IPv6 Tested in Space

An anonymous reader writes "Remember the Cisco router orbiting on a satellite in space? Well, it's now also the first to run IPv6 in space. Since no-one is choosing to run IPv6 on the ground, isn't this a bit pointless?"

Comments

Pointless? No.

[dreamchaser]

If you're going to start putting Interplanetary WAN infrastructure in place, might as well go IPv6 from the get go. Then once there are a few billion nodes scattered about the Solar System we won't have any addressing problems ;)

Re:Pointless? No.

[myrdos2]

Exactly, someone has to be the first to roll it out. The first IPv6 device might as well be a satellite, since these are notoriously difficult to upgrade later.

Even with a stepladder.

Re:Pointless? No.

[user24]

He has a good point. As you all know, IPv6 allows 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,45 6 addresses, while IPv4 allows only 4,294,967,296 addresses (tinyurl.com/6gqkc). Nothing like planning ahead, eh?

Re:Pointless? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, it meets the requirements put in place by the Grand Galatic Council.

Following international standards is a good thing and leads to interoperability and better service. Following Intergalatic standards is a better thing, as it prevents a coalition of other civilizations from destroying your planet.

Which is one more reason to hate Microsoft (Sorry. I had to).

Re:Pointless? No.

[thegameiam]

Because we all know that newly-implemented code never requires patching, and is guaranteed bug-free...

Re:Pointless? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to start putting Interplanetary WAN infrastructure in place, might as well go IPv6 from the get go. Then once there are a few billion nodes scattered about the Solar System we won't have any addressing problems ;)

However, interplanetary communication has a very big latency. Other protocols perform far better in that kind of environment.

Re:Pointless? No.

[NeilTheStupidHead]

Obviously your step ladder isn't able to scale. Time to upgrade.

Re:Pointless? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can it be a wireless router satellite (wifi router sat) DLink with hacked DD-WRT or OpenWRT (WhiteRussian) firmware running IPv6 protocol?

Además de sin cables, también te da alas!

Red Bull te da alas
IPv6 in the head falling down?

Re:Pointless? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

IPv6 in the head falling down?

Re:Pointless? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

communication between earth to mars, the minimum delay is 2 mins, because the light speed.
means using google on mars u will got the results after 2 mins, huh.
or ipv6 supports Warp

Re:Pointless? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

The main questions are, how did they plug in the cables, is it 4 port, is it 100/1000, and can I hook my Wii to it?

Re:Pointless? No.

[jovetoo]

Newly implemented code? IPv6 has been around for more than 10 years (RFC 1883). IPv6 integration in Cisco routers ran from 2001 to 2003. Other vendors have had similar release dates. This hardly qualifies a "newly-implemented".

IPv6 is stable and ready for deployment. It has been for a long time.

Re:Pointless? No.

[NOLFXceptMe]

itz not pointless at all... infact as dreamchaser said, we need infrastructure in place.And why not plan of more organization across planets and solar bodies... Moon first in line?

Re:Pointless? No.

[Architect_sasyr]

Assuming we populate other planets, would it then be a good idea to use IPv6 as the links between these planets (ala the 6bone) and then IPv4 with giant 4to6 devices on each of the off world connection nodes? That way we get the ease of IPv4 IP address' with the scalability of 6.

It was just a thought!!

My $0.02 AU

Re:Pointless? No.

[drinkypoo]

Apparently you have never used a Cisco product; they are remotely firmware upgradable via tftp. In fact, modern satellites themselves typically have a simple machine monitor which can be used to reboot them, load new code into them (etc) when necessary. This quality is shared by most equipment in space since, as we all know, you can't just drive out to the site.

Re:Pointless? No.

[TooMuchToDo]

Honestly, it wouldn't be extremely difficult to patch. I present as evidence the extensive software modifications/upgrades/fixes uploaded and successfully put into place on both Mars rovers that continue to run, despite their shelf life being mere months.

Re:Pointless? No.

[thegameiam]

Perhaps you could let me know exactly which versions of Cisco IOS include support for DHCPv6? Or how exactly were the expected v6 (without v4) hosts going to find their v6 DNS servers?

Or perhaps it would be support for IPv6SEC as a GRE tunnel encryption, or for DMVPN support?

How about those nifty Cisco SIP/SCCP phones running VoIPv6?

An RFC != a code implementation, and many companies have somewhat aggressive PR departments who will say that "IPv6 is implemented" when what they mean is "some very small IPv6 feature subset is implemented, and turning it on might break a bunch of other things."

To be fair, Cisco (and others) have been steadily adding IPv6 support for features, and their support is getting better, but it's nowhere near feature parity with IPv4.

There are other vendors who have more feature parity, but most of them achieve this parity by excluding infrequently-used IPv4 features (DLSW+, anyone?)

well this is good

[Anonymous Coward]

cause any aliens using IPv6 will be able to reach us easier.

Re:well this is good

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt that it would make it easier in a Jeff Goldblum type of way...

But rumor has it that Leisure Suit Larry 4 is still installed on there.

Nobody uses it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen to that, brother.

Just in case it catastrophically fails....

[m0ng0l]

No, testing it in space isn't pointless! If the IPv6 stack fails catastrophically, there's no one around to be hurt by the flying shrapnel!

I mean after all it might even potentially set the Earths atmosphere on fire, if it were testing on the ground!

IP in Space

[Anonymous Coward]

This is nothing new. The ill fated STS-107 carried a complete CANDOS pacage offering a wealth of IP protocols. In fact UoSat-12 back in May of 2000 ran an ftp server. The only thing new here is IPV6. IPV4 has been in space for a long time. You an find more about this at our website http://ipinspace.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Thank you,
your NASA team

Re:IP in Space

[Hucko]

hmmm... y'know... it would seem to me, the article is about....

My god! IPv6 in space! The new bit!

Re:IP in Space

[thatnerdguy]

My god! IPv6 in space! The new bit!

Is it the Evil Bit?

Re:IP in Space

[Anonymous Coward]

CANDOS pacage offering

Typical for NASA, they forget to translate Metric to English, and in this case, no spelling check?

Re:IP in Space

[Dan Stephans II]

Only an astronaut would be able to say this. (IP in space ... messy without the proper container)

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...

[Channard]

.. oh, wait, that'd be the Ultimate Marvel entity known as Gah Lak Tus. Not sure I'd want them to reach us easier.

redundancy

[Anonymous Coward]

So when do the plan on launching it's HSRP mate?

Re:redundancy

[Anonymous Coward]

As soon as you learn the difference between its and it's.

Not true

[cjonslashdot]

It is not so that no one is choosing it on the ground. The US government is mandating a move to IP6, and further virtally all of the major backbone providers now implement it. Vista supports it in a huge way. The missing link is that local ISPs have not turned it on, but they will. In a couple of years you will see a very sudden and comprehensive shift to IP6. There are many large business models that depend on it.

Re:Not true

[pla]

There are many large business models that depend on it.

Such as?

First, what does a networking potocol have to do with a business model; And second, how can any company survive with a business model dependant on something not supported by most ISPs?



Serious questions, not sarcasm.

Re:Not true

[TheNetAvenger]

First, what does a networking potocol have to do with a business model;

Go look up Communication clients and services, from simple IM and Voice to remote clients and client tracking.

And second, how can any company survive with a business model dependant on something not supported by most ISPs?

Go look up, "tunneling."

Re:Not true

[nevali]

3G mobile networks utilise IPv6, AIUI; I've a feeling it's part of the specs (well, everything is specified somewhere in mobile telco land), which makes it part of the business model.

Re:Not true

[djupedal]

Such as?

• Apple's OS X Bonjour relies on it.
• French telecoms have it
• Chinese telecoms have it

First, what does a networking protocol have to do with a business model

• Apple: OS X is a cornerstone of their business model - Bonjour is a cornerstone of OS X
• France: Great way to get govt. funding for R&D and keep a telecom business alive while you develop
• China: Great way to get govt. funding and keep a telecom business or two alive while they develop

And second, how can any company survive with a business model dependent on something not supported by most ISPs?

• Apple: What happens upstream, on one side of an ISP is one thing. Still lots of activity happening downstream, inside private IP address space, away from the ISPs.
• France: Great way to keep a business alive while you develop
• China: Routine way to keep a business alive while you develop

Re:Not true

[Kizeh]

Cellular carriers have looked at it very seriously for the next generation (4G?) networks, as one potential idea is to do packetized voice, and the number of addressable devices is potentially huge, and depending on how mobility is done, each device may need several addresses.

The U.S. federal government has mandated it, so anyone wishing to get into that business needs it.

That being said, my university has been running IPv6 for a few years now -- we luckily have native IPv6 feed from I2 -- and all of our routers (Cisco IOS), servers (various variants of Linux) and clients (MacOS X, Linux, Windows XP) have supported it just fine.

Re:Not true

[Tony Hoyle]

Nope.. 3G is all natted.. at least all the 3G I've seen.

I have a couple of 3G phones and none of them even appear to support ipv6.

Re:Not true

[nevali]

That doesn't mean they don't use it internally for IMS services, it just means that for customer-visible Internet access it's not directly used.

Re:Not true

[anticypher]

French telecoms have it
France: Great way to get govt. funding for R&D and keep a telecom business alive while you develop

You don't seem to know anything about this. Are you trolling, or just an ignorant american?

France Telecom, at least the major parts of it such as OpenTransit and Orange, are junking all of their old Alcatel kit (which was never that predominant) for Cisco and Juniper. They are doing this because they have so many customers, and so much equipment, they have been specifying IPv6 for years now, and rolling out IPv6 internally for the last year. All of their major competitors (there are 5 major broadband providers in France) are readying IPv6 to the end user, and many smaller broadband providers already offer it.

Alcatel, while it was once a subsidised French company, hasn't received any handouts or tax breaks from the French government in quite a few years. Mostly this was due to pressure from Brussels to play fair in the European market. Since the merger with Lucent, the new company is considered a pariah by just about every major telecoms and datacoms player. The merger was so badly bungled, that if Scott Adams were to try and put some of the major fuckups into Dilbert strips, nobody would believe that such idiocy could exist.

Apple: What happens upstream, on one side of an ISP is one thing. Still lots of activity happening downstream, inside private IP address space, away from the ISPs

While others have pointed out your ignorance of how ZeroConf/Bonjour works, on this point you are certainly correct. Only it isn't just Apple, Microsoft has also realised the same thing. There are lots of nifty little services that can do cool things with the features of IPv6. For those of us who have had IPv6 around for a while now, it is just so much easier to administrate and maintain, and many of the kludgy hacks to IPv4 are just part of the v6 spec and mostly just work.

Many forward looking companies are turning on IPv6 on their internal routers, just waiting for the day when their ISP finally gets a clue. With IPv6 addressing, all kinds of autodiscovery happens, and all kinds of useful tools are being built on top of that. People who install the new Apple 802.11n Airport Base Station can get IPv6 connectivity just by clicking a checkbox, and it automatically finds a nearby 6-in-4 tunnel broker. So just by installing one of these boxes, not just Macs get IPv6, but Vista users as well. At CeBit this year, almost every Chinese and Taiwanese maker of consumer grade DSL/Cable/WiFi router boxes were showing off automatic 6-in-4 tunnels, expect them to hit the American market within the next year unless the Chinese authorities decide that such advanced technology has to be kept out of the hands of the new axis of evil.

the AC

Cosmic Rays

[muftak]

Cosmic Rays cause Cisco routers to break enough on Earth, wouldn't the effect be multiplied with them being in space?

Re:Cosmic Rays

[thegameiam]

That got a lot better once they started using ECC memory...

i'm going to ipv6 right now!

[Anonymous Coward]

and i suggest that slashdot and everyone else follow or it's going to be very lonely for me.

ok, here goes.

3...
2..
1.

Re:i'm going to ipv6 right now!

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, where are you?

ballmer@ms.com://~ $ ping 127.0.0.1
PING 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.025 ms
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.019 ms

Oh, I see you now.

This surely is bullshit!

[ReinisFMF]

Everybody knows that satellites go round faster than earth rotates. The tubes would certainly break!

Re:This surely is bullshit!

[haraldm]

Everybody knows that satellites go round faster than earth rotates. The tubes would certainly break!

Naaah. Tubes are perfect for wiring up geostationary satellites e.g. TV satellites. Since this can hardly be wiretapped, it's a perfect solution for all of RIAA's and MPAA's problems. And many new jobs for RIAAers in orbit as well (shoot 'em up!), as well as in the network tube making business.

Tubez rock!

Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

This opens up new battle tactics in the eventually inevitable intergalactic wars. Once IPv6 is fully deployed throughout the universe, all we need to tell our enemy aliens is to direct their attacks at ::1.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah right, ::1 -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sector_001

Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

While we're also waiting for the personal commuter rocket backpacks...

"no one will ever need more than IPv4"

Cisco's New Marketing Campaign

[JoeCommodore]

Cisco - we hold 100% of the IPv6 market*

Cisco - We circle the globe with IPv6 support.

Cisco - THE standard for aerospace IPv6 deplyment archetecture.

Cisco - Our IPv6 technology is rated "higher" than any of our competitors.

*in space

Re:Cisco's New Marketing Campaign

[Chiaro Meratilo]

When I see "Cisco" I think "Crisco". O_o

Re:Cisco's New Marketing Campaign

[cyber-vandal]

I think of that shitty RnB guy

Re:Cisco's New Marketing Campaign

[Stormwatch]

When I see "Cisco" I think "Crisco". O_o

And when I see "Cisco" I think "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine".

Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[kimvette]

Since no-one is choosing to run IPv6 on the ground, isn't this a bit pointless?

Why is no one running IPv6 on the ground? Well, I'll tell you why I don't run it:

• Neither of my ISPs (work or home) supports it
  
• NONE of my routers support it
  
• A lot of applications I run don't support it
  
• Dealing with it on apache would be a PITA, wouldn't it?
  

Besides, who wants to deal with IPv6 when dotted quads are easier to memorize? Just wrench the class A address assignments away from the current assignees (not a single one of them needs a class A block) and reallocate them reasonably. Apple does not need a class A block, Merck doesn't, HP doesn't, GE doesn't, IBM doesn't, MIT doesn't. Halliburton doesn't, and the DoD certainly does not need multiple /8 assignments. Besides, isn't the DoD largely on IPv6 now? Reallocate the IPv4 space reasonably, force organizations such as Apple, HP, IBM, Merck, and Halliburton justify their IP allocation request like I had to for my puny /27 block, and then there will be plenty of space for all.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[Watson Ladd]

6e9>256*256*256*256

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[thegameiam]

I agree about the downsides of running IPv6, but pulling the /8 assignments from the current assignees would be a lot of headache and trouble for not so much benefit - yeah, a couple of those could be returned easily (probably not the DoD ones - they already returned the ones they don't need anymore) (and you forgot to mention that Level3 currently owns 3 /8s due to their purchase of BBNPlanet (AS1), and that would add maybe an additional year at our current run rate, but we'll come to a point where we need to do something different.

Whether that something is IPv6 or is wide-scale NAT, or some other protocol entirely, I don't know. IPv6 implementation and deployment has been hampered by the protocol designers attempting to fix every known problem with it, rather than simply fixing the address space...

-David

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

Besides, who wants to deal with IPv6 when dotted quads are easier to memorize? Just wrench the class A address assignments away from the current assignees (not a single one of them needs a class A block) and reallocate them reasonably. Apple does not need a class A block, Merck doesn't, HP doesn't, GE doesn't, IBM doesn't, MIT doesn't. Halliburton doesn't, and the DoD certainly does not need multiple /8 assignments. Besides, isn't the DoD largely on IPv6 now? Reallocate the IPv4 space reasonably, force organizations such as Apple, HP, IBM, Merck, and Halliburton justify their IP allocation request like I had to for my puny /27 block, and then there will be plenty of space for all. - And who wants to deal with dotted quads when a single digit is even easier to memorise. Except that wouldn't be much good when the 11th person comes along and asks for an IP address would it? Same with IPv4. We will run out of IPv4 addresses. Maybe not today, tomorrow or even next year, but short of the annihilation of civilisation as we know it it will happen sooner or later. It doesn't matter if we liberate x hundred million unused addresses, that will only delay the inevitable by a few years or maybe a decade at most.

The real PITA then, is trying to get people to do something about this problem before it really becomes a problem. People keep commenting on the slow transition to IPv6 as if it's a failure of the protocol. No, as you implied, it's a failure of the software developers who aren't implementing it, the hardware manufacturers who aren't supporting it, and the ISPs who aren't providing it. Instead of trying to free up more IPv4 address space we should be letting it become a scarce resource to force the guilty parties to make the necessary updates so that nobody's caught short on that fateful day when we well and truly are out of IPv4 addresses. We should be taking every step possible to limit the amount of software and hardware from being deployed that we already know will be useless a couple of decades from now, instead it seems like so many people are quite happy to take their sweet time with it until alarm bells start ringing.

You'd think with things like the Y2k bug and numerous other situations which exposed the fallacies of the "it'll do for now, we'll deal with that later" ideology that the computing industry would be all too happy to see that the IP address situation was spotted well ahead of time and would be embracing the ability to future-proof their software and IT infrastructures. Instead it seems like we're going to have another case of fingers-in-their-ears-"la-la we're not listening - oh shit! we're out of IP addresses!" situation with a mad dash to half-assed implementations and slap-dash patches.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[vertinox]

Reallocate the IPv4 space reasonably, force organizations such as Apple, HP, IBM, Merck, and Halliburton justify their IP allocation request like I had to for my puny /27 block, and then there will be plenty of space for all.

If I may make a car analogy...

Let us say that IPv4 is the oil we get from the ground and all cars run off it. Then a small group of scientists do a study and say discover "Egads! We've only got 10 years worth of oil left!"

Everyone panics and the scientists come up with a pure ethanol based car (IPv6) that has none of the limitations of oil when it comes to making new ones (In theory we could eventually use up all our natural resources in production of corn, but that would take thousands of years so that is someone eles's problem)

However, such a switch over would cost millions if not billions of dollars spent replacing all the oil based motors, but they start the work.

Then.... Some smart ingenious mechanic finds a way to make regular engines work off 50% ethanol and 50% oil (NAT addressing) and everyone goes "Phew! Problem solved!"

However, that doesn't resolve the fact that oil is still going to run out in 20 years but by then that will be someone else's problem.

But in reality, I think the US, Canada, and Europe will switch to IPv6 when their counter parts in China and India surpass us economically in 10 to 20 years. (As in Chinese companies start buying US companies and then tell their network departments to migrate so they can communicate better)

Asia is the big pusher for IPv6 because they simply did not get any of the IPv4 to start with and NAT isn't helping them much considering they will have literally the majority of world's internet users. Unless, like you say, the big US tech companies give up the IPv4 spaces to companies in Asia I think they are on the path to complete IPv6 networks over there.

Either way... I think most of us will get IPv6 equipment when it was cheaper for the manufacture to not disable the feature in our standard IPv4 products (think built in modem or video into the mother board trend) but this might be some time from now.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[Znork]

"Neither of my ISPs (work or home) supports it"

You dont need their support. Use 6to4. Or a tunnel.

"NONE of my routers support it"

You dont need them to. Use 6to4.

"A lot of applications I run don't support it."

Some do tho. It's wonderful to be able to ssh and scp directly into the boxes you have behind a NAT gateway without having to resort to two-stage jumps.

"Dealing with it on apache would be a PITA, wouldn't it?"

No.

"who wants to deal with IPv6 when dotted quads are easier to memorize?"

There's this new development called DNS you know...

"Just wrench the class A"

Mmm, like that's going to happen...

Meanwhile I sit here on a bazillion addresses, merit of having one single v4 address. Get with the times, it's not like IPv6 is rocket science anymore.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[vertinox]

Besides, who wants to deal with IPv6 when dotted quads are easier to memorize?

And I forgot to add... Who memorizes IP addresses anymore?

I used to back in the day, but DHCP isn't as flaky anymore so no need for static IP on the OS side and if your router setup is worth a snuff you can assign a static IP via DHCP based of your NIC's MAC address so it gets the same IP address each time. And since most people are blocking use of their DNS servers unless you are on their network also makes it pointless to know IP addresses by heart.

Everything else can go into an excel file or a sticky note on the monitor (I've got one IP address that I don't have a DNS entry for, but I use it once in a blue moon but I made a sticky note for it)

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[morcego]

I think most of us will get IPv6 equipment when it was cheaper for the manufacture to not disable the feature in our standard IPv4 products

Care to clarify that ? How it is more expensive to manufacture IPv6 equipment than IPv4 ?

Memory ? IPv6 uses less memory than IPv4+NAT.
Processing power ? Well within the limits of everything we have around. Again, IPv6 uses less processing than IPv4+NAT.
The stack itself ? Implementing IPv6 is pretty much equivalent (amount of work) as implementing NAT, if not easier. Also, there are plenty of stack codes lying around.

The only reason manufacturer would choose to disable it is not confusing clients (how can barely understand IPv4, if at all).

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[Ephemeriis]

While it is certainly true that there aren't a whole ton of home routers that support IPv6 yet, it's on the way. Vista installs IPv6 by default and it's a pain to get rid of it. Vista tells you you've got full IPv4 connectivity, but limited IPv6 connectivity...and I've already had one client ask me what that meant, and how he could get full IPv6. Folks will buy an IPv6 router just because it's got a bigger number...and now that Vista advertises IPv6 connectivity, people will be aware that there is a bigger number to be had.

Plus, some stupid applications insist on trying IPv6 if it is installed and wait forever for the packets to time out... A common problem I ran into with folks who tinkered under XP was massive slowdowns with Firefox after someone had installed IPv6. Remove IPv6 and everything was fine. Of course...Vista doesn't like it when you try to remove IPv6... Haven't had any calls about slowdowns yet...maybe Vista handles the stack better than XP did...

As far as "no-one is choosing to run IPv6 on the ground"... Well, that's just not true. Many ISPs are running IPv6 on their internal networks. You'll never see it because your modem/router/LAN live in an IPv4 tunnel...but it's there. I know I've seen Job Ads for the local hospital asking for IPv6 experience as well...though I don't know if they're actually using it yet or just preparing for the future.

"Dotted quads" may be easier for you to memorize...but I suspect this is largely because that's what you're dealing with on a day-to-day basis. Remember when you were little and it was hard to memorize addresses or phone numbers? Now that seems incredibly simple, doesn't it? Remember when you were just learning IP and wondered why you couldn't use DNS for absolutely everything (because names are so much easier to memorize than numbers). Plus, IPv6 supports a couple different ways to abbreviate addresses...such as stripping leading 0's or replacing them with :: Which makes our old friend 127.0.0.1 something much easier to remember - ::1

And simply re-allocating the IPv4 address space just isn't going to cut it. There aren't enough addresses out there. The only reason we've been able to stay with IPv4 for so long is NAT, which causes problems of its own. The bottom line is that we need more addresses than IPv4 has.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[kimvette]

Who memorizes IP addresses anymore?

People who need to configure DNS, DHCP, and apache servers, that's who.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[thegameiam]

I'd challenge the assertion that "many ISPs are running IPv6 on their internal networks" - the only ISP which has made any sort of argument that running IPv6 as a core service (rather than an edge service across the existing IPv4 core) is Comcast, and that has to do with the number of devices they're trying to manage with regard to set-top-boxes.

Comcast is nowhere near implementing this, either.

The US ISPs either run IPv6 as an edge service (in a VRF, say) or using tunneling approaches, or on limited deployments on specific hardware - but nobody's tunneling IPv4 inside IPv6 (although theoretically that'll work)

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[lukas84]

run nslookup or ping, and then c&p.

I also don't know why you think apache needs ip addresses. It understands DNS hostnames perfectly well, in VirtualHost blocks, Listen, etc.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[Ephemeriis]

Perhaps I am wrong... One of our larger local ISPs is rolling out its own fiber and offering a comprehensive package that includes broadband, unlimited phone, and video - and they're using IPv6 on their internal network. The end user doesn't see that though...they get an IPv4 address on their broadband router, just like with a regular cable/DSL connection. I just assumed that if a local ISP here was doing IPv6 internally that more worldwide would be doing so.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[Daniel Phillips]

I used to back in the day, but DHCP isn't as flaky anymore

But it is still flaky.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[thegameiam]

2 questions:

1) how do you know they're using IPv6 internally?

2) If I have 1000 aggregation routers connected to customers running IPv4, and two routers in my network where IPv6 is turned on, am I "running IPv6 on my internal network?"

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[kimvette]

Okay, so you're telling me there is no need to know IP addresses? So, I can nslookup a hostname before a zone is configured in bind for the new domain? One can use a hostname to test against a staging server before cutting over DNS without knowing the IP address to point the hosts file at it for testing? Wow, I'd love to learn how you do that. Somehow, you are suggesting that knowledge of IP addresses is totally unnecessary on the administration and development side.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[Anonymous Coward]

"NONE of my routers support it"

You dont need them to. Use 6to4.

"A lot of applications I run don't support it."

Some do tho. It's wonderful to be able to ssh and scp directly into the boxes you have behind a NAT gateway without having to resort to two-stage jumps.

But you still need support for this on the NAT box, right? If you're using a cheap, non-upgradable NAT router to share your single public IPv4 address, how would it know what to do with incoming tunneled IPv6 SSH connections?

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[Ephemeriis]

1) how do you know they're using IPv6 internally?

Because we do a lot of business with them and their clients. They offer very competitive pricing on pure bandwidth packages and their bundled price is outstanding. Plus they're a local company, which means tech support isn't outsourced yet. And they're far more reliable than the local cable company. So we wind up recommending that any of our customers looking for an ISP go with them.

All of which means that we wind up working with their installers and seeing their equipment very often. I've done work on their devices more than once and can attest that they are running IPv6 - a separate address for each interface on the device: bandwidth, video, phone. I have been told by their installers that this is typical and that their internal equipment is all running IPv6, though I have no proof of that myself.

2) If I have 1000 aggregation routers connected to customers running IPv4, and two routers in my network where IPv6 is turned on, am I "running IPv6 on my internal network?"

Yes, technically, you would be running IPv6 on your internal network. And I suppose this may be similar to what they're running. I have been led to believe that their servers (mail, web, whatever) are also running IPv6 as well, though this may be incorrect.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[Eternauta3k]

Besides, who wants to deal with IPv6 when dotted quads are easier to memorize?

Hehe, I had a friend who had memorized two or three CS servers.. I guess we'll have to use domain names...

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[MyNameIsFred]

...But in reality, I think the US, Canada, and Europe will switch to IPv6 when their counter parts in China and India surpass us economically in 10 to 20 years...

The main problem with your theory is that China and India are unlikely to surpass us economically in 20 years. To illustrate my point, let's compare the US and China. According to wikipedia the US GDP is approx $12.5 Trillion. The Chinese GDP is about $2.2 Trillion. If the US economy had zero growth for 20 years, and the Chinese economy would have to grow at almost 9.1% per year to equal the current US GDP. Zero growth rate for the US is rather unlikely the historic growth rate is a little over 3%. And I do not believe any country has had sustained economic growth of 9% for 20 years.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[kaizokuace]

umm people dont deal with long term problems in the short term. Thats like not the capitalist way of life!

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[slamb]

You dont need their support. Use 6to4. Or a tunnel.

You need their support even for 6to4. In one facility, I sent out 6to4 packets to the anycast address (192.88.99.1) and no packets came back. I don't know exactly what happened to the packets, but it works fine on machines elsewhere, but there tcpdump shows proto=ipv6 packets going over my real network interface to 192.88.99.1 and never coming back, so I can't access true IPv6 (non-2002::) sites. Even where the anycast address does work, 6to4 doesn't work over NAT without an alg no one's written or deployed, so you can't just get at your IPv6-only machines by using your hotel or airport's wireless connection, which is inevitably NATted and IPv4-only.

And tunnels? To where? If you have two specific sites you want to connect, sure it will work but so will an IPv4-only tunnel with reserved addresses. If you want to not have to do setup for each address pair, the tunnel would have to go to a host with IPv6 already set up that isn't too slow and is willing to forward all your traffic. Where would that be? The 6bone test network closed down, and even when it was running, their sites were high-latency, high-loss, and inconsistently available.

The problem is the ISPs. Applications are easy to fix - in fact, if you tell me how I could practically take advantage of IPv6, I pledge I will add IPv6 support for every Linux network application I use. I did it for CVS the other day - it took me about half an hour. I think much of the core router equipment has IPv6 support. In fact, some ISPs are even asking for IPv6 support in the DSL routers they bundle to consumers with the service. Not sure why...it's not like they're going to actually flip the switch and turn it on...that's not how they roll. They just like demanding features from their vendors that they'll never actually use. (Disclaimer: I work for one of those vendors. We have all kinds of features that real consumers never see, and it annoys me.)

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

Indeed.

What we need is someone to show them that China is leading the way in IPv6 uptake and that in 10 or 20 years when IPv4 is expended they'll take it in their stride while the West is struggling with network infrastructure failing all around us. We'll be at the mercy of communism. Sorry, I mean COMMUNISM!

This sounds like a job for Al Gore. "An Inconvenient IP Truth" anyone?

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[slamb]

I've done work on their devices more than once and can attest that they are running IPv6 - a separate address for each interface on the device: bandwidth, video, phone. I have been told by their installers that this is typical and that their internal equipment is all running IPv6, though I have no proof of that myself.

That doesn't mean they're running it. My MacBook right now says this:

[slamb@spiff ~]$ /sbin/ifconfig en1
en1: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULT ICAST> mtu 1500
inet6 fe80::217:f2ff:fe9c:84f2%en1 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5
inet 172.16.1.4 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 172.16.1.255
ether 00:17:f2:9c:84:f2
media: autoselect status: active
supported media: autoselect

IPv6 auto-assigns link-local addresses, much like the IPv4 169.255.0.0/16 addresses you see when no DHCP is running. I did nothing to set up that "%en1" address, I have never used it, and in fact it can't actually be used anywhere but on that network segment. All this means is that their equipment supports it, which is much more likely than them having upstream IPv6 connectivity and actually learning to use it.

No one uses IPv6. Your other example is equally bogus. The hospital you mentioned is probably just asking for experience with it because someone saw it in a trade magazine, similar to the people who were asking for "10 years Java experience" when Java had only existed outside of Sun for three years. Or because they know a particular person with IPv6 on his/her resumé and have made the job requirements so (s)he will be the only one who matches them. In a university- or government-run institution, that's how you get around the affirmative action people when you want to hire from within. I have seen it happen at a hospital.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[kaizokuace]

IPv6? Sounds like something RED China would do.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[dmsuperman]

I couldn't have said it better myself, so I won't even try.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[thegameiam]

Both are fair points, although from this description they sound like a smaller provider, as opposed to one of the really big ones (AT&T, Comcast, Charter, Cox, Verizon...)

My contention was that the big players aren't doing this yet (although Comcast is making noises about it).

The benefits of having separate addresses for each of these interfaces should be compared to the benefit of having different TCP port numbers for different services, which goes back to part of what I see as a problem with the way IPv6 has developed: instead of merely replacing the layer-3 function, it wraps a bunch of layer 2 and layer 4 functionality into it as well, defeating some of the advantages of layering...

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[dodobh]

Sprint and Verio run IPv6 in the core, as well as v4.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[Tony Hoyle]

It's quite common not to route 6to4. The ISP I'm with now is the first I've had in 3 years to route 192.88.99.1 and they've got native ipv6 anyway.

Tunnels I can sympathise. No quality. Abysmal uptime, and nobody to complain to if it goes wrong.. not to mention that 90% of the people who were providing them have packed up and gone home when the 6bone went titsup. I eventually gave up on my hosting machines' ipv6 after I did the uptime graphs.. uptime was about 30%, and the latency never got less than 500ms to the first hop.

ipv6 is still going backwards - it's *far* harder to get connectivity now than it was 5 years ago.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[bendodge]

Hey, my local ISP said they are currently deploying it, and plan to "flip the switch" in a couple months. In preparation, I have modified my trusty WRT54G with IPv6, and am currently tunneling through Earthlink Research's borker.

As for software dev's not supporting it, I guarantee game developers will eat it up when it has been reasonable deployed, as NAT is the bane of multiplayer games.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[Anonymous Coward]

Asia is the big pusher for IPv6 because they simply did not get any of the IPv4 to start with and NAT isn't helping them much considering they will have literally the majority of world's internet users.

Blame Asia. Note that the country Qatar manged/s to run with only one IP address.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[ScytheBlade1]

If you're going to flame, I'm going to flame. You're an idiot.

He never said that knowledge of IP addresses is totally unnecessary, he said that memorization of IP addresses is unnecessary.

New and different technology means new and different ways of management. Just because it means you have to re-think how you manage and impliment things doesn't mean that it's a bad thing or bad idea..

Once again: "Somehow, you are suggesting that knowledge of IP addresses is totally unnecessary on the administration and development side." <-- No, he really isn't.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[keeboo]

force organizations such as Apple, HP, IBM, Merck, and Halliburton justify their IP allocation request

How much I agree with you.
The problem is that anything and anyone outside the USA is pretty much powerless on this matter (the IPs are already allocated), while the USA itself is the least affected by IP shortage.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[ScytheBlade1]

Just because IPv6 gives you a bigger address space doesn't mean that it can't be memorized.

For example, I operate three buildings of computers, all on the private 10.0.0.0/8 subnet. I use patterns for address assignment. Routers are always .1, database servers are always .9, windows servers are always .10, DHCP clients run from .11 through .199, printers/scanners/faxes get from .200 through .250, and managed switches get from .251 through .254. Each building has a /24 block dedicated to it. 10.0.0.0/24 is one building, 10.0.1.0/24 is another, and 10.0.2.0/24 is yet another. But, because I follow a specific pattern, I don't need to go out and scan subnets or zone databases to find my servers: I know where they are because I follow a consistent pattern.

"But you're using IPv4 as an example, not IPv6!"

Yes, yes I am. But the same principle applies. Just because you have a larger address space doesn't mean it's any less manageable. Just because your /24 subnet is suddenly massive doesn't make it any less manageable. Let's be honest: the chances of you, and you alone managing a IPv4 /8 is pretty much zero. Let's jump back one to a /16. That's 65536 addresses. Are you going to memorize all of the computers attached to all of these addresses? Of course you're not.

The same applies to IPv6. You're not going to memorize them all. You're not doing that with IPv4 anyways. For every host you move to IPv6, you add a DNS record. DHCP is largely removed from the picture with IPv6. Apache isn't any harder to configure either. You're either going to tell it to accept connections on any local IP address, or a specific IP address. In both cases, seeing as you're either sitting at the box or talking to the box in question, it's a safe bet you already know how to contact it and in turn find out it's IP address.

Memorization is not necessary.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is IPv6 the end of the shoppers of send-buy public IPv4 because all IPv6 is public?

IPv6 + Mobility + Authentication for Mobility + Extra security for Authentication + AES encryption for security + asymmetric encryption + Session Initiate Protocol (SIP) + Session Description Protocol (SDP) + DNS for IPv6-bridge-IPv4 + SMTP & POP3/IMAP for e-mail messages + Routing Protocols + ...

See RFCs (Requests For Comments).

It will be TOO COMPLEX AND BUGGY!!!

The HACKERS will be the ZOMBIES ALIENS of THE SPACE.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are IPv6 routers the satellites/airplanes/helicopters/airrobots/cars/hu mans that they are moving/mobiliting quickly/slowly?

Does IPv6 support this special mobility of this extense air widespread/broadcasting like better & better eter?

20 Mb/s of my 1st neighbour + 10 Mb/s of my 2nd neighbour + 40 Mb/s of 3rd + 15 Mb/s of 4th + 5 Mb/s of 5 th + 45 Mb/s of 6th + ... =

= 300 Mb/s of throughput for me!!! (if my neighbours are idle or sleeping).

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[eightball]

Fatal error: Duplicate entry '0' for key 2 query: INSERT INTO sessions (sid, uid, hostname, timestamp) VALUES ('2fc2ba681282e862af2a6ae8e9518927', 0, '255.255.255.255', 1176091135) in /srv/www/kim/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 66

ip changed to protect me

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[Znork]

"But you still need support for this on the NAT box, right?"

Sortof, but not quite. You could probably forward all protocol 41 (6to4) packets to an internal machine (say, if you've got a linux server or something) running radvd and route all your v6 traffic through that. That would make it possible without support on the NAT box, but I wouldnt exactly call it elegant.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[Znork]

"In one facility, I sent out 6to4 packets to the anycast address (192.88.99.1) and no packets came back."

That's quite painful. I havent seen that problem myself, altho I've noticed that my own 6to4 packets actually travel to a different ISP to reach the anycast address. Shouldnt the anycast address automatically route like any other address, IE, your ISP has to actually actively _block_ the route updates to prevent your packets from reaching a 6to4 gateway?

"And tunnels? To where?"

Sixxs or other v6 tunnel broker? There are quite a few around.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[dascandy]

> like I had to for my puny /27 block,

You think you have it bad? I have to share my IPv4 /34 with 5 other people!

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[Anonymous Coward]

"NONE of my routers support it"

You dont need them to. Use 6to4.

"A lot of applications I run don't support it."

Some do tho. It's wonderful to be able to ssh and scp directly into the boxes you have behind a NAT gateway without having to resort to two-stage jumps.

But you still need support for this on the NAT box, right? If you're using a cheap, non-upgradable NAT router to share your single public IPv4 address, how would it know what to do with incoming tunneled IPv6 SSH connections?

One wonders why new Airport Extreme (811.11N) from Apple comes with built in IPV6 support (to outside). That is same company who was called "nuts" when they introduced a 400mbit connector named Firewire (IEE1394) while everyone was almost amazed by USB "serial" compared speed.

Re:Gee, why is no one switching to IPv6?

[Doug Neal]

My SpeedTouch ADSL router (cheap and cheerful ISP supplied one... for now) doesn't support this, I've tried. TCP and UDP only.

I for one

[Anonymous Coward]

welcome our huge-ip-address-space-possesing outerspace overlords!

It's a security feature

[Colin Smith]

By using an obscure and unused protocol they are able to confuse most hackers.

Re:It's a security feature

[arpunk]

IPv6 is a cooler playground for hacking.

Obviously

[Necron69]

Mars needs IP space!

- Necron69

ps. Take my bitch ex-wife while you are at it.

Re:Obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

Mars needs IP space!

They've got all the class E addresses already. How many more do they want?

who's no one?

[Anonymous Coward]

...Since no-one is choosing to run IPv6 on the ground...

You mean since few AMERICAN ISPs offer it...it doesn't reflect on the REST of the world.

every internet business?

[Anonymous Coward]

think about it

Ignorance is NOT bliss

[WindBourne]

Since nobody runs ipv6????? Sad, that so many Americans are clueless. Asia has moved into IPv6 in a big way, esp. China. They are all hoping to get a jump on it before we do. China, Japan, and even South Korea have pushed it like there is no tomorrow.

Re:Ignorance is NOT bliss

[thegameiam]

sort of - there's a lot more IPv6 there than here, but there are still a whole bunch of thoroughly under-implemented pieces of IPv6 (like, has anyone written an actual implementation of IPv6Sec yet?), and actual traffic rates using native v6 native v6 all the way through are exceptionally low.

If you go to one of the good latency calculators, you'll see that the delta between IPv6 performance and IPv4 performance is substantial, with IPv6 performance showing as a heck of a lot worse (about twice as poor). Once this isn't the case, then an argument for widespread adoption of v6 will be more effective.

Re:Ignorance is NOT bliss

[ffejie]

Nobody runs IPv6 -- yeah, like your rinky-dink corporate network. You know, no one, except the federal government and the 3 of the 4 largest service providers supporting them. Networx deal.

Re:Ignorance is NOT bliss

[thegameiam]

None of the significant US ISPs support native IPv6 transport across an infrastructure without any IPv4 present at this time.

No government agency does either.

Evidence? Try to get OSPFv3 working without an IPv4 router-ID. Try to get encryption (IPv6SEC) working without using IPSEC (over IPv4 transport). Try getting VoIPv6 working, or looking for hardware support for multiple queues for IPv6 packets.

Networx was just awarded a couple of days ago, and specifies those services which are to be orderable over the next 15 years. It shouldn't be used as evidence of what is supported today.

-David

Re:Ignorance is NOT bliss

[WindBourne]

My contract with Jeppesen ran out in Sept. Since early Feb, I have been working at Verizon Business. Please look up the players in Networx. I can tell you that very little IPv6 is currently being used. The FEDS are wanting to move to IPv6, but none of the players in Networx currently use it (they have small networks of it, but they are all IPv4 shops). Hopefully, that contract will change things.

Re:Ignorance is NOT bliss

[GooberToo]

Isn't that because it's tunneling IPv6 over IPv4? So of course the latency is going to be much higher. I would be hard pressed to imagine why latency would be higher for IPv4 versus IPv6 so long as it's an apples to apples comparison. If what I read is correct on the URL you provided, it's like comparing IPv4 verses IPv4 traveling over an VPN. So of course the latency is going to be higher...but one has nothing to do with the other if a fair comparison is your intention.

Please correct me if I failed to properly interpret "tunneling", as stated on that site.

Re:Ignorance is NOT bliss

[GooberToo]

This is starting to change. More and more government projects are starting to mandate IPv6 support.

Re:Ignorance is NOT bliss

[thegameiam]

You're correct about the reason, but the implication is that there isn't the quantity of native service deployed to support the need.

Re:Ignorance is NOT bliss

[thegameiam]

Many governement projects treat IPv6 support as a checkbox, not as something to be actually used. There are big, big, holes in the implementations, and nobody really wants to go first...

Re:Ignorance is NOT bliss

[anticypher]

Try to get OSPFv3 working without an IPv4 router-ID

Router IDs, at least in OSPF (all versions) and BGP, are not IPv4 addresses. They are a 32 bit number, that in some implementations are displayed as dotted quad. It is only common practice to make your publicly available router ID to match one of your assigned IPv4 addresses, so that collisions between Router IDs will rarely happen.

I still run across companies that have router IDs of 1, 2, 3 etc. Some router implementations will randomly grab the lowest IP address of all the local interfaces, and use that if an ID isn't explicitly specified. I've seen BGP4 Router IDs of 10.0.0.1, which switch to other random addresses from time to time, creating all kinds of confusion. I guess it all depends on how well you learned your networking, some training companies are worse than others, and many universities don't bother hiring professors with a clue, and for many cisco==networking.

None of the significant US ISPs support native IPv6 transport across an infrastructure without any IPv4 present at this time

This is a straw man argument, close to trolling. Nobody expects an ISP to roll out an all IPv6 network any time soon, but any ISP that expects to continue growing after 2010 will certainly need to dual stack their whole network from end to end.

I have built a proof of concept 100% IPv6 network, the full report on all the things right and wrong with it costs quite a bit of money. But for a /. summary, there is much work to be done on the server end. Apache, IIS, python, ruby, perl, PHP, VoIP, SIP/H.323, firewalls and most other server end technologies have a huge amount of development to do, none of them deal with IPv6 properly at all. On the client side, at least at the consumer level, Vista, Mac OSX, linux, BSD, Solaris and all the other modern OSes are quite well advanced, but applications rarely take advantage of the underlying support.

the AC

Re:Ignorance is NOT bliss

[GooberToo]

For us, IPv6 has been a checkbox but next year, it starts to be deployed.

Re:Ignorance is NOT bliss

[GooberToo]

That's only an issue today. The post implied that IPv6 was inherently a high latency proposal. It isn't, nor should it be. Once IPv6 becomes available to the masses, latency should be on par with current IPv4 deploymnets. In fact, latency may actually go down as routing can be more effecient, potentially requiring fewer hops if NAT is currently anywhere in your IPv4 routes.

Re:Ignorance is NOT bliss

[thegameiam]

NAT is generally an edge phenomenon: I am not aware of any provider who performs NAT in the core. Latency, however, is largely core-driven - as more masses deploy IPv6, it won't affect the latencies (software switching an IPv6 packet takes about the same amount of processing power and time in a consumer-grade appliance that performing a NAT does) - many core routers pass IPv6 traffic orders of magnitude more slowly than IPv4 ones (unless the ASICs have been custom-spun for v6, the switching will be software-based, which means that each packet becomes a CPU-hit). Core routers have a relatively long depreciation period (~ > 6 years or thereabouts depending...), so that's going to be a problem for a while.

Also, there are a LOT of backbone tunnels, and not much native peering and infrastructure - you'll sometimes see paths which go from Asia -> USA -> Europe -> USA -> Asia and other silliness. This will need to be cleaned up before any sort of actual improvement can be seen by an end-user.

The network effect won't improve the situation: it'll make it worse in the sort term, but if/when more folks deploy v6, then the providers will have a financial incentive to improve their networks.

Re:Ignorance is NOT bliss

[GooberToo]

I have to run but I wanted to post just real quick. NAT is common for many providers, especially so in Asia.

Switching IPv6 should require less computing power than NAT. At worst, it should be on par. Having said that, where NAT is in place, it must do both NAT and routing. If you remove NAT, you are by definition performing less work. Thusly, simply routing IPv4 or IPv6 requires less overhead (and lower latency) than IPv[46] + NAT.

As IPv6 becomes the norm, hardware support will become common place too.

The original point still stands...there is nothing inherently high latency in IPv6, which is what the original message to which I replied implied..

Re:Ignorance is NOT bliss

[thegameiam]

My one piece of advice is this: don't trust anyone who says it'll work without doing a proof-of-concept. There are enough ooky bits that are a lot better to find in a lab than on a production network...

Carl Sagan would've been proud

[Anonymous Coward]

The Milky Way galaxy alone has billions and billions of stars... and every one of them can be assigned billions and billions of IPv6 addresses!

ISPs Must Come First: How to Pressure Them?

[drgreening]

I tried running IPv6 and it works great within the company (Linux, Windows, Mac), but that our ISP did not support IPv6 caused insurmountable problems.

Are ISPs being pressured by anyone to support IPv6?

Re:ISPs Must Come First: How to Pressure Them?

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't even stop mine from getting bought by Best Buy.

New meme

[bcmm]

Pretty please can we make this into a new meme?
Examples:

• IPv6 Tested ...in Space
• SCO Vs. IBM Leaks Exposed ...in Space
• O'Reilly Opens Online Tech School ...in Space
• Microsoft Opposing California Open Doc Bill ..in Space

Re:New meme

[Anonymous Coward]

That's like adding "in bed" to the end of your fortune from a fortune cookie. "Success will smile upon you today... in bed"

Re:New meme

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, spacecraft flies YOU!! ... in Space.

Re:New meme

[TheDreadSlashdotterD]

It's the comment ... of doom!

Re:New meme

[Tony Hoyle]

Sounds like patenting opportunity to me!

Just gotta phone my lawywer...

Re:New meme

[Tatisimo]

I hope it becomes a meme... in Space!

Re:New meme

[jb.hl.com]

New memes are born...in Japan!

(now THAT'S an old, stillborn meme)

Re:New meme

[dkf]

1. Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of Soviet Russia Jokes.
2. ???
3. Profit... in Space!

Re:New meme

[LordEd]

No, its the comment ... of doom ... in space!

Re:New meme

[SeaFox]

Pretty please can we make this into a new meme?

In space... no one can hear you ping!

Re:New meme

[bcmm]

...in Space!

Re:New meme

[master_p]

In Russia...space tests you! in space!

Re:New meme

[Anonymous Coward]

Name one meme that became a meme because someone begged for it to be so in a forum.

You're an idiot ... Everywhere

You are already are using IPv6

[AndyMcL]

Ever use a new cell phone? Want to watch TV? The truth is IPv4 addresses are almost gone. Not the number of hosts, but amount of allocatable new address are almost gone. Companies do not usually give back allocated addresses even when they are acquired or merge plus of course the number of hosts are ever increasing.

The practical number of usable IPv4 addresses is about 250 million. Remember there is at least one host address AND THEN gateway and broadcast when provisioning new Internet services. This is very inefficient and one reason why there is not the notion of broadcast domain in IPv6. Also companies especially early on were given large blocks of addresses. So yes there are addresses out there which can be reused, but are you going to start calling up companies and universities and ask them for addresses? Not very realistic.

It should only take just a couple of examples to see why companies already have and will have to move to IPv6:

Remembering there are about 250 million usable addresses, what if you want to IP enable 80 million cell phone customers for web, video, IM, e-mail and other services? Where are you going to get all of those addresses? How will you get about 30% of the world's useable IPv4 addresses so you can make money from the new services? You can not. This is why NTT moved to IPv6 about 4-5 years ago.

Another example could be a US cable service provider (no names - protecting the innocent) who has 40 million customers and wants/needs to roll out new IP enabled digital set top boxes so they can provide video (1 address), VoIP (1 address), and Internet data (1 address). If each customer bought all three services the ISP would need 120 million address. Do you think anyone will give up their addresses so this one provider can have about half (120 million) of all of the useable IPv4 address in the world? No. IPv6.

The fact that you do not understand how to subnet IPv6 or understand how it works is irrelevant. It is needed because of the scale of IP enabled devices and services. Should people in developing counties do without the Internet revolution because Americans have most of the addresses and we are fat, dumb, and happy (it is phase meaning complacent) because we already have the lions share of the IPv4 addresses and as such many of the services already? --Yes I know we have fallen way behind Asia and Europe in many areas.

Also, IPv6 is needed to enable more interactive use of IP enabled technologies. Sitting behind NAT devices inhibits accessibility. (I know most are saying..well duh...) But networks should be secure and accessible. Think of talking to your friend on a mobile phone and then sharing/watching with him on your and his mobile phones some of the highlights of a sports game you watched last night and are being streamed from home your home server --of course taunting him while watching because your team won.

Of course some of this can be done now, but it is more male geeks doing it manually. When it can be seamless and by the main stream, then things will really be different. We will live in a much more collaborative society. One where using technology will not create social misfits who do not know how to interact with real people anymore, but one that uses technology TO interact socially with people. When you can video conference from your mobile, PC, work, school, or living room and the clarity of visual and sound are so good it seems like the people are there, you will not longer have to do " ;-) :-) :-S :-( lol " which are poor substitutes for seeing and hearing actual emotion and reacting to it.

So what does IPv6 enable? The future.

-Andy

Re:You are already are using IPv6

[thegameiam]

IPv6 is one possible solution to the address shortage (which is hardly at the *dire* stage, but will be soon enough). Other solutions include widespread adoption of NAT and/or adopting some entirely different layer-3 paradigm.

The IPv6 designers have hampered adoption by insisting on solving problems which are not directly related to address size (like autoconfiguration, QoS, etc) and rolling those into the protocol - because so many of these useful features which were steadily glommed onto IPv4 have not yet been implemented in v6, those customers who need the features have no incentive to deploy it.

Examples: IPv6SEC is not yet implemented. Autoconfiguration in a truly native v6 environment (i.e. no v4 at all) doesn't have a mechanism for learning about DNS servers. OSPFv3 is substantially different from OSPFv2. The list goes on...

Re:You are already are using IPv6

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be pointed out that NAT, which was initially considered a hack or a sort of "IPv4 hamburger helper", has turned out to be useful in hiding the IP addresses of the hosts behind the firewall, and in enforcing a layer of filtering. Of course you can use NAT with IPv6, too, but if everyone uses NAT then the IPv4 address space issue is much less severe.

Maybe someone should propose an "IPv5" that uses 64-bit addresses? Seems that people are having a hard time getting their heads around the huge address space of IPv6, the direct mapping of Ethernet physical addresses to IP addresses, etc.

Re:You are already are using IPv6

[thegameiam]

IPv5 was experimental-only, thus the v6 nomenclature. There was a proposed "IPv8" which was exactly like IPv4 except for the length of the address - I think that a simpler proposal had a lot going for it...

But alas, we did not head that way...

Re:You are already are using IPv6

[AndyMcL]

thegameiam,

NATing was a temp stop gap. Also, if you just look around, almost every home with broadband uses NAT, every company uses NAT and many companies have the operation hell of traffic being NATed multiple times throughout an Enterprise. So wide spread adoption of NAT already happened. NAT is not the answer. For a home user with a dinky network, it works. If you have a huge network with MILLIONS of endpoints, it just does not from an ROI perspective. Try tracing and capturing packets whose addresses change multiple times in both directions on a global network for an application that is not functioning and your company is losing money for every minutes (second) it is out.

Remember that there are billions of people with millions coming online in some form or fashion for the first time every year with many new companies springing up to serve them. A simple thing like an address gets important. The more private addressing you use, the less interoperable and supportable things become. Just something to think about as you play with the hair on your arm.

To the point of address exhaustion; here is a quote from an ARIN meeting last October 2006:

"....And then you see each of the RIRs, the amount of space that we currently have in /8s, ARIN having at this point the most IPv4 blocks from the IANA and, of course, the available space. It says the IANA reserved is right now 59 /8s. That number changed last week. There are now 55 /8s remaining. ARIN was issued four /8 blocks by the IANA last week, last Wednesday I think. So there really are 55 /8s remaining in the entire v4 space pool...."

http://www.arin.net/meetings/minutes/ARIN_XVIII/pp m1_transcript.html#anchor_4

I have seen estimates of practical allocatable address exhaustion in 2008 or 2009. Pretty darn soon! This does not mean the Internet or commerce will stop. Just new services and deployments will increasingly need to use IPv6 because there will not be IPv4 addresses for them.

Getting back to IPv6 in space.....it is good it is being tested now in space because it will certainly be used in the future. Also, I hope every router in space is Cisco, then they should work. :-)

Suggested links:
http://www.arin.net/
http://www.iana.org/ipaddress/ip-addresses.htm
http://www.arin.net/meetings/minutes/ARIN_XVIII/pp m.html

Best regards,

Andy

Re:You are already are using IPv6

[thegameiam]

Oh believe me, I'm familiar with ARIN's policies: I'm one of the people who argued for the adoption of PI (provider independent) allocations as opposed to PA-only allocations, which was the policy for a very long time.

IPv6 was designed by a lot of smart people who work on end-systems, with not a whole lot of folks who actually run very large networks being involved - that's why multihoming still remains a problem (yes, yes, I know, get some PI-space, or is Shim-6 still the suggested approach? Oh wait, that's right, there isn't a working implementation of shim-6...), and to a great extent, IPv6 solves problems which have already been solved for most ISPs and enterprises.

Other than address shortage.

Yes, I agree that there is an IPv4 address shortage, and there is a concern about depletion. But deploying IPv6 requires changing a lot of operational paradigms of the network (middlebox proxy vs. end-to-end), and also the firewall behavior is quite different.

So yeah, I think that there's a v4 address issue: I'm just not sure that v6 is the answer. Time will tell.

Re:You are already are using IPv6

[HobbesIE]

Often times - NAT is a security feature in networks - keep the bad guys out; disable USB ports, remove floppies etc - and lock down the introduction of foreign code to a system (Virii, spyware, malware...) - an analagy is once you get into the building - its all yours where you go. IPv6 would require a complete rethink of this security structure - each device connected to the Internet would have to able to fend for itself - the analagy being the front door of the building is open to all - but you need a key for each room. IPv4 can be viewed as an incubator for IT security, ahead of IPv6 which throws the device out intot he world - a bold move by Microsoft who seem to push the concept of IPv6..!

Re:You are already are using IPv6

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if all companies were allowed to keep their fat /8 networks, the IANA could at least hand out
127.x.0.0/16 {x=1..254} and 224.0.0.0/8-253.0.0.0/8. Noone's using frickin multicast over the internet (may I say that ISPs don't support it?!) that anyone would require more than a /16 net for mcast.

Re:You are already are using IPv6

[daverabbitz]

Your argument is totally spurious. NAT doesn't provide security aside from disallowing connections to originate from outside the network, this provides very little security, as most attack vectors on workstation PC's are via HTTP or email* which are both internally originated.

Once a machine has been compromised, it can make outward connections to anywhere it pleases (With just NAT), and can listen on any UDP port it wants to by sending packets out packets to bogus addresses (like STUN for SIP).

You are correct in stating that the outside network shouldn't be able to arbitrarily connect to your internal network, but likewise the internal network shouldn't be able to arbitrarily communicate with the world. This is trivially simple to do on both IPv6 and IPv4 networks and only someone truly incompetent would argue that IPv6 is bad because it doesn't have NAT.

Example:

The correct way to provide security on IPv4 (on Linux):
iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
iptables -F
iptables -A INPUT -s $ADMIN_HOST -d $INT_ADDR -i $INT_INTF -p tcp --dport $SSH_PORT -j ACCEPT
iptables -P INPUT REJECT
iptables -A OUTPUT -s $INT_ADDR -d $ADMIN_HOST -o $INT_INTF -p tcp --dport $SSH_PORT -j ACCEPT
iptables -P OUTPUT REJECT
iptables -P FORWARD REJECT
echo 1 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward ...(Commands for allowing acceptable connections follow)

On IPv6 (on Linux again):

ip6tables -P INPUT ACCEPT
ip6tables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
ip6tables -F
ip6tables -A INPUT -s $ADMIN_HOST -d $INT_ADDR -i $INT_INTF -p tcp --dport $SSH_PORT -j ACCEPT
ip6tables -P INPUT REJECT
ip6tables -A OUTPUT -s $INT_ADDR -d $ADMIN_HOST -o $INT_INTF -p tcp --dport $SSH_PORT -j ACCEPT
ip6tables -P OUTPUT REJECT
ip6tables -P FORWARD REJECT
echo 1 >/proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/forwarding # Maybe want to change this to only appropriate interfaces ...(Almost identical commands for setting up acceptable IPv6 connections follow)

I imagine on other platforms it is just as simple or simpler to do the same. Some would argue that my method for allowing SSH is wrong, but it is convenient to allow all connections to the router (not the network) for a brief moment so that you still have ssh access in case anything goes fubar.

If anything IP Masquerading (The type of NAT you are probably referring to), makes firewalling harder, as it is more complicated to understand a packets path, and what address it has at a given position in the network.

*Think of all the Joe-sixpack machines behind ADSL or Cable routers which are already members of botnets.

Re:You are already are using IPv6

[oddityfds]

> IPv6SEC is not yet implemented.

Use secure protocols, instead.

> Autoconfiguration in a truly native v6 environment (i.e. no v4 at all) doesn't have a mechanism for learning about DNS servers.

I'm pretty sure DHCPv6 solves this. There's also anycast DNS.

Re:You are already are using IPv6

[AndyMcL]

thegameiam,

Thank you for your educated insight. I appreciate and respect different views especially if they are thought out and articulated well.

Best regards,

Andy

(ccie x 3)

Re:You are already are using IPv6

[HobbesIE]

There are many ways of screwing up a users computer for nefarious uses - honey potting them with pop-ups on dodgy websites that install mirc botnets, the user opening the email with britneynaked.jpg.bat as the attachment, distrbuting autorun.inf files on usb keys (I beleive a security assessment firm contracted by a British bank scattered 100 usb flash drives in the vicinity of the bank's head office at lunch with an autorun file to report back when bank employees plugged them into their workstations out of curiousity - a high percentage did)

The main threats that using NAT removes are the outside influences caused by a direct incoming connection - remember Windows Messenger pop-ups (winpopup?) advising the user to go to a certain website to clear spyware? Or a Windows 98 machine simultaneously dialled up to the Internet through a modem and connected to a LAN - File & Print Sharing switched on? AT least when the user is behind a NAT - any pings to port 139 are ignored unless the user specifically allows such activity which indicates a level of technical knowledge such that they can secure their machines adequetly.

I must confess only an beginner's knowledge of iptables coming as I do from a Windows background but from what I can see - this configuration would need to be replicated on each workstation - grand if you image each harddisk - but would it not be easier to set this rule at the gateway that provides NAT? What if you want to allow a certain port - for example the company relaxes restrictions on MSN Messenger usage (Gaim on Linux I suppose) - the admin must either go to each machine or re-image each workstation - quite tedious.

Not really the main thrust of my point - but how are these addresses allocated - a DHCP process by the ISP?

Re:You are already are using IPv6

[daverabbitz]

I haven't ever tried anything similar on Windows, but it would be trivially simple to have a script which SSH's to all workstations and configured the firewalls the same, or to have cron job fetch new firewall rules periodically over AFS or whatever. I haven't done either because at our site almost all machines are thin clients and so updating the image on the boot server and rebooting the clients is sufficient.

Re:You are already are using IPv6

[thegameiam]

DHCPv6 was created to solve this exact problem. However, its implementation is pretty spotty at this point, although it's getting better. Anycast DNS is a fantastic idea, but you've still got to get the server addresses into the system somehow - Windows XP wouldn't send DNS requests over IPv6 (sans v4) for love or money: my understanding is that Vista is better about this, but I have not personally tested it.

And by "Use secure protocols" did you mean "secure [higher-layer] protocols" like SSL or some such? There are substantial advantages to being able to encrypt at lower layers of the OSI stack: if I'm in an IPsec VPN environment, I don't need to worry (as much) about getting my exchange server to speak securely... SSL is designed to be single-host to single-host - it gets pretty clunky to use it as an IPSec substitute.

Re:You are already are using IPv6

[oddityfds]

Oh, I could go on for several paragraphs about why I feel IPSEC right now shouldn't and can't be used as a primary means of securing communications, but it was a bit off-topic. Let's just say I tried using it and found that it was too easy to slip and have everything working fine, but without proper encryption and authentication, and that it really didn't solve the key distribution any better - no, quite on the contrary - compared to SSL+x509 and Kerberos. I just don't trust it. When SSL or Kerberos are used, you know when they're doing their job and there's usually a switch somewhere which you can toggle to make the application actually stop working unless it's secure. That's what you want, and it really isn't that hard.

IPSEC is fine though for setting up your VPN between a laptop and a router, or between two routers, but then you're giving up end-to-end security unless you also use some secure higher-level protocols to go with that.

um, no.

[thegameiam]

Bonjour does not rely on IPv6 - IPv6 autoconf was based on Appletalk autoconf, as was Apple's Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous). Bonjour works just fine with no v6 on the network.

And Apple's business model is absolutely not dependent on Bonjour: I think perhaps you are misunderstanding the term "business model." An example of a business model is:

"We give away high-quality software for free to get people to buy our hardware, where we make high margins" - that's an example of Apple's business model.

"By becoming the de-facto standard desktop environment, we encourage customers to buy applications from us which are specifically geared for that environment" - that's an example of Microsoft's business model.

Notice that neither of those models require calling out a specific technology. Any company which is completely dependent on a single technology will find itself obsolete when the next big thing is created.

Internet hierarchy

[phobos13013]

From what i hear, this is just an attempt to create a protocol "hierarchy" where us lowly terran-based inhabitants are forced to fight amongst the allowable IPv4 addresses, while the more affluent elite who are permitted access to the great beyond get to roll with IPv6. Fight the powers!

I wonder if that Cisco has been patched...

[mnemotronic]

For this configuration exploit, this SNMP vulnerability, this IP sequence generation problem, this ICMP vuln, this H.323 problem, and this buffer overflow.

NOTE: Some of the listed problems indicate a "Cisco 3200 Catalyst", which may not be the same as the orbiting "Cisco 3200 Mobile Access Router". IANACG (I am not a Cisco geek).

Cellphones don't need unique addresses

[argent]

Remembering there are about 250 million usable addresses, what if you want to IP enable 80 million cell phone customers for web, video, IM, e-mail and other services?

Since every phone has a unique address (PSTN address, AKA phone number) within the cell network, you don't even need to touch 10.0.0.0. You can give every phone the address 192.168.0.2, router 192.168.0.1, and NAT them all by PSTN at your border router.

I would *prefer* to have my cellphone be something like $CARRIER:PREFIX::$PSTN:IN:OCTETS but you don't actually need this capability.

Re:Cellphones don't need unique addresses

[nevali]

Except that an awful lot of 3G (UMTS) services operate via IP, and are supposed to continue to do so (and be directly addressable from the home network) whilst roaming.

[Aside: Whilst a given phone will invariably have an MSISDN (phone number), it could have two, or three, or four, and it's not necessarily globally unique. Generally a phone won't know its own PSTN number unless it's told it by the network, and in normal useage it's only the SS7 gateways that need to care: the actual MSISDN isn't used a whole heap for call routing). About the only useful ID in this context is the MSIN (mobile subscriber identity number--the number on your SIM), but that's no more helpful to an end-user mapped to an IPv6 address than any other address would be.

I'm not entirely sure how giving every phone the same IP and NATing achieves anything beyond confusion, or what 'NAT them all by PSTN at your border router' means, let alone how it would help.]

Re:Cellphones don't need unique addresses

[argent]

Except that an awful lot of 3G (UMTS) services operate via IP, and are supposed to continue to do so (and be directly addressable from the home network) whilst roaming.

That's a nice feature, one that seems to be designed to promote IPv6, but there are techniques to implement that with NAT/PAT using asymmetrical routing.

I'm not entirely sure how giving every phone the same IP and NATing achieves anything beyond confusion

It's a thought experiment that demonstrates that you don't need 80 million IP addresses to provide services to 80 million cell phones. Obviously you would use a less parsimonious distribution of NATted addresses, and use asymmetrical routing to implement roaming.

or what 'NAT them all by PSTN at your border router' means

Doesn't matter if you use PSTN, MSIN, or anything else, just so long as it's a unique ID per phone that can be used to associate any open TCP sessions the phone has with a matching internet-routable IP and port at the border between the cell net and the public internet.

Re:Cellphones don't need unique addresses

[nevali]

That's the point, though: it has very little to do with the public Internet. IPv4 traffic is still NATted at the borders and so on as it previously has been, but IPv6 is used within the networks by the networks.

Re:Cellphones don't need unique addresses

[Tony Hoyle]

Whatever the blurb says 3G might be designed to do I've not used a phone in years that didn't have an automatically assigned NAT address and they are not addressable externally (not a problem - who would run a server on a phone?).

I've never seen a mobile phone that even supported ipv6 let alone got given an address. The security implicitions of giving mobile phones public addresses... heck that's why ipv6 still has NAT and NAT will continue to be deployed at the border routers of every major company even long after ipv6 gets deployed (if it ever does) - simply security. You don't want to be giving away information about your internal structure like that.

Re:Cellphones don't need unique addresses

[argent]

The original comment was about provisioning 80 million customers, though, and how you'd do that without IPv6... and the followup implied that you'd need 80 million static IPs to do it. All I'm saying is that ain't so... the v4 address space won't run out as long as ISPs can continue to extend NAT and PAT.

I would love to see IPv6 deployed, I don't want to lose my routable address even if I don't run a server, and I expect that's going to happen sooner or later. But it's not up to me, and address space pressure isn't going to make it happen.

Re:Cellphones don't need unique addresses

[Eunuchswear]

Whatever the blurb says 3G might be designed to do I've not used a phone in years that didn't have an automatically assigned NAT address and they are not addressable externally (not a problem - who would run a server on a phone?).

Me! MEMEMEMEME! ME! ME!

That would be so cool.

Re:Cellphones don't need unique addresses

[Morth]

who would run a server on a phone?

My sister in law in Thailand decided to get internet when I was there last. Problem is there's no phone lines where she lives, mobile phones came first. So that's what she got, a stationary 3G modem with fixed charge. I think I saw at least 3 NAT passthroughs when I did a traceroute out of her computer. Not a problem for her, but if I ever move there myself, I will certainly be annoyed.

And the same is happening here in Sweden. People who live too far from base stations for *DSL get internet through radio or mobile. We might have enough addresses for everyone to get one (I'm not sure), but we're certainly approaching the line where the home internet user will only have a NATed address.

Re:Cellphones don't need unique addresses

[argent]

we're certainly approaching the line where the home internet user will only have a NATed address.

I agree that this is true.

I agree that this is a problem.

If I were the God of the Interweb, we'd have been on IPv6 years ago.

But practically speaking, the people who are running the Interweb don't care about this, in fact they would rather have users on NATted addresses, so the address space problem is not going to lead to IPv6, it's going to lead to more NATting.

Mod +1 Touching (NT)

[El_Isma]

Mod +1 Touching

If only I could hack the ISS

[interstellar_donkey]

Slightly off topic, but if there was some way I could figure out how to connect to and hack the ISS computers, I'd love to get in there and replace whatever is on the display to read simply "All of these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there".

It'd have a fun effect, to be sure.

belief future understand

[m0llusk]

Space is our future. IPv6 is our future. Enjoy the present while it lasts.

You want IPv6 adoption? Make it reasonable.

[shaitand]

Start an open site dedicated to CONTENT providers who have made their content available for IPv6 and give blue ribbon graphics to IPv6 only sites. Then.. and this is the biggest one.

Make getting address space cheap and easy!!! IPv6 is huge, why do I have pay ridiculous recurring fees to get a block? Make small allocations free, registration free and online, then just make me return a confirmation letter/call/email once every 5 years to renew. IPv6 space is monstrous, it is terrible that you have to pay outrageous fees to become a member organization and then huge recurring fees for addresses. Why do ISP's have to go through the same backflips and outrageous pricing schemes that served to reduce demand for IPv4 addresses.

Once you have major content providers onboard and make it free and easy to get address space, then ISP can advertise access to the 'NEW AND IMPROVED' internet.

Re:You want IPv6 adoption? Make it reasonable.

[larz]

Feel free to contribute some sites available via ipv6--> http://ipv6links.net/ There are many tunnel providers that will give you a /64 or /48 for free.

Re:You want IPv6 adoption? Make it reasonable.

[Tony Hoyle]

lol. You're funny. 'many' tunnel brokers. 7 in the whole world.

Did you look at that page before posting the link?

Re:You want IPv6 adoption? Make it reasonable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the companies that handle DNS and IP assignments have gotten too fat off the huge fees required for IPv4 addresses and DNS.

Therefore what became expensive out of the necessity of supply and demand (IPv4 Addresses). They're not willing to cut prices because they already hold a monopoly on IPv4 and they have effectively been given a monopoly on IPv6 as well. Do you really think that the company in charge of this wants you to be able to pay $0.01 per address when under the IPv4 scheme you had to pay $1 per address? That is a loss of $.99 and that is unacceptable to a company.

Funnily enough the validation word is 'worldly'

Re:You want IPv6 adoption? Make it reasonable.

[shaitand]

'Because the companies that handle DNS and IP assignments have gotten too fat off the huge fees required for IPv4 addresses and DNS.'

That is the problem. There are enough companies that have a vested interest in seeing this do well that they could benefit from deductible contributions to an international non-profit to oversee IP address allocations.

Re:You want IPv6 adoption? Make it reasonable.

[anticypher]

Start an open site dedicated to CONTENT providers who have made their content available for IPv6 and give blue ribbon graphics to IPv6

There are plenty of badges and code snippets available to websites who have IPv6 connectivity, with various dancing penguins or turtles to show when a browser has connected with IPv6. It wouldn't be that hard to make it into a dancing blue ribbon.

to IPv6 only sites

I've been looking at the viability of v6 only sites, its not going to happen any time soon. Dual stack, no problem, but there just isn't any reason for a site to cut off most of it's traffic. There are already a few IPv6 information sites that have a complete version on an IPv6 only machine, but its more for geek style points than anything else.

Going back to the subject You want IPv6 adoption?

When slashdot's (or digg's or myspace's) management goes to their upstream provider and demands IPv6 connectivity, and tweaks the site to support it (no small task, really), then we'll see a major shift in the U.S. to IPv6. Until then, Asia and Europe are leaving the U.S. behind. In 1997, slashdot was a site by nerds, for nerds. Since /. was bought by OSTG, it has been a site by PHBs for page impressions and slashvertisements.

Make getting address space cheap and easy

I keep hearing this, and I can't figure out where it comes from. I already posted prices in another thread, but v6 netblocks are the same price as v4 addresses, or even cheaper depending on how much you want. The only places where money flows for address space are when LIRs pay their annual fee to the RIRs, and the RIRs give money to support IANA (and grudgingly, if ever, to ICANN). Any LIR that wants to get a /32 v6 block just fills out a form, and gets the allocation, its part of their annual fee (1300 Euros/year in Europe). Beyond that, its pretty much free market forces for what an LIR or ISP can charge for v4 or v6 addresses. For a while, there was a policy in place to force aggregation by giving only LIRs PA blocks, but enough people living in the real world have forced the existence of PI blocks. With only minor justification, I'll get you a nice big PI block you can play with for 3 years, I only charge administrative overhead (which is still going to be a few hundred Euros if its the only thing you want). If you hire me for other work, I tend to throw in the v4 and v6 blocks and AS# for free, if that is what the project needs.

the AC

Skynet running IPv6? Nooo!

[dalleboy]

I, for one, welcome our new IPv6 satellite overlords.

Windows Vista is nativly IPv6...

[Kaenneth]

All you need is two Vista machines, and you have an IPv6 network.

So there must be at least a dozen IPv6 networks in the world...

Retail Vista has already outsold Windows XP (N)

all kidding aside, Vista does have some improvements, but it's the first of the new generation. Like 3.0, 95, and ME... it'll be better when it's updated to 3.1(1), 98 (se), or XP(sp2) level.

Third times the charm.

Re:Windows Vista is nativly IPv6...

[Tony Hoyle]

2 vista machines *and* an ipv6 capable router, unless you're suggesting connecting them via crossover & limiting yourself to a 2 machine network.

Oh and an ipv6 capable ISP... at least one that routes 192.88.99.1 (few do any more) or even one that does routed ipv6 (Don't know what the situation is in the US but there's only one in this country - most don't).

Re:Windows Vista is nativly IPv6...

[TheAwfulTruth]

You don't need a router, any passive Eathernet hub (or several) will suffice for a smallish (50 or so) multimachine ipv6 network or a network of any other protocol of your choosing. And yeah if you want to connect to the net with an eathernet decvice yes, but if you areusing a machine as a gateway/firewall then yo can have IPv6 internally (you know for fun) and IPv4 externally.

In space?

[rs79]

Good place for it.

Other than the greybeards nobody on earth seems to be using it.

IPv6

[SniperClops]

IPv6 sucks, they should have kept it in a similar format like 256.128.194.242.167.567 or something like that.

Re:IPv6

[hawaiian717]

No thanks. An IPv4 address is 32 bits, while and IPv6 address is 128. My computer's link-local IPv6 address, fe80::020a:95ff:feba:2832, would be 254.128.0.0.0.0.0.0.2.10.149.255.254.186.40.50 using IPv4's dotted decimal notation. The :: is a compression notation, meaning "fill in a bunch of 0's here to get the right number of bits).

Re:IPv6

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with that is that each IPv6 address is a 8 groups of 4 hexidecimal digits. The reason they did that is so each single IPv6 address can encode 16 bytes of data. In the old IPv4 format, each area between the dots stored a byte of data (0-255). To keep the same format each IPv6 address would have to look like this:

255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.25 5.255.255.255

Sure, each element could cover a greater range, but there's no simple way to convert decimal to binary (whereas in hex it's 2 digits->1 byte, always).

Sprint & Verio

[thegameiam]

I assume by "Verio" you mean NTT (AS2914). NTT is an incumbent Japanese telco, which bought the US-based Verio some years ago. I know that NTT offers IPv6 services, and their brochure is here, which claims that they're running dual stack on all of their routers. That brochure also claims that they have 500 customers for their IPv6 services, and claims that they're the largest provider of IPv6 in the world.

As for Sprint, they often brag about their L2TPv3 core, with MPLS, and other private-IP services offered as edge services. It would make sense for them to run 6PE and just treat v6 as yet another edge service which doesn't interfere with their core. BTW, Sprint's documentation on this indicates that they have a grand total of seven IPv6 speaking routers.

So while you might have a point about NTT running v6 in the core, they're not that big an ISP in the US: the weekly routing table analysis doesn't show them in the top 20 in either the ARIN region or the APNIC region. From the map on their website, they've got all of 9 POPs in the US... Their focus seems to be on business and webhosting customers, rather than on end-users - they don't offer a TDM product below a DS3.

In any case, the idea that having 500 customers of a given technology shows the provider as the most deployed/largest in the world misses the scale of the Internet entirely: Cablevision might have more than 500 customers in a single building who are IPv4-only.

Re:Sprint & Verio

[dodobh]

Sorry, NTT-Verio rebranded last year, so I still think of Verio as a telco (Verio is now only the hosting division. The T1/T3 stuff was sold to Cogent last year as well, when they rebranded.). NTT is a fairly large backbone carrier, and their customers tend to be other large providers/companies.

I do know some engineers at Sprint, and they tell me they have dual stacks in the core.

There aren't too many consumer type ISPs offering IPv6 in the US, true.

i dont like it

[unity100]

memes need to be natural and catchy. this one is so unnatural that it is so unnatural.

Shielding fixes that

[countvlad]

All electronic devices are shielded in space, otherwise the exposure to radiation would make them completely useless. Special EMI/RMI shielding containers are built to house the electronics, and I'm pretty sure special fabrication considerations go into protecting the devices. There's no doubt other solutions put in place.

Re:Shielding fixes that

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you think a LOT of space equipment still uses OLD motorola, sun & mips chips? They made purpose designed chips for these issues.

just put PRON on and IPv6 will be popular

[Anonymous Coward]

All people has to do is start those PRON site on IPv6, and the whole internet
will move over to IPv6 in matter of weeks

Why your routers don't have it.

[Esteanil]

To a large majority of the market, IPV6 support is not a required feature.
Thus, any hardware manufacturer that does not include IPV6 support now can count on repeat business when it becomes a highly wanted/required feature.

Still lacking

[Anomalyst]

Currently there is little, if any, support for static leases. None of the MS stacks support it. I frequently use IPv4 static leases to put "special" hosts (servers, printers, etc) at known addresses and to administratively subnet host ranges, makes it easier to assign access control lists for firewalling and QoS. Until enterprise level capabilities arrive, IPv6 will remain primarily a laboratory curiosity.

Re:Still lacking

[the_greywolf]

None of the MS stacks support it.

Are you sure? I thought it was supported on Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista? And I thought there was a whole upgrade plan laid out?

Perhaps I'm wrong. Thanks for letting me know!

Re:Still lacking

[Anomalyst]

What flavor of kool-aid do you want today?
Trusting MS or any other sociopathic corporation marketdroids to be honest or complete in their touting is naive at best.
None of URL given reference the lack of IPv6 DHCP stateful address acquisition in the stacks noted in my post. A painful 30 minutes of searching through the boasting turned up "IPv6 protocol for the Windows Server 2003 family does not currently support DHCPv6 or any other stateful address configuration protocol" http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/lib rary/6c05c210-e5f9-4882-b760-d275a80f35091033.mspx
I am well aware the MS has done its typical "bragging rights" half-assed preliminary implemtation of standards for IPv6. Even if they had stateful DHCP implemented in the client, they don't have a functional DHCPv6 server yet to provide the addresses and options (e.g. static CIDR route or NTP server) and wont even be taking a swat at it until 2007Q4 (http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx ?PostID=1436592&SiteID=17) for pity's sake. My point still stands, without the ability of DHCP to shape and organise address allocations according to enterpise requirements, any IPv6 implementation beyond a trivial single site is pretty much masturbatory, while it might feel good to you, nobody else gets anything out of it.

Re:Still lacking

[the_greywolf]

I still don't understand why anyone would need DHCP anyway, when an address can simply be generated, based on the local router and hardware MAC, and still provide reasonably good routing. Why is a stateful address configuration even needed in the IPv6 context? I mean, I understand the need in the IPv4 space, but...

Re:Still lacking

[Anomalyst]

> I still don't understand why anyone would need DHCP
Pretty much any enterprise needs the ability to place some hosts within certain IP address blocks. Firewalls must be configured with known IP addreses for WWW hosts, mail servers, Thin client servers, VPN gateways, etc. Lots of stuff needs to have a permanant address. It's nice to have all the printers in one administrative subnet to restrict telnet access to them. In a multi-site scenario it is needed even more because you want your sites to be as identical as possible so that field engineers can learn where these resources are without regard to the site to which they are dispatched. DHCP allows an administrtor to consolidate and distribute the details of DNS, WINS, NTP that are so so easy to screw up by hand (and time consuming as well) into DHCP. If you have more than a couple hosts you should be using DHCP.

First IPv6 E-Commerce Site - Ever

[ThOr101]

Welcome to the first ever E-Commerce site on IPv6. Who says no one on the ground is running it. Shop for yourself, or your favorite man at http://www.best4men.com/

EC-Commerce, Chat & E-mail, all on IPv6.

--Brett

Re:First IPv6 E-Commerce Site - Ever

[jguthrie]

Hey! It looks like you've got a Freenet6 tunnel, just like me! I hope you've figured out a better way to keep an eye on it than I have. Every time I try to ping the far end of my tunnel, it seems, the tunnel is down but tspc is still running. Unfortunately, I just checked and I think you're tunnel appears to be down right now. It's a good thing you also have an IPv4 address.

Imminent death of Internet predicted, film at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

IPv6: Wolf! Wolf!

World+dog: Yawn.

IPv6: Wolf! Wolf!

World+dog: What, you still here?

IPv6: Wolf! Wolf!

World+dog: Ooo, that Simon is so mean.

Meanwhile, there is no wolf, just a solution in search of a problem.

Re:Imminent death of Internet predicted, film at 1

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

"A solution in search of a problem"? I'm sorry, are you disputing the fact that there are a limited number of IPv4 that is far too low for the practical number of systems that will require them in the near future? Are you really that clueless?

Or are you just one of the other idiots I mentioned in my post who thinks that it's too far in the future to be worth worrying about? Yeah, let's wait 10 or 20 years until the last possible moment then rush about to fix the much much larger number of peices of software and hardware that will need it. You're a genius.

Now there's the problem

[bruce_the_loon]

What sort of idiot still designs web session code that requires a unique IP address? It's a known problem and has been for a number of years now. The solution isn't to switch to IPV6, but to fix the code.

Proxy servers, spoofed addresses and so forth are plenty good reasons to not write code like this.

Port and net sweeps

[bruce_the_loon]

And if you're trying to run a net sweep across your LAN to find all available machines? It isn't the single machine that I mind typing in. That's where dns comes in. It's the command line for NMAP. These are tools I use regularly, and entrying a 3232:2323 etc every ****ing type would **ss me off.

And what about default gateways, especially on a network you don't own. And netmasks. Its difficult enough to spot a fault in a quad netmask that's in hex or binary (and there are systems out there that insist on those, I have three on my LAN, all old instruments in physics). Try that in the enforced hex of V6. Why can't we have damned decimals in those addresses?

That's nominal GDP

[ichigo 2.0]

Seeing as the Chinese currency is severely undervalued, using nominal GDP numbers is a bit misleading. If the Renminbi was allowed to completely float, the rise in the exchange rate would cause the nominal GDP to rise accordingly, even though the economy stays the same. In PPP adjusted terms the numbers are 12.3$ trillion vs 9.4$ trillion so assuming current rates of growth, the Chinese economy will have more purchasing power than the US in the next decade.

Re:That's nominal GDP

[MyNameIsFred]

To quote wikipedia ..."The differences between PPP and market exchange rates can be significant. For example, the World Bank's World Development Indicators 2005 estimates that one United States dollar is equivalent to approximately 1.8 Chinese yuan by purchasing power parity in 2003. [1]. However, based on nominal exchange rates, one U.S. dollar is currently equal to 7.9 yuan. This discrepancy has large implications; for instance, GDP per capita in the People's Republic of China is about US$1,800, while on a PPP basis it is about US$7,204. This is frequently misused to assert that China is the world's second largest economy, but such a calculation would be invalid under the PPP theory..."

Re:That's nominal GDP

[ichigo 2.0]

Did you read the article you quoted? I also have to wonder if you agree or disagree with me, as your post was quite ambiguous and the quote didn't really say anything new... And to top it off, I'll respond with my own quote from the article you linked to:

"Using market exchange rates to compare countries' standard of living or per capita Gross Domestic Product can give a very misleading picture. The exchange rate only reflects traded goods in contrast to non-traded ones. Also, currencies are traded for purposes other than trade in goods and services, e.g., to buy capital assets whose prices vary more than those of physical goods. Also, different interest rates, speculation, hedging or interventions by central banks can influence the foreign-exchange market.

The PPP method is used as an alternative.

For example, if the value of the Mexican peso falls by half compared to the U.S. dollar, the Mexican Gross Domestic Product measured in dollars will also halve. However, this exchange rate results from international trade and financial markets. It does not necessarily mean that Mexicans are any poorer; if incomes and prices measured in pesos stay the same, they will be no worse off assuming that imported goods are not essential to the quality of life of individuals. Measuring income in different countries using PPP exchange rates helps to avoid this problem.

PPP exchange rates are especially useful when official exchange rates are artificially manipulated by governments. Countries with strong government control of the economy sometimes enforce official exchange rates that make their own currency artificially strong. By contrast, the currency's black market exchange rate is artificially weak. In such cases a PPP exchange rate is likely the most realistic basis for economic comparison."

Case in point, China.

IPv6 is here, get ready for it

[oddityfds]

> Since no-one is choosing to run IPv6 on the ground

I call bullshit. I see lots of v6 everywhere. There is IPv6 native in the backbones in Europe, there are ISP:s with v6, there are large organizations with v6, and important servers. From many places I've seen, a traceroute to the SourceForge download mirror in Ireland shows exactly the same path regardless of if you use IPv6 or IPv4. That is, it's native all the way, no tunnels.

IPv6 is here. The only piece missing is home ISP:s (unless you count 6to4, in which case it already works) and getting it enabled by default in Windows (where Vista is almost but not quite there yet).

And why resist? IPv6 is a good solution to many problems. Are you afraid your leet NAT workaround skills will become obsolete?

I've been using IPv6 for several years

[keithmoore]

native at home and at work, 6to4 to tunnel between them. it was a great way to get around the exorbitant fees my ISP wanted to charge me to get more than a single static IPv4 address at home.

OSes (windows, mac, linux, *bsd, and most *ixen) have been shipping with IPv6 support for years.

most "real" (not SOHO) routers have IPv6 support, though upgrades may be needed to switch IPv6 in hardware.

apps are less of an issue than it might seem. the point of IPv6 is to enable new apps and new networks - to extend the capability of the net beyond what you can reasonably do with IPv4 and NAT. the well-established apps, and those that can work well with NATs, will be the last to move. so it doesn't make sense to watch web and email (for instance) for signs of early IPv6 adoption.

biggest pacing item these days for IPv6 adoption seems to be things like high-speed firewalls and intrusion detection systems.

IPv6 may not work out of the box for space comm

[decaym]

A lot of people are talking about how widely IPv6 is deployed here on Earth. As the article is about IPv6 in space, maybe it would be better to talk about the implications of going with any IP protocol in space?

For Earth orbit, either IP protocol (IPv4 or IPv6) is likely OK. But what happens if we really want to deploy an interplanetary internet? Say you have a station on the moon trying to relay off a satellite in Earth orbit. What does your round trip latency look like? Try three seconds round trip. How happy will TCP connections be with a three second (3000ms) ping time?

Now, lets go further. Have a satellite in Mars orbit communicate with a satellite in Earth orbit. You can easily have a one way trip of 20 minutes, or a 40 minute ping time. Show me a connection oriented protocol which can handle this.

Either IP will have to have a major overhaul or something else may be needed to move traffic around the solar system. Connection oriented just won't work for such long communication lag. You either have to accept only a few packets per hour, or you will have to have a very large sliding window to get all of the data through and reassembled.

hey the eighties called!

[freaker_TuC]

The eighties called, they want their superman ... in space ... back

Crisco ?

[freaker_TuC]

When I see Crisco I think "applepies" ...

although there are more things added to it to boldly go where no man has gone before...

Maybe I should just not use your Cisco anymore to be safe afterall to bake my apple pies ;)

like duh ?

[freaker_TuC]

Who's going to wartravel anyways ?

Not like one is going to sit in front of this satelite to hack the guts out of it; latency is a bitch to deal with anyways ;)

Hey, why is there a thin fine red line coming out of the sky? This all feels h*@#~!#(@#)(!$)%&[no carrier]

whippersnapper

[thegameiam]

sigh. I'm quite familiar with the capabilities of much of the Cisco product set. Remotely upgrading code is a PITA (and not entirely risk-free), and tftp across a link with packet-loss is even worse. Better is straightforward FTP, due to TCP's retransmission properties.

In general, most space science software is nowhere near cutting edge, because the engineers (rightly) want code which is known to work always. Cisco is still in the "adding significant features" mode with its IPv6 implementations (various chunks of DHCPv6 were being added in 12.3(14)T, for instance, and aren't available for any of the high-end ISR line [28xx, 38xx] at all). The proof is here. I'll leave the implications of the freshness of the code for you to figure out.

good point.

[thegameiam]

That's a fair point, about ugrading the Mars Rovers. This is a tad different, however, because the device in question is a commercial product rather than homerolled-code, and there isn't currently an IPv6 protocol stack which is anywhere near as well understood and tested as most of the IPv4 stacks out there.