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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?"
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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 ;)
Why is no one running IPv6 on the ground? Well, I'll tell you why I don't run 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
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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.
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).
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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