Slashdot Mirror
(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?"
Do I need to upgrade to IPv6 to use web 2.0?
I think that's why it's called Web 2.0. Because it's two more than IPv4.
Best Windows Freeware
Ted Stevens (R-Pork): As my colleagues from across the aisle are pointing out, we're facing Peak Internets. Clearly what we need is to open up drilling in IPNAR (Internet Protocol National Address Reserve) and start drilling in those unused /8s. We need more tubes!
Ted Kennedy (D-Ham): Sure, how about 34.0.0.0/8, Halliburton?
Dick Cheney (R-Oil): Suck it, Ted. Your union buddies in 19.0.0.0/8, Ford Motor Company, ain't long for this world anyways.
Senator BOFH (I-Maginary): Umm, dudes? I didn't know DEC was still around, let alone still owned (16.0.0.0/8), and do enough people still go to Interop (45.0.0.0/8) that it deserves a whole frickin' /8 to itself?
FCC: All of y'all, shaddap. The telcos paid us good money to put us in charge of this little exercise, so we'll take it from here. Everybody switches to IPv6 on our timetable. It shouldn't take us much longer than it took to phase out analog TV.
Hopefully before they start implementing this strategy, they will take the huge Class A addresses from those who don't necessarily need all of it:
....
MIT (I know they make use of public IPs, but 16 million addresses?)
Haliburton (!)
Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc (?)
Ford Motor Company
This website has an updated list. There are a lot more on the list who have waste space, I just don't feel like going through all of them.
"There's no place like 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1"
You heard it here first. iThankyou.
throw new NoSignatureException();
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).
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
No. No. NO. Behind every router you can have an independent network, with as many machines as you want. Most small networks have users on the IPs 192.168.0.n or 192.168.1.n or 10.0.0.n. There are probably tens of thousands of machines using these addresses - but they do not conflict, because they are not using that address on the same global network.
And it's oh so delightful when you have to connect to heterogenous networks who are both using the same private IP scheme. Or when you have to VPN into your office from a customer network and you're both using the same scheme. Or when you have to VPN through a NAT firewall.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Erm, that's easier said than done. A normal residential IPv6 allocation will be a /64 prefix, which means you are allocated a 64-bit prefix, and you can select any address in the remaining 64-bit address space. So you'd have 18446744073709551616 addresses to scan to find all the hosts on the network. Assuming that the hosts have Privacy Extensions turned off, and that they are all autoconfiguring based on their MAC addresses, you know that the 12th and 13th bytes are 0xFF and 0xFE respectively. That still leaves 48 bits of address space, or 281474976710656 addresses. Good luck.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
ARIN wouldn't give us an allocation. In their rules, I have to be able to prove that we have a customer base large enough to use up a full /32 (of IPv6) addresses before we can get an allocation. So in order to get IPv6 block, we have to have enough customers to use up 2^16, or by IPv4 standards, a Class B block. WTF???? IPv4 allocations are handed out for free, but you can't get one unless you're a mega-conglomerate.
:(
IPv6 adoption won't occur in the US unless ARIN comes up with a better policy.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
When the folks who invented IPv6 wanted to give people a chance to use the new protocol in a test environment, they created the 6bone. They then spent years getting the folks who make backbone routers to implement the new protocol on those routers, and when the backbone routers had firmware that would do IPv6, they declared victory and went home. One of the last exchanges I participated in on the 6bone mailing list talked about how, since everyone in the world now had access to IPv6, there was no more need for this test network.
The only problem is that protocol adoption and demand for addresses typically happen from the leaf nodes first, and then they move to the backbones. The sole focus on the backbone providers meant that IPv6 became a solution looking for a problem. Yes, I could have gotten native IPv6 service....if I had been willing to get an OC-512 backhauled from Germany. The problem is, I was (and am) a user with a SOHO LAN and I can't justify paying better than commercial cablemodem rates for access and, as far as I am aware, native IPv6 transport is still not available from Time Warner or Comcast or whoever does the service in my area.
Of course, the news isn't all bad. All the operating systems I routinely run now speak IPv6 natively. The thing is, if I can't buy transport for the protocol, it doesn't matter how cool it is, how cheap the addresses are, or how easy the autoconfig is, it's not at all useful in the real world.