130.88.12.x network - it might just as easily be off the 131.23.42.x network. But the router for 130.88.x.y might be off 132.79.42.y, so you can't pass the packet to the router for the general case, you have to pass it to the router for the most specific case. Because many routers don't allow netmasks with "holes", you could in theory end up with router tables with up to 512 million entries with no efficient method of searching it. You have to check the destination against every entry + netmask for the most accurate match.

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