(Almost) All You Need To Know About IPv6

Butterspoon tips us to an article in Ars Technica titled "Everything you need to know about IPv6." Perhaps not quite "everything"; the article doesn't try to explain the reasons behind IPv6's meager adoption since its introduction 12 years ago. But it should be regarded as essential reading for anyone overly comfortable with their IPv4 addresses. Quoting: "As of January 1, 2007, 2.4 billion of those [IPv4 addresses] were in (some kind of) use. 1.3 billion were still available and about 170 million new addresses are given out each year. So at this rate, 7.5 years from now, we'll be clean out of IP addresses; faster if the number of addresses used per year goes up. Are you ready for IPv6?"

Comments

Re:Running out of IPv4

[guruevi]

That is 192.168.0.0/16, 10.0.0.0/8 and 172.16.0.0/12 for you, you insensitive clod. And remember, 172.16 is a 12-bit netmask, not a /16 and definitely not a /8 (I think HP owns a few of the other ranges in 172.x.x.x which usually gets blocked within a firewalled/natted network by an anal admin that didn't pay enough attention.

NAT though is NOT a solution, it's a patch, a fix to a problem of running out of space. There should be enough IP's out there for everyone, but the '/8 should be enough for the average company' idea from the 80's-early 90's screwed us all up. Each Coca Cola or IBM-owned computer for example could have it's own public IP, the way it should be, but they own 16M+ addresses, way too much for their needs. But anyway, IPv6 is going to keep us out of trouble for now until we make the same mistake (history has a tendency to repeat itself) and we have to invent IPv8 or so.

Next to that IPv4 has been missing some major features and runs into problems with large networks and (very) fast links (talking 10Gigabit for example) IPv6 will solve for us, it routes faster, it has inheritely support for multicast and jumboframes, IPSec and mobile versions while IPv4 usually has that functionality bolted on (sometimes implemented slightly different with each manufacturer).

Re:All you need to know...

[wampus]

Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc (?) BBN built the ARPANET, I can kind of understand why they have a class A.

Re:Running out of IPv4

[physicsnick]

But anyway, IPv6 is going to keep us out of trouble for now until we make the same mistake (history has a tendency to repeat itself) and we have to invent IPv8 or so. The IPv6 address space allows for 3.4x10^38 IP addresses. Assuming we can fit, say, ten trillion people per solar system, we can colonize about 80% of the entire known universe before we run out of IP addresses.

I suppose at that point, history will repeat itself and we'll have to invent IPv8. :/

IPv6 is way too painful

[Anomalyst]

I made a fairly determined effer to see if we could bring up a manageable lab with IPv6.
1) Our local provide (XO) doesn't even offer public IPv6 address space.
2) ARIN wants thousands of dollars PER YEAR for portable address space.
3) Identifying what/how-to use a substitute for the deprecated "site-local" addressing. Tracking this down took days of searching and piecing things together. All the docs agreed that site-local was deprected but rarely mentioned what was going to take its place. Here is some links to what was found, MS has surprising helpful documentation:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/network/evaluate/ technol/tcpipfund/tcpipfund_ch03.mspx#EDAAE
http://book.itzero.com/read/cisco/0602/Cisco.Press .Deploying.IPv6.Networks.Feb.2006_html/1587052105/ ch02lev1sec1.html
Generate a global ID with either of the tools below:
http://www.kame.net/~suz/gen-ula.html
http://www.hznet.de/tools/generate-rfc4193-addr
Additionally it is nearly impossible to control the allocation of hosts to specific suffixes. We often organize customers address space so that global catalog for each site are at, say, .5, exchange at .7, proxy server at .13, etc using DHCP static leases, it make life easier on our field techs, they know exactly where key pieces of infrastructure are for troubleshooting. We can send them to different customers and they have an ingrained familiarity of how things are configured. Currently MS IPV6 does not have a usable IPv6 DHCP server, and the IPv6 clients do not allow such an address assignment even if the server could do reservations.
In a nutshell, IPv6 tools and implementation on hosts fall far short of the enterprise tools used define and organize a LAN for IPv4 and until ease of use is at least on par with MS IPv4 DHCP point/click environment it is going to continue to languish. It absolutely must have integrated DHCP server redundancy with automatic failover/failback/sync so sorely lacking, LO these many years in MS offerings.