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Proposed IPv6 Cutover By 2011-01-01
IO ERROR writes "An internet-draft published this month calls for an IPv6 transition plan which would require all Internet-facing servers to have IPv6 connectivity on or before January 1, 2011. 'Engineer and author John Curran proposes that migration to IPv6 happen in three stages. The first stage, which would happen between now and the end of 2008, would be a preparatory stage in which organizations would start to run IPv6 servers, though these servers would not be considered by outside parties as production servers. The second stage, which would take place in 2009 and 2010, would require organizations to offer IPv6 for Internet-facing servers, which could be used as production servers by outside parties. Finally, in the third stage, starting in 2011, IPv6 must be in use by public-facing servers.' Then IPv4 can go away."
While IPv6 fixes many problems in IPv4, the developed world will not
embrace IPv6 until many shortcomings in the protocol are addressed.
1. Cisco routers suck at IPv6. Many of cisco's routers use the
router's CPU to process IPv6 packets instead of the fast-path. The
reasons for this are explained in the next few points. While Juniper's
routers are substantially better at IPv6 than cisco's, IT managers are
often restrained by insane corporate policy that dictactes the use of
cisco.
2. There are too many addresses. There are 16.7 million addresses per
square metre of the earth's surface, including the oceans. This is
overkill. The world does not need more than the 4 billion addresses
available with IPv4, and I challenge you to come up with an
application that requires that many. Assuming that you can actually
come up with one, it could easily be solved with Network Address
Translation, or NAT as it is commonly known.
3. IPv6 addresses are too large. An IPv6 address is 128 bits in size -
64 bits of which are reserved for addressing hosts, and 64 bits of
which are reserved for routing. One thing that is cool with IPv6 is
address autoconfiguration. Take your 56-bit MAC address on your
ethernet card, ask for 64-bits of network prefix, bang it together
with EUI-64 and you are set. The problem with a 64-bit network prefix
is that routing tables become massive. Just do the math and you'll see
that extreme amounts of memory are required to hold routing tables.
4. The IPv6 header is too large. An IPv4 header compact at 20 bytes in
length, while the IPv6 is bloated at 40 bytes. That's right niggers,
each one of your IP packets has twice as much overhead as before.
While this may not sound much, IP networks have a requirement that the
minimum MTU supported must be 576 bytes. That means that where you
might have got 556 bytes of data in your IP packets, you now get 536
bytes. This means that downloading stuff will take 3.4% longer.
Sure, IPv6 allows for nice hacks like those described in this article,
but is it really ready for prime time?
AFAIK most ISPs in Switzerland don't offer IPv6. So organizations would need to use 6to4 or tunnel using a tunnelbroker. While possible it just doesn't issue any pressure to ISPs. So we are replacing NAT with 6to4... Not exactly sure that's the point of having IPv6.
who is this guy and why does he control what happens with my internets?
Remind me again what authority the IETF actually has?
Oh yeah, none. They create specs, then people half-implement them, and nothing changes.
Just like the change to digital TV. It might be a better broadcast system, but without the government forcing people to change, it wouldn't have happened otherwise. IPv6 just doesn't offer anything sufficiently valuable over IPv4, so people won't bother to change.
And when can I get IPv6 addresses for myself?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Huh? What is a public facing web server? I mean my "server" on my DSL machine that runs apache and some other nifty stuff is public facing. All machines that have an IP address are public facing for crying out loud! Sure, mine only has a domain name associated to it by dyndns but for Joe Sixpack that doesn't make a difference. For all intents and purposes I have a "public facing webserver".
There is no difference between my IP address and the IP address of Amazon, except that their reverse DNS lookup matches ;-)
This is a great plan for switching over to IPv6. It's full of things that everyone MUST do. It's just missing one thing: if everyone ignores the plan and does nothing instead, how is it going to be enforced?
Aight, I put on my robe and wizard hat.
(I had to make an exception to the rule in my sig for that one!)
-Peter
You would think scheduling a big upgrade for the middle of the holiday season would be asking for trouble.
What's wrong with saying "the second weekend in February" or some similarly random date? It's a weekend so it won't interfere with business, but unlike new years day it won't mess with employees' personal lives too much.
There's a reason businesses and governments don't start their financial/tax years on the first of January, after all.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
How many universities and businesses have legacy servers online that won't convert to 6 due to OS not supporting it? I know you can tunnel, and there's always routers, but the cost could add up. How do you put a price on these machines being completely phased out... course it would be nice to have more IP's.... dilema.
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
One of the things holding back the deployment of IPv6 is the fact that IPv6 PI still isn't sorted. There has been some movement of late, but it's still not sorted. (PI = provider indepentent address space, PA = provider allocated)
Without PI, you can't do multihoming, unless you're a Ripe member (so you're multihoming on PA space). Lots of companies will only use IPv4 PI address blocks (so they're not tied to one provider), so won't try IPv6 until they can get a PI block. At work, we'd love to do IPv6 in production, but because we can't get an IPv6 PI block, we can't.
Until all the ripe regions roll out IPv6 PI, lots of companies that want to do production IPv6 just won't. It needs fixing
This post will enter the public domain 70 years after my death, unless Disney buys another extension.
Sorry, but 4 years to get every internet connected system running IPv6?! Sure it sounds great, but for a lot of folks this is going to require entirely new hardware as well as software. The budget will keep getting cut until the last minute and then they'll try to cut it all over at once. I hate to think of all the hardware that will get scrapped because the manufacturer doesn't support IPv6 without a hardware upgrade.
Then there are the folks that will find out a week before the cutover date for some reason. And the folks that no one tells at all.
There is still an ungodly amount of custom software out there that won't support IPv6 at all. Business critical applications with little or no vendor support.
I don't think we're going to be able to do a clean cutover to IPv6 until most hardware/software vendors start shipping systems that require both IPv4 and IPv6 configuration to complete installation. I figure about 10 years if they start shipping today. And then we'll still have to deal with that 20 year old software that is required to provision telephone numbers but only runs on 486 hardware.
A couple of 30-somethings embark on the ultimate roadtrip
I don't mean to suggest that all technical progress must stop because people still use old hardware or software. But this doesn't seem well thought out and seems an overly agressive time table. Look how much time was alloted to the transistion to HDTV from NTSC in the U.S., and that was only one country, not a global system. Since there is plenty of new hardware that people will still be buying this year that does not support ipv6, this seems like a schedule that will only cause problems and make Bill Gates happier and richer.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Yes - it's a real thing, so the timetable is pretty good.
a rea-7.ppt
http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/07jul/slides/int
(For some reason openoffice churns through that for like an eternity and they haven't yet converted it to a PDF). Anyway, the analysis is pretty good.
IPv4 works for me today and will work for me in the future. Sure there is new stuff in IPv6, but I have ZERO motivation to move to it. Why would I spend money and time to make something better for others, with little to no value returned. Going to a new technology for sake of the new technology is retarded. The fact that IPv6 has not been adopted shows that IPv4 is sufficient for most people's needs. When I can ONLY connect to the Internet with IPv6 or ONLY buy IPv6 equipment, then I'll have reason to upgrade. Until then, Cisco and crew, stop trying to spend my money.
This has been a hot topic on a number of lists. Some observations:
1. Neither John Curran nor the IETF has the the authority to bring this about, thus the use of the word "must" is misleading. Even if the regional internet registries supported this with policy that placed additional IPv4 addresses out of reach of those who did not deploy IPv6, far less than half of the content providers would be impacted within the proposed timeframe. Indeed, relatively few content providers come back for more addresses. Its mostly the transit providers which connect the end users who have a growing need for IP addresses.
2. The natural course of IPv4 depletion is more likely to drive conservation of IPv4 addresses than it is to drive IPv6 adoption. Business will tend towards this path because the incremental cost of conservation is small and the benefits are immediate while the cost of IPv6 deployment is large and the benefits are remote. Conservation might sound like a good thing but its actually very dangerous. It implies injecting many additional routes into the "default-free zone," which for complex technical reasons would decrease the overall stability of the Internet.
3. Existing policy at the regional registries serves to obstruct the deployment of IPv6. For example, in the Americas at ARIN, there is an additional $500 fee to receive IPv6 addresses in addition to whatever fees you pay for IPv4 addresses. That's a nuissance. More critical is the wide swath of legacy multihomed content providers who because they are too small don't qualify for IPv6 addresses from ARIN. Those folks can't get the so-called "provider-independent" addresses they need to connect via IPv6 in a technically comperable way to how they connect with IPv4.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I love how the guy uses the word 'must' and 'Internet' in the same sentence!
Score:-1, Funny
My home network is already running IPv6 alongside v4. It's not that incredibly hard to set up.. only problem will be the hundreds of thousands of end-users who have non-v6 compatible routers.
Every time you ________ in Soviet Russia, kitten kills God!
unless someone takes over the Internet at large like China or Iran control their networks/ societies
only a powerful autocratic authority can mandate such a switch
in the free market economy at large in the world, the benefits do not outweight the costs. and even if someone argued that the benefits do outweigh the costs, there is no incentive for someone to be first out of the gate. in fact, there is a penalty for that (more cost, less traffic). so it will never happen
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Does the IETF even realize the scope of this project? Ignore everything else and just look at every ISP in the world....all of them....the big ones and the mom-and-pop shops.
Now every single one of them must have routing gear (and all the associated monitoring equipment) capable of IPv6, and the ability to manage the massive address space. I know ISPs right now that can barely handle their IPv4 infrastructure that has been in place for a decade. Now you are asking them, in the space of a few years to throw out their existing infrastructure and move completely to IPv6? That's rich.....
If the ISPs don't convert (or can't quickly convert) then no one else will.
-ted
Hi. Have you heard of this thing called 'Linux'? It's an operating system that fully supports ipv6 and will run on any computer that can run Windows 98. Not to even mention the multitude of other systems out there like BSD and Solaris. You can use Google to discover more about these systems.
Also, don't fall into the all too common trap of looking at how large 2 to 128 is and thinking that ipv6 really provides that many unique addresses. You have to look at how the bits are used, the number of useable Internet addressable devices is much smaller. Perhaps even around the size you may be thinking we need. A new addressing system can provide some nice new features. Imagine the benifit of having a portable IP addres that is yours no matter what network you connect to or where in the world you move. Kind of like having a real truly portable telephone number. As all communication merges into IP address this will be both handy and important.
None of this should be taken to imply that I support the absurd cut over schedule in this thread. But there are some nice things designed in ipv6 and it will be a positive thing if the convesrion is done right, not switched over in a mad rush.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
And as I ask on every IPv6 story, is it possible to access Slashdot using IPv6 datagrams?
NOTE TO STUPID FANBOIS: The fact that IPv4 *addresses* are also valid in IPv6 has no bearing on this. An IPv6 TCP datagram is different from an IPv4 datagram, even if they both are sent from IPv4 representable addresses.
If a tech oriented site like Slashdot cannot be bothered to support IPv6 datagrams, then how can we expect anybody else to care?
www.eFax.com are spammers
It's got (almost) nothing to do with network-facing servers. There's no point running IPv6 if noone's going to route IPv6 packets to you. I've seen no indication of IPv6 activity or routability or interest from my local ISPs.
-- Andrew
What will happen to embedded devices like routers, set top boxes, IP phones, etc. Does this mean we have to buy new ones?? WTF I say!
LOL!!1!eleventy!!
IPv4 works, leave it. The numbers can be kept in your head. Subnet math is easy. It's already ubiquitous.
I work for $LARGE_US_BANK, and our entire infrastructure is v4, and not once have I ever heard, EVER, of talk to move to v6.
If you're a backbone provider and are in routing table hell, deal with it another way. Tunnel, buy bigger routers, do something.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Forgive my ignorance on this subject, however, is it not possible for IPv4 and v6 equipment to co-exist? Why should the entire world need to cut-over on one day? Is it better to mandate that IPv4 addresses will no longer be issued after some date, rather than forcing every person who has an "internet facing" server to switch. It feels unrealistic and unecessary.
I name myself as an example. I consider myself relatively knowledgable about IPv4 in general. Subnetting, supernetting how-nat-works the cisco-vs-the-world layout of a datagram and all the required things to know when you work as a network enginner.
But please humor my candor here for a moment, I have no clue how IPv6 works. At all. I know what an IPv6 address looks like, and that's about it. I also have a vague superficial concept of what is a 6to4 gateway.
But I have no idea how it is scoped, how it is routed, how it is laid out, or basically anything.
The short answer is "buy a book", of course. Which I will do. Even take a class if necessary. Training is good, right? But has anyone thought of the implications in the enterprise? I have a few clients right now where I don't see their network admins understanding that change immediately. I know, bad admins, change them, or train them... But still.
It vaguely worries me in a strange way. Like you know, as a child, seeing a small frog cross the road and being actually fascinated by what might happen, yet still uncomfortable at that idea.
I'm just rambling. I guess my point that this is a massive technology change, and I'm just vaguely afraid of either not being able to keep up, or seeing people around not keeping up at all.
So, right now seems like a good time to start reading up on it.
When everyone gets their own IP addys and don't have to use stupid NATS, then people can log directly onto the other computers during the login sequence instead of using servers as a go between. For games this will result in something unheard of: a 2x speed up in ping times. Instead of client1->server->client2, you'll have client1->client2.
Now the downside of not using a server will be that games are more succeptable to hacks, but good programmers can make anti-hacks. Another bad thing about clients with static IPS is that viruses will be able to spread easier, but I forgot the exact reason why.
God spoke to me.
The biggest problem with IPv4 is that the way addresses were distributed totally screwed over Asian countries. There are single Universities in the US that have more assigned IP addresses than pretty much the entire Asian continent! There are places in China that now sit behind six layers of NAT.
Asia will lead, and anyone who wants to communicate with them will be forced to follow.
But if the OS is only a means to and end, and what you care about is running useful applications rather than just an OS, then you may want to run an OS that suports the applications that you run. I've seen wine, I've tried it, it is not a viable solution for most windows applications.
I've been using Linux on one of my systems for years. I still get frustrated by the learning curve. But I still run Windows on several other systems (including a Win98 system that I'm posting through now), because they run the software that I need to run to do the things that I want to do and to be compatable with the rest of the people that I interact with. A forced quick switch to ipv6 will not be a boon for Linux. People may try it, but will quickly realize that they have to switch away from it if they actually want to get anything done. And then they will be far less likely to ever come back. The best thing for Linux would be a slow transistion to ipv6 that allows it more time to mature and grow a user base, not a rushed cut over that will sour users to it if they try it at all.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Hmm...
Is there some crucial service under government control (like DNS root servers or something) that could be switched to IPv6-only in such a way that other systems would have to be configured to cope with both IPv4 and IPv6, thus making a later total switch to IPv6 less painful?
Aren't they starting on the wrong side? As previously discussed here, changing all public facing servers requires significant upgrades of very costly enterprise hardware. Making big complex companies change in a scant 5-6 years... right. All the legacy crap laying around, all the $100K Cisco/Foundry/Juniper routers that will need hardware upgrades.
Are not most active IPv4 addresses consumed by clients? I say start with the consumer, they'll absorb cost and are likely to buy plenty of gadgets by 2011 anyway. I'm sure linksys can build a home router that's IPv6/IPv4 compatible. Trickle the upgrade to the CMTS / DSLAM up the road and progress from there.
I think a better mandate would be all internet clients should be doing IPv6 by 2010. Consumers and the people can cause technical change more than giant companies and their finance departments.
Maybe this is totally infeasible, but slashdot is here to point out if mine is a bad idea.
Unless your DSL router happens to be the latest Apple Airport Extreme, chances are your DSL router is a huge bottle neck in your IPv6 experience. Most 4to6 tunneling solutions only work if you don't have any NAT going on. Microsoft came up with Teredo as one solution to dealing with IPv6 tunneling in the presence of a NAT. Naturally Microsoft only offers an implementation for their MS-Windows platform. If you want it for any other platform then there is the open source implementation known as Miredo. I would rather have more routers supporting IPv6, but in the meantime this does the job.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
That is the week of Presidents' day.
I keep reading a bunch of comments about the larger packet sizes, address size pool and their implications. However we rarely hear of the potential benefits of using IPV6 - are there any?
In my limited experience with it as an end user I find the addressing methodolgy to be extremely unfriendly. Perhaps I'll get accustomed to it in time.
Also, I'll ask the question: why are DNS and addressing not very closely tied? If you have a DNS outage - you mine as well unplug your datacenter. Seems to me that if we had to fix something and cause some disruption we mine as well take a stab at what is really broken.
I think IPV6 needs an advocte, anyone?
I always understood IPv6 routing is less expensive than v4 routing since the tables are much much smaller. Besides every modern router has IPv6 built-in these days. It's not a technical matter, it's a matter of short-term cost savings.
My ISP only allows me one dynamic address... I use a NAT router (with their blessing) and have several machines at honme. With IPV6, is there still NAT routing? Or do you think my ISP will say "IPv6 = you get as many hosts as you want"
Oh, and NAT firewalling? what about NAT firewalling?
coëxist? Is that similar to anæsthetic, insofar as it's the correct British and/or obsolete spelling of the word?
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
No, let's forget to mention it because it isn't true. A cheap off-the-shelf DSL/cable modem or router will let the Win98 machine live in peace with its IPV4 brains and do the translation to IPV6 completely transparently, with no more issues than they do straight IPV4 network address translation now.
Besides, I wouldn't knock Win98 so readily. With a router which provides a hardware firewall and a little care, a Win98 system has the advantage of running many legacy applications (as well as modern ones that don't use newer interfaces) while not phoning home to Microsoft, not giving you any trouble about how your machine is configured, not pestering you every minute about how your machine "Might Not Be Safe!", and slowing down by quite a bit because newer Windows OS's are incredibly badly designed.
Besides, with any luck, people who are dragging their feet this hard will go to linux or OSX in order to maintain that funny feeling of being able to add memory or peripherals without their computer refusing to work again until some guy - or server - at Microsoft says it can. OSX's ability to run that old Win98 in a sandbox (via Parallels) could seem mighty interesting to a die-hard Win98 user...
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
So they're going to do it on 23?
It is clear that IPv6 made several basic design decisions that, essentially, made IPv6 impossible to deploy. Prof. Bernstein pointed this out many years ago in http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html and there seems to have been no changes to make IPv6 deployable. As other people have pointed out, IEFT saying MUST means nothing - if they had the power, you would be reading slashdot over a IPv6 link already.
Basically, the problem is interoperability between IPv4 and IPv6. IPv6 is completely separate and not compatible with IPv4. This means there is no incentive for any server to go v6-only since there are all clients are v4; the most you can hope for is some servers going dual stack. There is no incentive for clients to go v6 since there will be servers that stay v4 and all severs will be at worst dual-stack, so there is no incentive for clients to go even dual-stack. When you figure in the cost of going dual-stack and the troubles that all ISP's will go through; there is huge incentive to stay v4. So it is surprising that the world has stayed IPv4?
of the year before.
just cuz.
( ) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to introducing IPv6. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) We'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of the internet will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many internet users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
(x) The general public doesn't care about IPv6
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for the internet
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of new protocols
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing hardware investment in IPv4
( ) Susceptibility of protocols like IPv4 to attack
(x) Willingness of users to install OS patches
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of internet users
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are affected by ISPs having to switch to a new protocol
( ) Windows
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(x) IP protocol should not be the subject of legislation
(x) Cutoff dates suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
(x) Managing dual v4 and v6 addresses is inconvenient
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Looks like these truths are not so self-evident after all...
Here's an alternative approach:
1) by 12/30/2007, the IETF recognizes that IPv6 was a colossal bollix, and apologizes
2) by 01/30/2008 the IETF rescinds IPv6 and stops whipping a dead horse
3) by 06/30/2008 the IETF offers a draft RFC for IPv7 - which is backwards compatible with IPv4 headers to ease the transition burden, and has a mechanism for isochronous packet delivery to improve video and voice transport
In the resources-on-your-equipment sense, the size of the tables matter and yes, you are correct. In the money-has-to-be-paid-for-equipment sense, the size of the tables in software is irrelevant. Many ISPs don't have "modern routers", particularly smaller ones, as your national/international providers have the scale and money to have regular and scheduled hardware upgrades. Cisco gets a lot of shit, but a large amount of their equipment just lasts and lasts. And if you're an ISP trying to cut corners, weeeeelllll...you might not have upgraded to the latest hardware.
Consider also that this is not just routers, but anything with a public IP, such as firewalls and a lot of enterprise-level firewalls just do not have IPv6 capabilities yet. Not like, hey, the handling is Teh Suxx0rs, but it's Just Not There. Juniper's security products don't do it; hell until a recent-ish version of the FW+VPN OS was released, an IPv6 packet could reboot a VPN connection. Nor do Fortigate or CheckPoint handle IPv6. Cisco's SSL VPN does shit to the packets and to make a long story short, is just not ready to deal with IPv6. AFAIK, ISC's DHCPv6 is still kind of rough (although admittedly I don't follow it very closely on the list, it gets mentioned now and again and the impression I get is that they're working very hard on it. Which means it isn't ready yet.) This matters a great deal to ISPs who would be the ones handing out IPv6 to your average user; an unbelieveable amount of them use ISC's DHCP software.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
but what a great time to clean out all those non ipv6 zombie machines currently facing the internet.
Can we have a UTF-8 cutover day, too?
would require organizations to offer IPv6 for Internet-facing servers
What motivation would an organization have to make this change? Why should they be forced?
This whole transition idea seems naive. Organizations will shift to IPv6 when it's economically beneficial.
Why do these articles only end up being commented about IPv6 improved address space?
IPv6 offers lots of tasty features because they took the opportunity to fix a lot of quirks in the IPv4 protocol while they were at it, and that offers real world advantages.
Things like host autoconfiguration and ad hoc networking, end-to-end IPSec support in the standard, larger datagram support for efficiency in fast networks.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
NAt is evil? And your proof is that by bypassing NAT your PC gets pwned in a matter of minutes?? If guess it's evil if your the one trying to hack into others' systems and getting blocked by those NAT routers. I got a NAT router the day that I first got a high speed connection. The only application that I've ever had a problem with that I couldn't get around by forwarding a port or some other similar tweek was with Netmeeting. The fix was simple, don't use Netmeeting, use one of the many other beter tools designed for the same purpose. I wouldn't run a computer without being behind a NAT router; carry one in my notebook travel bag.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Managers are going to look at this and say, "why can't we just IPv6 for new stuff". So, I'd say this proposal is dead on arrival.
This is my sig.
IPv6 is being forced upon companies who sell software to the government. If you want to sell your software to a government agency you need to have a plan for switching to IPv6. That's a government requirement. I think the due date for the plan is 2008. The actual switch over is another date but you need to show that you have a plan or they'll stop buying from you.
Also, to anyone who thinks there are plenty of unused IPv4 addresses you are wrong. In the beginning many companies grabbed huge ranges of IPs that they would never need. It wasn't a problem at the time because they never conceived that they would run out but now that we're running low on addresses you can bet those companies are holding on to those assets because they're worth cash.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
Who picks these dates?? You know if it becomes the accepted cut over date that lots of engineers are not getting a christmas or new year break that year. Why not do it on the 10/10/'10. Easier to remember and doesn't mess with anyones holidays.
For the uninformed
I wanted to experiment with IPv6 on my server and asked my hosting service to provide me with a V6 address. They didn't support it. I looked elsewhere (since I was going to get another server anyway), but no provider could match all of my requirements (IPv6 support, Linux OS, affordable).
In the end, I just went with an IPv6 broker and managed to get my IPv6 site (http://showmyip6.com/) running through a tunnel.
You would expect servers and hosting services to be the first to get into IPv6, but if they haven't done it yet, don't expect to see widescale adoption elsewhere.
...all the addresses might have to be changed because the map gets reset... When you refer to 'map', do you mean routing table? I really know nothing about IPv6, and something about this statement unsettles me if a unique map is not distributed, but rather on a single host... isn't this the very reason DNS is distributed? Or is it not a routing table, to which you're referring to as a 'map', and I'm all out of context?If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
That's not the key. That's the _problem_ with IPv6.
The problems with IPv6:
a) It's a bad design just for the reason it's not backward compatible with IPv4. BEFORE anyone mentions mapping and all that, please show me how an IPv6 _only_ machine is going to talk to an IPv4 _only_ machine AND vice versa. REMEMBER: any "solution" that requires IPv4 addresses on both machines is NOT a solution. After all if we are really running out then you MUST assume one side no longer has access to IPv4 addresses.
In the solution please include how DNS resolution, SSL, VPNs and all other popular things are to work (or not work - explicitly state the popular services/features that will not be supported).
If any solution to a) involves convincing everybody running a useful IPv4 service to somehow get an IPv6 address and DNS entry, I'm going to laugh at it.
b) The popularly proposed transition methods involve convincing lots of people to do stuff that they don't even know they need to do, nor is it certain that they would be able to do it - it may be beyond their control or ability.
For example they need to at least:
1) Get an IPv6 IP address that actually works from their ISP.
2) Get their DNS sorted out so that the IPv6 address is advertised.
3) Configure their machines accordingly
4) Figure out how to deal with a)
IPv6 is about as compatible with IPv4 as OSI. I'm sticking to the Internet which Google etc are on. The rest of you can go switch to "AOL/Compuserve 2011" for all I care.
Would someone please bury this AC's comments with negative mod points. The AC is truly and idiot. He's full of shit on no less than all four of his points. I think that may be a new record.
Just like King Canute once commanding the tide not to come in, so the IETF is now commanding IPv6 to become widely adopted. If they're going to apply measures like this I think they should go for something more useful, maybe commanding cancer or heart disease to go away, since that would help a lot more people.
It should be called the "Network Engineer Full Employment Plan". Anybody remotely competent in network engineering will be able to get a job in the next few years if this thing takes off.
IP256 better anonymously than flawed IPv6.
IP256: "The Internet Protocol 256 bit".
The datagram formats are different between IPV4 and V6, but the parts of them that people actually use are readily translatable. So you can setup border translators between IPV4 islands and and IPV6 network or vice-versa.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
Why does every technical standards organization plan intensive, complicated and pervasive changes for midnight January 1st, when:
1. There will be no technical support available from vendors until they return from holiday, perhaps days later?
2. No one will be available to test, evaluate and identify distributed service outages, again for days.
3. The poor, maligned and disrespected IT staffs will have to miss the New Year's Eve parties, probably their best/only chance to hit up their drunken office colleagues and have a chance of success. Please, won't anyone think of the geek?
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD
When you say "the way addresses were distributed", you are ignoring the fact that there are millions of unused, un-distribued addresses free for the taking.
Internet Protocol v4 Address Space.
See all those blocks marked "IANA - Reserved"? Those are unused addresses. Any ISP in China can ask APNIC for more addresses, and APNIC will give them addresses. There is no shortage.
This reminds me of my plan for eliminating that annoying delay after the traffic light has turned green, but the cars in front of you haven't moved yet so you can't go. We install low power radio transmitters at each intersection. When the light is about to turn green a voice comes over the radio in your car. "Three... two... one... GO!" That way everyone steps on the gas at the same time and voila, no more waiting.
Aaargh! I see this all over the Web these days -- and even in newspaper stories!
People, the past tense and past participle of the verb "to lead" is spelled "led". Yes, it's pronounced like the name of the metal. No, it's not spelled the same way. No, it's not consistent with the parts of the verb "to read". Welcome to English: a writhing mass of special cases.
So: today I lead, yesterday I led, I have led many times.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
Would that be January 1, 2011, or 1 January 2011?
Here are some of the helpful words which can be made from hexidecimal quads: :aced: :bade: :beef: :cede: :dead: :face: :fade:
:dada: (for the art fans, or perhaps new parents) and :acdc: (for rock & roll fans)
and of course
I use a lot of those in lab settings...
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
same song (same verse even) ... read the full thread over on NANOG; especially interesting is Randy Bush's followup, featuring some slides (specifically, slide 20) he presented recently that basically say "yeah, there's a problem; no, the sky is not falling; none of the forced-cutover plans thus far presented have fully taken into account operational and business issues. Careful thought and deliberate action (rather than panic and haste) are needed here to avoid creating problems we'll be living with for the next 30 years." (Apologies if Randy thinks I'm paraphrasing him incorrectly; I doubt he spends much time reading /. though. :))
illum oportet crescere me autem minui
I guess then Herb will have to take wiskit.com offline, since A/UX is unlikely to ever get IPv6 support!
Constitutionally Correct
I can see the value in deploying IPv6, but I think it has to be done from the bottom, not from the top. A lot of posters have mentioned using it on intranets, and I'd like to hear more about that.
I'd love to see IPv6 depolyed on a low-bandwidth municipal wireless mesh. Any device within range that could speak IPv6 could become a peer on the network. This would enable all kinds of really cool applications, like city-wide sensor projects and multicast audio feeds.
Gateway to the IPv4 Internet could be provided using NAT by any device that was willing to act as a bridge.
There's no need to convert teh entire Interweb. IPv6 makes much more sense (ironically) in a controlled deployment where legacy hardware (and legacy thinking) isn't really a factor.
Uh, you're wrong?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
This is something that every needs to see. This should go a long way towards fighting the 'anti-IPv6 because the addresses are hard to remember' crowd of cry babies. Yes, Virgina we are running out of IPv4 allocatable addresses.
If HTTP(s) and SMTP client-side implementations can be written look up SVR RR's with their DNS query, we won't need IPv6 for a factor of just under 65535 times longer. The restricting factor on IPV4 is that it is not feasable to run many services on something other than the port in /etc/services. If there is a way to publish the port the service is running on, then tunnelling can be done wildly, and firewalls can become useless. (Except that firewalls are already largely useless.)
The internet will only be "slowed down" by 3.4% if everyone uses the minimum packet size. This is unlikely, and a network won't exactly be slowed down by this amount unless it is 100% saturated 100% of the time.
Everyone needs their own IP address. You must be one of those people who think the internet is just a gateway to the web and email. The truth is the internet can be used for much more. How about two way communications instead of just "surfing the WebTV(TM) innernet tubes." It only works if everyone has their own IP address, preferably static so they don't have to play with things like dyndns. The current state of floating IPs and NAT and no servers allowed by ISPs sucks goat guy balls. When will we have the true promise of the internet?
I use Comcast's (formerly Time Warner RoadRunner) cable infrastructure
but am an Earthlink client.
How exactly is Earthlink supposed to configure Comcast's routers
to natively carry my IPV6 traffic? The answer is they can't because admin access
is not shared and Comcast won't agree to it, at least according to Earthlink.
So they offer tunneling if you want to load their WRT54G image on a suitable device.
Or you can read their PDF describing their setup and figure out how to do it yourself
with any reasonable Linux or UNIX distribution.
Nothing against Earthlink or Comcast but the average consumer is not going to
understand my last paragraph, much less decide to load up IPV6. When you see
the average firewall device at Fry's selling with native or tunneled IPV6
config panels, there might be some hope. Until then, it'll just be the lone trailblazers
doing this out of intellectual curiosity.
I'm not sure what you're getting all wound up about. It seems valid to me. Asia will lead. What's wrong with that. Asia will lead [the way]. Does that make it better? If it were Asia will have lead (should be led) you'd have a point.
You know, I have been using IPv6 in some way for about 9 years now, starting back with the stack for NT from MS Research and FreeBSD with KAME. There was a lot, and there is still more, to learn, and what sucks for early adopters (and huge advocates) of IPv6 like me is having to swim upstream against the current of "we have plenty of IPv6 space", "we have NAT", "IPv6 sucks", etc. It sure does get old. If you naysayers would put half the effort you spend bitching on /. into urging your ISP or your IT organization (or both!) to become IPv6-aware, we could see some real progress.
/8 20 years ago, so let's cut this huge address space by less than half and use a /64 for the host. Ridiculous! If past lessons had been learned and remembered, we wouldn't see this kind of early waste, and IPv6 could well last a couple hundred years, or longer, addressing all parts of this solar system and perhaps beyond.
While I am a huge advocate of IPv6 adoption, I don't agree with the wasteful manner with which the networks are being allocated. It is as if the architects got flashed by the MIB and can't remember anything about the relatively easy acquisition of a IPv4
There is a lot going on in Asia/Pacific (AP) with IPv6, and emerging countries will be far better off since they are just building out infrastructure from scratch and can be dual-stack capable from the start (akin to cellular networks versus thousands of miles of copper). Here in the US, the price for being so technologically advanced early on and having spent (I loathe to refer to networking gear purchases as "investments") so much capital on gear to-date means that hard business cases need to be made to justify to the bean-counters that IPv6 is worth the effort. Couple that with the usual short-sighted executive management in most companies and you will be hard-pressed to get funding for IPv6 ventures. Fortunately, the word is getting out to even the executives that IPv6 is not just a rumor and projects are starting to gain momentum, but I fear that for most in the US it will be a never-ending game of catch-up.
Optimistically I forge on...
Mike O, KT2T
Google. Please, please, please if you're reading this - switch IPv6 on to your services. It might be the "content" that people say is needed before mass change.
/48 of IPv6. Tweak your code and database entries (if they don't simply handle an Inet field). Put in AAAA records. Hire me. I'll do it for you.
And Slashdot - for fucks sake - one of the most techie sites of the net, still suffering with the "meh, we're American, and we've got enough IPv4 addresses, so we're not bothered with IPv6" syndrome.
I just can't get over that mentality. Build an IPv6 kernel. Get a
Get your own free personal location tracker
Did you even look at the parent of the comment to which you replied? Its title is "IPv6 adoption will be lead by Asia." The point stands.
I'd really like to move to IPv6, but I can't do anything about it until I can go and pick up a consumer device in the under $50 range from DLink, Netgear, or Linksys that supports IPv6.
I believe that my Mac, Vista Laptop, and XP laptop can all support IPv6 without much pain, and it would actually improve home networking, by removing some of the DHCP complications.
Wim.
Yes. The passive construction uses the past participle. Consider: "I will do it" but "it will be done by me", not "it will be do by me".
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
like, about 10-15 years ago or so, forgot the venue but remember how he was saying that IPv6 was just around the corner. Apparently it is still around the corner and will stay this way, so IETF decided to give not-so-gentle kick-in-the-ass of Internet providers. Yet - working at some point for BBN Planet dealing with lots of management issues, I can clear see the first question in any provider's mind: what would be the cost of conversion? Who's going to pick up the tab? Even if it's mandated by IETF, at this point Internet - as a loosely couple collection of Tier-1 providers, each is more or less autonomous (yeah, AS, pun intended), it's either 'everyone gets converted', or 'noone gets converted', but it's no longer can be mandated. I'm thinking of management/monitoring tools, many are homegrown - think of the cost of re-writing them. THink of the cost of re-training the personal. it's overwhelming task. no wonder there is no rush to convert. there is *no pressing need* to convert.
A funny footnote: in direct conversation with Scott Bradner, aka SOB (the IETF chair at the time IPv6 was introduced), he said, roughly, the following: Well, we were trying to push TCP/IP as a standard, as hard as we could. Now some 'industry pundits' picked up on the issue of 32-bit addressing space of IPv4 as a limiting factor. So we had to quickly cook up something (which we called IPv6), just to keep their mouth shut, just to tell the world that "yes, we will have expandability in a future".
He sounded like he didn't give a damn whether IPv6 would ever be implemented. Scott, by the way, was heavily on a practical side of things, including manageability. I can understand his sentiment.
I wonder why there is such a push to move into IP6. I mean sure, IP4 will eventually run out, but thanks to NAT, I don't think this is as much of a problem as it was a decade ago.
I like the privacy IP4 allows, and I'm not in favor of changing over to the new scheme, even if IP4 does cause some headaches.
--Reverend Raven
Desperate days demand dire deeds.
I see this a BIG pain for all of us, system and network administrators. I noticed that no one else like computer and network manufactures and ISP are not saying anything about this. I did call our ISP about this issue when I was working on a network problem and they not ready this is either. So if all of these people, manufactures and ISPs, are not ready or not willing to get on the IPv6 bandwagon what does this guy and his organization could do to bring this about. For something this big, we need to have the manufactures, ISP and the entire internet support infrastructure to be on board to even start how we are going to implement this. Since IPv4 and IPv6 are incompatible how does anyone need to access internet while this transition is going on. I don't think this guy and this organization thought of it all of this when they wanted implement this and they are not the real people implementing this, we are.
I don't know anything about IPv7 which I only read some cursory information but I hope it allows all version to interoperate with each other so transition is much easier.
Maybe Al Gore can do us all a favor and REinvent the Internet.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
I propose we forget IPv6 was ever created and stick with IPv4.
The big problem is that many kinds of routers have two ways to route packets - either by using ASIC hardware to do easy jobs fast, or by using a general-purpose CPU to do more complex jobs, and if the ASIC doesn't support IPv6, you have to do it in the CPU, which is a limited resource on most routers from some popular vendors. That's a problem that time and design work can fix, but it'll be a while before IPv6-capable routers catch up with IPv4 equivalents in terms of features and performance. The extra address bits _are_ a problem if you're designing ASICs - the address is 4x as big, so you can fit roughly 1/4 as much performance on a given sized chip. Among other things, your forwarding tables are 4x as large.
A separate CPU problem is that the CPU needs to run routing protocols and occasionally need to recalculate the tables, which typically takes N**2 space and therefore a lot of RAM. For some reason, a gigabyte of RAM that costs $100 if you install it in a beige-colored box costs up to $5000 if you install it in a teal-colored box, at least if you're buying a service contract for the teal-colored box
The more serious problem is that IPv6 was supposed to do something about hierarchical routing structures that were supposed to reduce the table size growth, but it doesn't realistically support addressing for sites that get connectivity from two different ISPs for redundancy and reliability, which is becoming increasingly common for businesses. There are ugly hacks like Shim6 that are supposed to address this, but don't really cut it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Sure, the parent article was flamebait, but it made some useful points and attracted some useful flames.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I think the way to visualize the number of ipv6 addresses, is instead of looking at how many ipv6 ip addresses there are is to look at how many routers prefixes are going to be available. Since as with ipv4, allocation is not perfect.
c e] Should be enough.
/., "In Asia, IPv6 is already a reality. The high population and accelerated Internet growth rate, combined with the limited IPv4 address space, does not leave any other choices." Also U.S. DoD announced in 2003 that ipv6 is now a purchasing requirement and they expect migration by 2008. Where DoD goes with a purchasing requirement, the rest may follow.
ipv6 addresses = 2^128 = 3.4 * 10^38
possible ipv6 router prefixes = 2^(64 - 3) = 2,305,843,009,213,693,952 routers / (6.6 * 10^9 humans) = 349,370,152 possible globally addressed routers per person
And "over 80%" of ipv6 space is still unassigned. The "- 3" is due to "IANA unicast assignments are currently limited to the IPv6 unicast range of 2000::/3." [http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-address-spa
wrt, the initial topic, from the IPv6 Essentials (2006) book reviewed on
I wouldn't buy any cheap ipv4 hw.
From the +5 comments seems that there are some ipv6 hindrances with ARIN that need to be corrected, regardless of the other statements.
The designers of ipv6 find NAT inelegant & obsolete, but organizations can still use an ipv6-style NAT anyway.
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
If you want the space at that price, and can document that you need it, you can get it; otherwise you can get IPv6 service from an ISP or IPv6 tunnel broker and have them assign you space.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Over a 3 year timeframe, most of your legacy servers will look pretty old, slow, expensive, and financially-depreciated next to the new shiny servers people are buying to replace them. Most of the exceptions are on private networks anyway, not the public internet, like that mainframe your corporate HR department uses. So even if your public internet connectivity is all IPv6, you can still tunnel 10.0.0.0/8 or 192.168.0.0/24 through it and nobody'll mind.
Also, most of those IPv4 applications can handle 6to4 translation if they're doing all the work on the server and not running fat clients, so you can put up a PC farm running translators.
Routers are more of a problem - handling IPv4 bits is actually the primary job they're doing, as opposed to being a communication mechanism for getting to some database application that's the primary job. They're often implementing stuff in ASICs, and they're harder to replace cost-effectively.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Does anybody really think that there is any economic gain in switching to IpV6? If there is no gain then why would ISPs switch? It seems to me that any new protocol should aim to solve some of the bigger problems the internet is facing. My first thoughts would be the amount of bandwidth that is wasted by botnets sending spam and bit torrent clients resending the same information. Increasing the address space of the protocol is not enough. Give me a good working global multicast system and some way to identify and filter the noise of spam and I could see some economic gain and a reason to switch to a new protocol.
Another is that fortunately many of the businesses that would want multi-homing for servers are putting them in colo space rather than on their premises, so they're ok with using provider-allocated space, and it's only the colo provider that has to advertise multiple routes. Another is the policy issue that ARIN will normally not sell you PI space smaller than some size (is it
Shim6 is supposed to fix this problem, but IMHO it's an ugly ugly hack that won't succeed.
The other popular reason for getting PI space is to make it easier to renumber if you change ISPs. Unlike multihoming, this is a problem that can be made to go away by fiat. It made more sense back in the 1980s, before DHCP and DNS support became relatively universal. Renumbering servers and VPN tunnel appliances is still a bit annoying, but usually not bad, and you don't really need to renumber client machines any more, you just expire their DHCP leases if they're non-laptops, or unplug their LAN connections if they are. (Yeah, I know, it's not really quite that simple, but it's still fixable, especially because the parts that are hardest to fix are usually behind firewalls or NAT so you don't care.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
- Clients at the business's office, which need reliable outbound connectivity,
- Roaming clients, which aren't part of the problem here,
- Servers that need reliable inbound connectivity, and
- Servers that need to be reliable and need to be at the business's office.
The latter group is really small, and for most companies is limited to cranky VPN appliances. You *can* run customer-facing servers at your office, but it's become much more common to run them in colo centers, partly for reliability and partly for cost reasons, and for those cases it's usually just fine to use the colo provider's IP address space instead of PI space.The economics change around from year to year, but colo usually wins for a lot of applications except for a small number of very large companies or for people who don't need dual-homing levels of uptime. Otherwise the number of global routes would be a lot higher. (Last time I looked it was around 200,000 - a few years ago the Imminent Death of the Net was predicted as the number approached 100K, but bigger routers with more memory have come out since then.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
In IPv6-land, the typical allocation for an end-user organization is
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You only need to talk to another server on the net if there's some application it's serving that you want. These days, usually that's the web or email or maybe some IM protocol, so a box that proxies a couple of popular services will take care of connecting your lameoid PC to most new and interesting IPv6-only servers.
For now, the more entertaining problems are when there's a server out there with IPv4 AND ipv6, and their DNS advertises both, and your PC decides to connect using IPv6, but you don't actually have IPv6 connectivity from your ISP. Oops. It's probably Bill's fault.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
NAT is a cheapass way to build a slightly-stateful firewall. I'm not exactly sure how you fit your NAT routers between your notebook and the nearby wireless pod (:-), but if you're only doing pure-client stuff or are willing to tweak your NAT box you can make it mostly work most of the time for most applications.
That doesn't mean that NAT isn't evil. It breaks the end-to-end paradigm that makes it easy to develop new applications for the Internet, and forces most people to just be clients unless they're running software which does various levels of ugliness to work around NAT. It's easy to make a client that works behind NAT to reach a server that's not, and a bit harder to let non-NATted clients reach NATted servers, but it's a lot harder if both ends run NAT. For instance, do you know why Skype is so popular, in spite of being a closed-source closed-documentation proprietary application that doesn't use either of the common VOIP protocol standards, doesn't interoperate with anything, runs Repeckt-Mah-Obscuritay unverifiable crypto, and turns random well-connected users into supernodes? It's partly because it was well-done and shiny, but it's largely because it does an effective job of NAT traversal, and the supernode business is one of the tricks it uses to do that.
Think about your options for firewalling in an IPv6 environment. You can still build firewalls that let in stuff you want and don't let in stuff you don't want, and even do it statefully so you only let in good stuff when you're interested in listening for it, and with 2**64 IPv6 addresses for your house, you could even just leave stuff unprotected and nobody'll find it by port-scanning (in practice you wouldn't do that, because if you reveal your IP address on one protocol, such as by initiating http to a web site, then a miscreant knows to scan other ports on that address, or he could go scanning MAC addresses for recent Dell PC models or whatever. But you *could*, and you could even set up your machine to have different protocols use different IPv6 addresses.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Geoff Huston's best calculation of IPv4 addresses exhaustion (when your ISP asks for an address block and is told the cupboard is bare) is 2010.
In short, if you are purchasing networking equipment today it needs to have equivalent support for both IPv4 and IPv6. This is true of the latest generation of most routers, switches and operating systems. It isn't true of many odd boxes, such as firewalls, and "network appliances".
ISPs intend to run both IPv4 and IPv6 as first class protocols. They are not keen on suggestions of removing all IPv4 support by 2011, viewing that as 5 years too early.
> For some reason, a gigabyte of RAM that costs $100 if you install it in a :-)
> beige-colored box costs up to $5000 if you install it in a teal-colored box,
> at least if you're buying a service contract for the teal-colored box
The consumer crap that goes into the beige-colored box doesn't have error detection/correction and it isn't designed to offer "five nines uptime" and the company selling/maintaining it won't re-imburse you major cash if it doesn't meet five nines. *THAT* is the difference. It'll work "good enough" for Joe Blow surfing pornsites. It will *NOT* keep the internet running with the reliability we've come to expect.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
I think IPV6 is a good idea. However, with the zealots/fanbois it has for "friends", it sure as hell doesn't need any enemies. Don't go out of your way to piss off potential converts...
1) Do *NOT* advocate a mandatory drop-dead-date for IPV4. Doing so *BEGS* for the rejoinder... If IPV6 is so absolutely wonderful, then WTF do you need to drag us into it, kicking and screaming? Build your allegedly "better mousetrap", and the world will beat a path to your door. Unlike NTSC and ATSC television, IPV6 and IPV4 can co-exist. If IPV6 can't draw people away from IPV4, then it doesn't deserve to live.
2) Do *NOT* tell people that they have a "duty" to spend money migrating to IPV6. Show them the benefits. Again, if there aren't any benefits, it's IPV6's problem.
3) Fercryinoutloud *STOP* harping about "the end of NAT" and "NAT is evil". NAT works. It conserves IP address space, and it also protects end-users. And forget about the stupid argument that putting your PC in the DMZ "proves that NAT doesn't protect your PC". That's equivalant to saying that putting "INPUT ACCEPT" as your only iptables rule "proves that iptables doesn't protect your PC". When you proclaim that IPV6=="The end of NAT", you are spreading FUD, and scaring people away from IPV6. For those of you who whine about how "NAT breaks internet connectivity", remember that "a firewall breaks internet connectivity", too. This is *NOT* "your father's internet". 50 years ago, many people didn't lock their houses. Then meatspace got ugly. 15 years ago many people didn't bother with firewalls or NAT. Then cyberspace got ugly, like so...
Aug 3 01:42:13 m450 UNSOLICITED:IN=ppp0 OUT= MAC= SRC=24.64.247.183 DST=208.65.246.166 LEN=512 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=71 ID=58522 PROTO=UDP SPT=6403 DPT=1026 LEN=492
Aug 3 01:42:13 m450 UNSOLICITED:IN=ppp0 OUT= MAC= SRC=24.64.247.183 DST=208.65.246.166 LEN=512 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=71 ID=58524 PROTO=UDP SPT=6403 DPT=1028 LEN=492
Aug 3 01:43:34 m450 UNSOLICITED:IN=ppp0 OUT= MAC= SRC=24.64.119.4 DST=208.65.246.166 LEN=512 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=71 ID=6764 PROTO=UDP SPT=3804 DPT=1026 LEN=492
Aug 3 01:43:34 m450 UNSOLICITED:IN=ppp0 OUT= MAC= SRC=24.64.119.4 DST=208.65.246.166 LEN=512 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=71 ID=6765 PROTO=UDP SPT=3804 DPT=1027 LEN=492
Aug 3 01:43:48 m450 UNSOLICITED:IN=ppp0 OUT= MAC= SRC=24.64.11.137 DST=208.65.246.166 LEN=512 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=71 ID=46557 PROTO=UDP SPT=8109 DPT=1026 LEN=492
Aug 3 01:43:48 m450 UNSOLICITED:IN=ppp0 OUT= MAC= SRC=24.64.11.137 DST=208.65.246.166 LEN=512 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=71 ID=46559 PROTO=UDP SPT=8109 DPT=1028 LEN=492
Aug 3 01:46:31 m450 UNSOLICITED:IN=ppp0 OUT= MAC= SRC=219.148.119.6 DST=208.65.246.166 LEN=40 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=108 ID=256 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=12200 DPT=8000 WINDOW=8192 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0
90% plus of the people on the internet haven't got a fucking clue how to safely operate an internet-facing server. They *NEED* NAT, not an obscure-interface firewall. I run linux. When I use ADSL, I use NAT. If IPV6 is implemented in my lifetime, I will still use NAT. Deal with it.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
BGP works just fine for IPv6, there is nothing new, different or difficult in multihomed IPv6 networks.
You people are idiots. IPv6 has been ready for years. Our entire network, VPN, firewalls, routers, servers and clients are all running IPv6. Its not hard at all. There is nothing magic about the internet, it can change just as easy as the smaller networks that make it up.
slashdot.org has no AAAA record
Liar.
IPV6 isn't in the past tense. It doesn't exist yet. Until a migration plan exists the protocol called IPV6 is as incompatible with the Internet as IPX is- less so perhaps because more network administrators understand IPX than understand IPV6.
Failing to understand this, and taking as gospel from such dishonest people as Randy Bush that IPV6 is "the next version of IPV4" makes people think that:
- There is a problem, but we have a solution!
- That solution is, start over!
Anyone who even mouthed starting over is a bit hasty is labelled an obstructionist. When asked how are we going to use our PI blocks, they said "we don't need PI blocks yet. We only needed them because of problems X,Y,Z which don't exist on IPV6". When asked how are we going to embed legacy clients, they said "we'll use NAT" and if asked how do we get to that magic moment when people can start disconnecting IPV4 services, the answer is "we just have to start over."If these people were truly the force that was responsible for the Internet that we all use, then it was probably an accident. These people are obviously incompetent. These people thought DNAME and A6 records were a good idea. They don't get it: their migration plan is as poorly thought out as MX record transition, and here's news: There are functioning sites that still don't have MX records.
If IPV6 is truly necessary, then I think that we need competent answers to these questions. The IETF needs to step up and provide a migration plan. No migration plan? Stop whining.
The price differences are even more egregious for Flash (though the prices are a lot lower, e.g. $700 for a 512MB upgrade vs. $10 commercial), because the stuff is basically only used for storing the OS and booting the machine - good camera memory is fine, and you're not constantly overwriting it so you're not going to burn through write cycles.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
a more expensive type of DSL.
Capabilities, Speed, Low Price -- Pick two.