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Level of IPv6 Usage Is Vanishingly Small
An anonymous reader writes "The impending IPv4 address allocation shortage has led to a lot of speculation on the future of IPv6 (including here). A new study says that Internet IPv6 migration is not just going slowly — it has basically not even begun. After spending a year measuring IPv6 traffic across 87 ISPs around the world, the study concludes 'less than one hundredth of 1% of Internet traffic is IPv6... equivalent to the allowed parts of contaminants in drinking water.'"
Because it impacts the other guys, not me. It's the people in China and India and everywhere else that need addresses. Me? I've got a whole block right here.
'less than one hundredth of 1% of Internet traffic is IPv6... equivalent to the allowed parts of contaminants in drinking water.'
Like that means anything to me. Can they compare that percentage in terms of the number of pages per Library of Congress?
Was IPv6 our only hope or do we have something else ready to go for when we hit that last address? And speaking of that, what WILL happen when we hit that last address? Will the internet suddenly die? Or will some people just not be able to connect because the IP is in use?
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
Is it African or European IPv6?
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
If people could actually get IPv6 service from their providers instead of having to route everything through congested tunnels, THAT would help.
The biggest reasons:
And probably many others. The bottom line is that right now today, there isn't a 'killer app' for IPv6.
My blog
Between tunnel brokers and 6to4, really all of us who manage servers should have them on IPv6 in addition to IPv4. What's the downside to being ready?
Quote:
Flow label - QoS management (20 bits). Originally created for giving real-time applications special service, but currently unused.
This is the one feature I consider to be useful of ipv6 and it's not currently used. While I agree there is an addressing problem, it currently isn't affecting me or anyone else. I suggest the lack of benefits coupled with the lack of a major problem with the current ipv4 is causing this. Why spend the money for such little return?
The the water is internet. Which comes into our houses view pipes.... OMG THAT PROVES IT. The internet IS a series of tubes! We were all sooo wrong ;\
99% of IPv4 traffic is bittorrent. Switch it to IPV6 and the traffic figures will spike!
To me IPv6 is still nonsense. It is part IPv4 with something on the left side like area zone or ISP code or whatever. I would recommend IPv5: 0.aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd == our IPv4 .. just one more block for ipv5. all protocols can be easily adapted to support ipv4 wrapped in ipv5 and that's all there is to it.
new IP addresses can be eee.aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd and there you have it. We already have regexps matching ipv4
mov ax,4c00h
int 21h
Not quite totally dissimilar to a good comparison.
The allowed amounts of dioxin, TCE, and many other chemicals is down in the parts per billion. So the comparison is off by about five powers of ten.
Well at least not right now. With more allocation of IPV4 address we wouldn't be needed anytime soon. The company I work for has 56 public ip address for 3 webservers. The other 53 address are not even used, they are just parked for future use. If I was allowed to set the servers up the "right" way I wouldn't even need 3, just 1.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
measuring the percent of traffic is not very reliable. Thats like saying how much internet traffic is used for Vonage, or Slashdot.
More importantly, how many sites can be reached via IPv6? How many publish AAAA addresses in DNS? How many ISP's can route IPv6? I know that there is tunneling for running over IPv4, how much of that 99.99% of traffic might be doing that?
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Let me get this straight... It's not a truck?
It may be just me, but I always felt IPv6 is a solution looking for the problem.
There is a reason IPv4 is so well entrenched. Other than availability of software, hardware and services, it is convenience of handling IPv4 in all those things. This is what permits developers to create all those wonderful products, administrators to effectively administer them and users to enjoy them. A primary reason to that is IPv4 address size - it is 32 bit which is natively handled by all current hardware, and easily remembered by humans (short term) in its quad decimal form.
IPv6 has neither of these features. It is difficult to deal with in software (I know, I do this for a living), does not fit into any native data type (and won't until we move to 128 bit architectures - which does not seem to be very soon), cannot be remembered or used by a human (so effective administration requires magic automatic tools), does not give itself with any convenience to routing related data structures (like radix trees). All this for dubious benefit of addressing directly (in non-hierarchical manner) of every toaster in the world. This is directly opposite to the way the Real World operates (i.e. your home has an address, but noone gets to talk to your toaster directly without going through you first.
If I were solving this, I'd suggest separate and non-directly routable IPv4 address spaces for separate countries (and, perhaps, for other entities). And lots and lots of NAT or proxying. Of course that is kind of what is happening anyway.
China would be happier that way too. In case of cross-border cyberattack, just cut external links and your country is self-sufficient and interconnected :)
Anyway, I am ready to bet some cash that IPv6 will never become a major transport protocol.
I know I will do whatever I can to keep it far far away.
...that when anyone buys a router, in 90% cases IPv6 routing is not available. Or at least disabled by default. I mean big ISP-grade routers, home routers, linux IPTables routing howtos, everything. Fix this first.
Make all porn only reachable through IPv6.
The fact of the matter is, IPv6 is a solution looking for a problem. With IP shortages and the ease of NAT/PAT, most entities realized they don't need a whole block of IP addresses. Most of the time, one suffices. Else, a block of 8 almost always fits everyones needs. It is like trying to solve Y3K problems 992 years before we need to actually worry about it.
Also, most of the world is using Windows XP. Can you show me where in my TCP/IP settings panel I am supposed to enter my IPv6 information? Exactly.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Just get a few porn providers to use it, then WHAM!
But sometimes a government mandate is required to make big changes.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
We'll be using IPv6 to run our fusion powered, flying cars to go to the moon?
...where it explains IPv6 will succeed anyway.
Since there doesn't seem to be a name for the four hex characters between the colons, I propose that they be called "quads".
::ffff:0:0/96, still others say 2002:: The thing is, they are probably all right, but they are just being used for different purposes. The biggest reason, though, is that there has not been a firm switchover date. Unless and until there is a compelling reason to switch, IPv4 will still be the main protocol.
Actually, I think that part of the reason IPv6 hasn't been as widely adopted as it should be is that it has an unfinished feel to it. Some places say you need a dhcp server. Others say it is self configuring. Some places say the zero prefix is used for IPv4-compatible addresses; others say
Perhaps what we need is some sort of international IPv4 lights out day. On, say, 01-Jan-2010 IPv4 will no longer be routed. That way, ISPs would need to be compliant, or they will be off the air.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
A simple one is just dealing with IP addresses. Not too bad to remember an IPv4, especially since in a given network most addresses are largely similar. An IPv6 one is rather more difficult, and much of the self similarity is gone since the MAC is embedded. Thus you have to start to have better management to deal with the numbers.
A bigger one is the cost of replacing high speed routers. Real high end gear tends to do things in ASICs. It's really the only way to achieve the speeds that people want. Doing it in software would be prohibitive, even if routers had massive CPUs, which they don't. Well, there's lots of gear out there that only does IPv4 in hardware. You want IPv6, it is all handled by the software and thus anything more than a small amount will crush it. It is, of course, not cheap to get an IPv6 upgrade, even when one is available.
That's the situation on campus where I work. The network is Cisco 6500s at it's heart. They handle IPv4 with ease, including the incredibly complex access lists and routing tables we have. However, they do that because they can do IPv4 in hardware. Well they support IPv6, you just turn it on, however only in software. It we tried to use it, it'd grind everything to a halt. So if we want the hardware to do it? $10,000,000. Ya, let me tell you how interested anyone is in spending that, when what we have works great and we are getting our budget cut (again).
Similar situation at larger levels, but even larger dollars. You don't go replacing these high end routers once a year. These things last for a long time. Thus there's lots of hardware out there that works great for IPv4, but can't do IPv6. Companies are understandably not interested in sinking tons of cash to upgrade, especially when it seems to gain nothing.
So even if IPv6 were just turn a switch, I could see adoption being slow because it don't really solve any problem. However it does introduce it's own problems, which makes it just that much slower.
In France, all the major ISP (Free, Orange, Neuf, etc.) and several small ones (like Nerim) provide a /64 segment as part of the usual "triple play" package for 30€.
The 2 minors problems are :
- the user has to activate the IPv6 for the gateway, in a web interface of the ISP (easy, just a checkbox)
- the user must have to have an IPv6-ready OS : nothing to do for GNU/Linux, a choice in a menu for MacOS, but a pain in Windows
As for the servers, IPv6 support is mandatory in all administrations (all equipment must be able to route et handle IPv6, but the application can still be in IPv4) and IPv6 has been declared "strategic mission" in CNRS (National French Research Center; that is all public research).
Telecom companies are also beginning to use IPv6 in the mobile television on cellphone.
So we can say that in France the situation is OK, except that IPv6 must be manually enabled by the user.
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And don't forget that it is one more thing that can go wrong.
Remember, you ALWAYS run the MINIMUM on your servers. If you don't absolutely need IPv6 today, then don't put it on.
I'd say, IPv6 is being accepted even slower, than Windows Vista. Khmm...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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djb, love him or hate him, called this out years ago...
http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html
Lack of IPv4 embedding in IPv6 has to rank as one of the dumbest decisions of all time. It reminds me of that "anti-spam proposal evaluation worksheet" that floats around in the comments here from time to time.
Your plan fails because it:
[X] Demands immediate and total cooperation from everyone at once.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
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'less than one hundredth of 1% of Internet traffic is IPv6... equivalent to the allowed parts of contaminants in drinking water.'
The Net considers IPv6 to be damage and routes around it.
Some enlightened parties are providing free porn, music and warez over ipv6. That should draw the crowds! Binary news servers newszilla6.xs4all.nl and news.ipv6.eweka.nl are both freely accessible over ipv6.
...and I'll boost the numbers.
When I last reviewed the Xen VPN farms out there I didn't find any with IPv6. It is on my short list of discriminators, not that I need it now, but I don't want to have to revisit the server to add it in the next couple of years when it is needed.
I should probably add that I don't want to pay more than $10/mo for the server either. I don't need much of a slice. I get by fine on a vpslink level-1 server, though gandi is about to claim my business. 4x the ram, twice the disk, same price.
http://www.ams-ix.net/technical/stats/sflow/?type=ipv6
There were a few who prepared, and many of those told the rest what they were doing, so, by 1998, most businesses had some place to go for answers.
I think that's the real reason y2k was relatively tame.
That's what's happening here. Most companies don't know where to start. The question is how many people are doing the pioneering, and how long after the squeeze hits (hits the small countries first, probably) will individuals have to put up with "carrier grade NAT" or whatever.
But the real question is whether IPV6 is really scaleable. Without switchers to test it, we don't know.
Personally, I don't much care for IPV6. I'd prefer a scheme where you have something like a high-bit extension rule that would allow anyone with a valid IP address and a working router to just add an octet for his sub-net of (about) 120 hosts and keep going. I'm pretty sure the idea was considered and there was a valid reason (not the obviously invalid reasons about trouble holding the market captive) for not considering it, but it sure seems to me like (it could have been) a great solution.
I'm still not sure how to handle portable devices, since it would seem that the prefix pretty much limits where a device could be found, and therefore where it could connect.
Another possibility would be only 64 address at a level, with the top two bits encoding some sort of function, like addresses relative to the local network and special function addresses. Maybe you could even make mobile devices accessible that way.
Yeah, I know. These kinds of ideas were used in some of the network protocols that TCP-IP beat out. So there must have been good reasons.
Anyway, would it be possible to concatenate 4-octet addresses. So my global IP address would consist of A.B.C.D:192.168.7.201 if my address on the local network is 192.168.7.201 and my router's address is A.B.C.D?
Yeah, that could go really bad if implemented wrong.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
A few problems with this.
First, there have been town criers out preaching about IPv4 problems for many years now even before the release of the Vista infection. Now the problem with this was that there is no linguistics that the average person can understand and relate to. With Y2K it was simple, "your infrastructure is about to totally collapse, I hope you like the bronze age." This was supported hype backed up also by Hollywood with their movies. Where else to you hear about IPv4 limitation problems but nerd and geek places and chat?
Second, typical to most things that are drastic humanity will stick to the frog in slow rising heat response. Short of feces hitting a fan there is no inclination for change anywhere in the industry where it would matter in regards to momentum of change. Sure you can have IPv6 support native in things like routers and Vista infected computers but what good does that do when the source for IPs still is locked solid in IPv4 like ISPs?
Have you tried to get IPv6 support from even MAJOR vendors?
Name one cablemodem or DSL vendor that supports client-side IPv6 addressing? No? How about just the management side of the CM or EMTA? Still hard pressed, right?
Have you tried managing firewalls with IPv6 ?
Well, sure, you can kind of do it in sort of an ad-hoc fashion, with no bearing to your existing IPv4 implementation -- yep, they get their own objects and rules.
Hey, Checkpoint, the whole point behind Object-Oriented-Management is that we can build an object with all of these things... IPv4 addresses, IPv6 addresses, heck, why not even MAC addresses? Are you telling me that You can't figure out how to make it work without resorting to doubling up on host-objects (one for each class), and making them into 'groups', just so I can manage my ruleset appropriately?
Don't even get me started on Cisco and the ASA.
That said, I'm routing IPv6 on my IP core. I've got two tunnels set up so I can use V6 at home and at the office for testing. I'm just waiting on those darn vendors.
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
We all use DHCP and NATing. The greater internet itself can remain IPv4 for ten or more years but there is no reason that users need to be connected though IPv4. Furthermore with 6to4 even if the ISP's infrastructure hardware is IPv4 users can trunk over it to the ISP's IPv6 network easily.
I think what ISP's are actually fearing is the all user IP's will become static then because of the nature of IPv6 but if they wanted there are things they can do to maintain the status quo such as binding specified mac address.
P.S. One interesting aside about IPv6 is that since it should remain mostly static, your IPv6 address can be used to track you. I can easily imagine database companies selling names, addresses and phone numbers based on IPv6 addresses. I'm surprised ISP's haven't implemented it just for that, within a few years it would take them mostly out of the loop for address records and ISP subpoenas (except for final confirmation). I imagine it would really cut torrent traffic down. But then of course everyone can still argue how their computer or wifi access point got hacked. All you got to do is subpoena a spammer and he can detail how they hijack computers with viralus trojans.
I agree, it's fucking childish. Reminds me of those people who insist on pasting "sigs" into every one of their posts in order to thwart people who have the display of sigs disabled in their preferences. The only good thing about it is that it makes it really easy to figure out who the poster was when you're metamoderating.
I always metamoderate such posts negatively, BTW - that is, positive mods on such posts get marked Unfair, negative mods get metamodded Fair.
I fail to see what's taking so long - NAT is never a solution, and when ISP's starts handing out private IP's, the internet has truly lost. TCP/IP has always been about end-to-end connectivity, and NAT, while it may be handy in some cases, and helps saves a huge part of the adress space, it's not a good solution in the long run.
IPv6 on the other hand has plenty of advantages over IPv4 - the most obvious is the increased address space. Another, more unknown advantage, is the much simpler header, which in IPv4 has a lot of unnecessary fields, either because they're handled by other layers, or because the internet has changed since the protocol was born.
This lighter header, means less processing of the packet is needed, and routing operations should be simpler, and faster.
Another advantage is support for jumbograms (great for high speed point-point links), better support for mobile IP, and the huge address space, in combination with the large number of bits avilable for subnetting, should decrease the size of the global BGP table (which contains over 130 000 entries last time I checked).
So, it has these advantages:
- restores end-end connectivity
- less overhead on stable, dedicated point-point lines => more throughput
- simpler header, smaller routing tables => faster routing
- more subnet bits => allows for more flexible network designs
- better multicast support
In conclusion, if you fail to see the advantages, you're not a network engineer, or you shouldn't work as one.
We could have even just added a 3 more positions in the address and assumed a default of 1.1.1. as the default prefix if none was given. That would have given us 16 million * the current 4 billion addresses - 64 quadrillion addresses.
At the risk of repeating the 'no one needs more 640k', I'd have to say that I think 64 quadrillion is more than usable for the next several years. The upshot is that it would have been much easier to deal with that. From a pragamatic viewpoint, there's a whole lot of software out there invested in the dotted quad format. Modifying that to deal with a few more X.X.X places wouldn't have been as hard (think GUIs that check IP validity, for example) as moving to IPv6.
Lame excuses, perhaps, but I think we'd have seen much faster adoption to a format like X.X.X.X.X.X.X because it's an incremental, not radically different.
creation science book
IPv6 will fail and be replaced with a very different network stack where things like TCP/IP are abstracted away.
Why do I say this?
1) The world is document centric, not IP address centric. I want to access a collection of named documents and services from "slashdot.org". I dont care if these come to me by IPv4, NetBUI, IPX/SPX, Token Ring or Carrier Pigeon. I want to get "slashdot.org" and I want to make sure "slashdot.org" really is "slashdot.org" and not "somephishingsite.com"
2) "End 2 End" isn't a selling point. I dont want my home network to be publicly visible.
3) Protocols that route around my desire for #2 succeed. All good P2P clients support UPnP.
3.1) Protocols that do not work with my desire for #2 fail. See Active FTP and the failed or failing IM networks and IM software that do not transfer files over NAT.
4) Those P2P clients are proof that how documents get to me are independent of the underlying link. I have no doubt that BitTorrent could be easily adapted to operate as a wire protocol on 802.11g or on top of IPX/SPX.
5) If (and a big one) IPv6 got any traction, smart entrepenuers will began creating new services or modify existing ones like BitTorrent to operate and bridge IPv4 and IPv6. Really smart ones will most likely realize that once they abstract TCP/IP out of their design, they can do other "fun" things like implement their file sharing network directly over WiFI or some other mesh type network.
Conclusion?
IPv6 might take off,but I doubt it. Once IPv4 addresses get scarce and there is a real cost to staying "IPv4", some young buck will have invented a whole new way of networking and we'll migrate to that instead.
Whenever asked how any normal personal will remember 16-character hexadecimal addresses, IPv6 proponents always scoff and reply simply, "Well that's what we have DNS for..."
This in my opinion is a terribly short-sighted answer. As Dan Kaminisky recently revealed, our existing DNS system is terribly fragile. I'm sure there are scores of system administrators out there who still rely on remembering IP addresses to manage and configure their networks. Take away that ability and suddenly everyone is dependant on DNS, which is badly in need of a redesign, and local naming schemes, such as WINS, Bonjour and locally-implemented DNS, which is highly inconsistent.
Let's get naming schemes working properly first before we leap headfirst into non-memorable addressing. That's where the IPv6 crusaders should be focusing their efforts if they want to see movement on this issue.
ONE:
If I did, I'd have to get a new hardware firewall and learn how it works well enough to trust it.
NAT, for all its ills, is very easy to understand from a firewall perspective:
Any unsolicited packet that isn't specifically forwarded to a specific machine inside the LAN literally has nowhere to go and gets dropped. That's easy to understand, easy to trust, and as a router firmware designer you have to go out of your way not just be careless to mess it up.
IPV6 doesn't use NAT, which means before I buy a firewall that protects me, I'll have to not only learn how it works but learn how trustworthy and competent the company that made it is.
TWO:
I'm not even sure my ISP allows it, and rolling my own tunnels is just too much effort for too little payback. The cure for this may be government intervention and/or incentives. For example, if the IRS web site went ipv6-only for a day next March, with an ipv4-version notice that "if you can't see this page, you won't be able to do your 2009 taxes next year" that would get ISPs on the ball.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Until such time as some of the larger sites like, say, oh, I don't know, how about SLASHDOT get their finger out and install IPv6, people aren't going to bother. As a probably flawed analogy, would you buy a top-of-the-range games console with wireless everything and teraflops of processing power if there was not a single piece of software to run on it? Actually, this being Slashdot, you probably would just for bragging rights, especially if said CPU had a cool name like cellPwner pro or something. I know, bad analogy.
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION: ;slashdot.org. IN AAAA
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
;; Query time: 0 msec
; > DiG 9.3.4-P1 > slashdot.org AAAA
; (1 server found)
slashdot.org. 3149 IN SOA ns-1.ch3.sourceforge.com.
hostmaster.corp.sourceforge.com. 2008080600 14400 1800 604800 3600
Go figure. This is why IPv6 isn't taking off and a pox on anyone who says otherwise. Trying to blame sysadmins for not deploying IPv6 is a downright insult. We're ready, Slashdot. Google's ready. A whole raft of other sites have connectivity and are ready. Looks like you're not.
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
After all, if you allow for private addresses, then our Utopian world of every device connecting to every other device will be gone.
Reminds me of the dogma from Tim Berners Lee & Crew about the semantic web business.
Who cares if something like NAT makes sense. Who cares if the "semantic web" is unworkable in the real world? Being practice makes life easy and doesn't have pain. Being unworkable just gives you something to strive for.
And like any good region or liberal cause, if we aren't feeling pain, we should be guilty.
They'll route around everything just like they are routing around the RIAA, throttling or anything else.
In fact, I think it will be the P2P guys that get us out of the old-school way of thinking about networking. IPv6 will not take off because we've outgrown the abstractions offered TCP/IP. We will abuse IPv6 the same way we abuse IPv4--they are square pegs trying to work in modern round holes.
I don't know! waaaaaaaaarrrgghhhhhhh!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
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I think IPv6 will never catch on because its not how we use the internet. The concept of a "global flat namespace" is not desired by corporate America. The closest we want to get is DNS. Sysadmins want control of their network. Flat networks are pointless.
The next big leap will be the use of IPv4 over virtual networks. Something along the lines of the current VPN technology, but where every computer is "always on" many networks, instead of the current "one network only" rule.
accessible via IPv6 (and the number of clients able to reach IPv6 hosts) is probably more important than the amount of traffic. all of my customers are dual-stack, and while only a trickle of data flows over IPv6, any customer can seamlessly connect to an IPv6 server over IPv6.
the problem is that a large percentage of people on the net need to be dual-stack (or otherwise able to access IPv6) before anyone serious goes IPv6-only.
the thing is, IPv6 is a much happier world for us all (both admins and end users) than nat hell. Sure, Nat seems to work ok at one level, when you split a single IPv4 address with your entire home network... but what happens when the ISP does the NAT and you have no public IPs at all? this will cut into your bittorrent habit.
Personally, I suspect that we will see a huge amount of IPv6 hype as the v4 pool runs out... I'm not saying that IPv6 will win, just that there will be a lot of hype.
Either way, things will get interesting. NAT hell will finalize the 'two tier' internet that was begun when ISPs started handing out dynamic addresses to dialup/dsl customers. Internet access behind NAT is largely a client-only experience, and many existing apps don't work well behind NAT (like bittorrent... remember, you can forward ports now, but at v4 runout, ISPs will start handing out NATted addresses to end users. and they are unlikely to forward ports for you.)
IPv6 has its own challenges... the biggest problem with IPv6, though, is the chicken and the egg. Until more hosts support IPv6, there's not much point to using it.
as far as I can tell, most of the tunnels are pretty quick. And most reasonably decent ISPs provide local tunnels for their customers.
the problem is that undoing that waste is very difficult. do you really expect corporations to go through the expense of renumbering inefficient assignments, and then to *give away* a scarce resource? a scarce resource that may become quite valuable in 3 years?
A lot of IP based software is incapable of using IPv6, I know this from experience when using exclusively a IPv6 address.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Four-octet IP address, four-octet port number, and NATting x NATing.
Knock that sucker with a 4-by-4.
The issue as I see it(this is just my personal opinion):
- IPv6 was designed in a vacuum, it was designed to facilitate automatic readdressing. The dorks who thought this was a good idea A) don't understand applications or sessions and B) have no concept of PCI and the issues this creates with firewalls. "Yes, it just whacks all of your connections and things re-address. Damn application state! Damn database connections"
- IPv6 was not designed to allow the same kinds of multi-homing that is possible with IPv4 BGP(see readdressing above). Since DNS has its own issues, BGP is the ONLY way to assure the same address is available via multiple providers. IPv6 takes that away
- IPv6's ICMP equivalent is over engineered. MTU discovery mechanisms are moronic and too deterministic. As a firewall administrator, it should be my decision about what kinds of traffic are allowed through. Making IPv6's ICMP the equivalent to MTU detection, ICMP, and ARP means that more shit will get tunneled through their 'elegant solution'. Lookup ICMP/DNS tunneling if you want examples.
I have a few more gripes but the IPv6 IETF has done a pore job of marketing their work.
"a lot" ? examples? everything I use on a daily basis in the server space is v6 compatible and has been for a few years now. Clearly, servers will need to remain dual-stack until the v4-only client-side software cycles through, but old stuff that hasn't been updated in a while belongs behind a firewall/gateway no matter what transport the public internet uses.
...it should be *taken* away from them by law, call it eminent domain for the common good, and turned back to the pool for people to purchase. And place a small cap on how many addys any one entity can buy so they aren't snapped up by squatters. There is no ethical nor technical reason why all those class As should be held by a few companies or dot edus. They just did it in the olden days and now it is obvious it was a rip to the rest of the internet using public.
I'm actually in one of the rare areas that have more than one ISP. We have three available here. Our current ISP doesn't implement IPv6, so I can't use it. I checked with the other two. Neither of them allows IPv6, either. None of the three admits to any plans to implement it.
Most people have only one ISP, of course. What incentive does that ISP have to permit IPv6? I mean, here where we have three ISPs, none of them has an incentive to do it.
I don't see how we can ever switch to IPv6 until the ISPs stop dropping all IPv6 packets, and start forwarding them properly. And that clearly ain't gonna happen without a bit of "government regulation" ordering them to do it or else. But with the current political setup here in the US, that ain't gonna happen, either.
Anyone have any idea how to persuade the ISPs to come around?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I guess they figure that if you are advanced enough to want IPv6 you can setup a PC router. Hm. I wonder what the operational costs of running a free V6-UDP-V4 tunnel broker would be.
He basically states the case that we are where circuit switching was at it's "end times". Gray beards from old telcos used to think the packet switching nerds with their new fangled TCP/IP were nuts. Jacobson claims we are now at the state where the level of abstraction we operate at calls for something different where it doesn't matter if the data comes from TCP/IP, NetBEUI, the toster or as a signal modulated in my cats meows. He is right. We should stop worrying about *how* our services connect and start worrying about the data they are sending gets to us.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6972678839686672840&hl=en
who has jurisdiction over the internet? many of the biggest wastes were allocated before ICANN existed.
before you start calling for government intervention, remember that it isn't just your government that is involved here.
.
IPv6 for Microsoft Windows: Frequently Asked Questions [Updated January 10, 2008]
What is new about IPv6 support in Vista and Windows Server 2008?
Installed and enabled by default
GUI based configuration
DHCPv6 support
Etc.
How can I tell if the ipV6 protocol is installed for Windows XP?
To determine whether IPv6 is installed, type ipv6 if at a command prompt. If IPv6 is installed, you will see a display of your IPv6 interfaces and their configuration. Otherwise, the Ipv6.exe tool will indicate that IPv6 is not installed.
How do I install ipv6 protocol for Windows XP? SP2 or later.
[Four methods step-by step]
{from the Network Connections dialog box}
6. In the Select Network Protocol dialog box, click Microsoft TCP/IP version 6, and then click OK.
from the Windows XP desktop, click Start, point to Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Command Prompt. At the command prompt, type netsh interface ipv6 install.
And hell, I used to run ip_masq on my hand-me-down machine to get out on the interweb.
You know what? You have no rights to my private network. NAT keeps you out of my affairs. It causes me some troubles, yes, but those troubles are far less costly then letting you snoop around my network.
Firewalls that filter my data without going through a "portal" like a public/private address space are too insecure for me to trust. I feel much beter knowing you cannot, realistically, route into my network. A network that was [public-ip] [firewall] [public-ip] means once an attacker gets through the firewall, it is much easier to route packets in and out.
I'm not even going to get into the reason the "big boys" use nat. They do it because private address space is portable and doesn't bind you to a provider. Since not everybody can be multihomed both on IPv4 or IPv6, it is a significant risk to invest your IT infrastructure in what is basically a proprietary IP address block.
Remember when if you switched cell phones, you'd loose your cell phone number? Same thing at work here.
I really like the idea :P
The question is how to we input it...
0. It never managed to get off the ground. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
equivalent to the allowed parts of contaminants in drinking water.
Under the Bush FDA, that could be rather a lot.
Looking at an app that uses regex to match both IP4 and IP6 precisely (as opposed to numbers and dots or hexchars and colons), the IP4 pattern is:
PAT_IP4 = r'\.'.join([r'(?:\d|[1-9]\d|1\d\d|2[0-4]\d|25[0-5])']*4)
RE_IP4 = re.compile(PAT_IP4+'$')
and the IP6 pattern is:
RE_IP6 = re.compile( '(?:%(hex4)s:){6}%(ls32)s$'
'|::(?:%(hex4)s:){5}%(ls32)s$'
'|(?:%(hex4)s)?::(?:%(hex4)s:){4}%(ls32)s$'
'|(?:(?:%(hex4)s:){0,1}%(hex4)s)?::(?:%(hex4)s:){3}%(ls32)s$'
'|(?:(?:%(hex4)s:){0,2}%(hex4)s)?::(?:%(hex4)s:){2}%(ls32)s$'
'|(?:(?:%(hex4)s:){0,3}%(hex4)s)?::%(hex4)s:%(ls32)s$'
'|(?:(?:%(hex4)s:){0,4}%(hex4)s)?::%(ls32)s$'
'|(?:(?:%(hex4)s:){0,5}%(hex4)s)?::%(hex4)s$'
'|(?:(?:%(hex4)s:){0,6}%(hex4)s)?::$'
% {
'ls32': r'(?:[0-9a-f]{1,4}:[0-9a-f]{1,4}|%s)'%PAT_IP4,
'hex4': r'[0-9a-f]{1,4}'
}, re.IGNORECASE)
Longer, but not any less handy. I mean, what do you care care once the
expression is compiled?
Confucius say "Man who upgrade to IPV6 find himself talking to clouds."
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
the study concludes 'less than one hundredth of 1% of Internet traffic is IPv6... equivalent to the allowed parts of contaminants in drinking water.'"
IPv6 is the floater in the pool of IP addresses.
The problem with IPv6 is that it's too ungainly. I an happy with a 32 bit namespace, and would have been happy with a 33 bit namespace, but 128 bit? How many internet aware toasters are you guys planning to build? Who is going to eat that much toast, anyway?
Also: I can find no clear explanation of scopes in IPv6. Yes, everything has an auto-address. HOORAY. Everything has a MAC address as well, but I don't refer to things by MAC. And I certainly don't want 99% of my clients with a public IP. With IPv4 that is asking for trouble, why would it be any different with IPv6?
Why didn't we just add 2 more dots, call it IPv5, and prefix all existing addresses with 1.1. ? Seems to me that increasing the address space by a factor of 65536 would have been enough to satisfy demand without breaking everything. Personally, I won't adopt IPv6 until my ISP threatens me at gunpoint. Not only is there no clear reason for me to migrate, but there are several massive disincentives.
Dude, you know there are like 50 ways you could fix it so you never see TT again. And most wouldn't take you any longer than writing that post.
Results of search for: ipv6
Did you mean: ip ips
Residential Products and Services
No results available in this category.
It looks like they might support it on their business accounts.
Not to mention alot of devices don't support it yet. I know the DS specifically doesn't. I was actually commended by tech support for asking a "really tough question" when inquiring about IPv6.
the new address is 4 times longer. 4 times???? That's a freaking over kill. 4 times longer means 2^128/2^32 = 2^96 times larger in this case. That's like 10,000,000,000 distinct ip addresses for every single human on the planet. Sheesh, I'd have thought that the IEEE would be satisfied by 48 or maybe 64. Seriously, who wants to type 8 groups of 4 hex digits like 2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:0000:1428:57ab
?
1. Vendors won't support IPv6 because users don't need it for their current apps.
2. Vendors won't add IPv6 to their current apps because it's not being supported by vendors.
I don't see the users getting much input in all of this. The vendors won't create a killer IPv6 app because vendors won't support IPv6 on the network, and vice versa. The user is completely ignored and is totally outside of that equation. But the user is then blamed for the lack of IPv6 adoption on both sides, for failing to demand what was never on the table to begin with.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
In the end aren't we just going through a crapload of trouble to not just route heierarchical domain names? I mean it's not like we USE ip addy's if we can configure things so that we can reliably avoid it. They're just the skeleton upon which we stretch whatever naming system we're using like DNS or SMB.
They're saying that IPv6 is like poison!!!
It looks to me like the study didn't really measure the amount of IPv6 traffic on the internet because it only looked for native IPv6 packets, which are extremely rare (as they have noticed) because very very few ISPs implement IPv6. Rather, most people using it are tunneling over IPv4 through tunnel brokers.
Of course since most people realize that tunnel brokers are basically a waste of time, I wouldn't be surprised if the total IPv6 traffic was tiny even if you counted the tunneled stuff.
We're in for some painful years shortly where IPv4 addresses are nearly completely out and people have to take crash courses in IPv6. Luckily, most hardware and OSes these days have IPv6 support, so a switchover is possible, but both application developers and ISPs are dragging their heels and making the problem worse.
Of course running out of addresses doesn't mean the internet breaks outright. People who are already on it will still be able to connect and get where they need to go. It's just new people trying to connect that are going to be out of luck. People on dynamic IP addresses (PPPoE, DHCP) might find themselves waiting and waiting for an IP address when they connect, because their ISP was not able to provision more to handle their growth. New servers will have the biggest problem, you'll probably see a market spring up for second hand IP addresses for people who don't want to wait in line like everybody else.
I read the internet for the articles.
... has no AAAA records for either "slashdot.org" or "www.slashdot.org".
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
... MediaSentry? Do they have IPv6 access and capability?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Like many of you, I've been following the IPv4 vs. IPv6 story from the beginning. The fact that adoption is proving so difficult is the practical proof of one and only one thing: the IPv6 standard is a mess. The single biggest problem is the lack of backwards compatibility, both on the wire and in text. IPv4 addresses should - and must - be a valid subset of whatever succeeds it. The best thing that could happen would be for the IT world to "get over" IPv6 and throw it out as a hare-brained, ivory tower failure. Start over andreate a new successor that is backwards compatible - there will be essentially no adoption problems.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
When there was no more space to build outward in Manhatten, then solution wasn't to try and produce more land. instead, they made the buildings taller (which worked well until '99)
People have no problems remembering up to four three digit groups. So why not, expand the address space to support 0-999 values instead of just 0-255. Sure, 999 isn't a byte, but it's close enough to 2^10. Sacrificing the remaining 25 values won't hurt much. But more importantly, it would increase the address pool from 4.2 billion (minus invalid values) to 1,000,000,000,000 (a trillion) which still allows something like 200 IP addresses for every person on the planet. And with technology like NAT which should be employed for security purposes should be more than we could ever use.
Not we just need some genious to figure out how best to map that mechanism to the base-2 or IPv6 world
Both IPv4 and IPv6 suck. IPv4 sucks because it should have been just: dest-address, source-address, ttl (byte), flags (byte), size (short). 12 bytes instead of 20. IPv6 sucks because it wants to be too much and at the same time, simply isn't modern enough. How's about variable length addresses (my home network needs only 1 byte) ? How's about flags that say something about the scope of the packet (I don't want these packets to make it accross a router; I wouldn't have to spec certain address 'areas' as 'special') ? Why drop ARP (really, it was just fine) ? What's with the f^@%ing jumbogram (4 gigabytes of payload ? What concentrator is going to cache 4 gigabytes of payload ?) ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Maybe it shouldn't have tried to carry that coconut.
The powers-that-be have finally admitted that DJB is right, and interoperability is a problem and are looking at defining an IPV6 version of NAT. See http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/072108-ipv6nat.html for details. It'll have 2 uses...
1) The many-devices-to-one-address-mapping that we all know and love with IPV4 NAT
2) Automatic translation between IPV4 and IPV6. If you use the analogue-TV-to-digital-TV analogy, this NATing function is like the cheap converter boxes that allow your old analogue TV to receive digital broadcasts. Joe Sixpack will be told to plug his computer into the box, and the box plugs into his modem *AND THINGS WILL AUTOMAGICALLY WORK JUST LIKE BEFORE*.
Item #2 is the biggie. If we can make the migration asynchronous (i.e. no "flag-day" when everybody must switch over at the same time) things become a lot easier. And when Joe's current computer, running Windows 98SE or WinME (don't laugh) dies, he'll buy a new one with Vista or WIndows 7, and it'll support IPV6 out of the box. Just like when your current analogue CRT TV dies, you'll buy a new one, and it'll natively tune in digital broadcasts. And you won't need the NAT box anymore, except as a security blanket.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
http://xkcd.com/326/
DNS and DNS updates.
I don't want to have to type out each and every new computers IP6 address in the server DNS. I don't want to tell someone attaching themselves to my network "it won't work until I tell you what IP address you need".
I need something where someone has a computer that calls itself "Andy" and is attached to my network. And "Andy" should get an IPv6 address and DNS should notice this new computer and update itself so instead of having to ask DHCP what IP address was handed out and type it in when I want to connect, I want to be able to go something like:
$ ftp andy
and get ftp access.
I can do it with IP4.
When can I do it for IP6?
I thought it was more like 50% and 49.9% were made up a while back on Wikipedia.
I'm just talking general software. But in my experience: Google desktop, Google earth, pretty much every instant messenger but some xmpp clients, media players etc.
There is a lot more software that won't work when you have only a IPv6 IP address on your network card (yes, I had a proper IPv6 to v4 gateway setup).
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
nm, title says it all.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
If people could actually get IPv6 service from their providers instead of having to route everything through congested tunnels, THAT would help.
If you are in North America then you are probably going to wait, since while Europe and Asia are making the transition, North America seems to be dragging its feet. If you are interested in IPv6 connectivity from you ISP, get a whole of people to make enquires through official channels. If they feel there is a market then they may add support, even if it is experimental. Heck you could always ask to be signed up as a public beta tester when they first deploy IPv6. For the moment your ISP probably doesn't see the need or doesn't have the expertise and that won't change until people starting knocking on their door asking for connectivity.
It should be noted that IPv6 is one of these technologies if implemented right many people will not realise they are using the technology because 'it just works'.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
For the last 8 years I worked for a major switch/router manufacturer and we were one of the first to forward IPv6 traffic in hardware/silicon (rather than a software data path on a generalized CPU)...back then 99% of all IPv6 traffic (what staggering little there was at the time) were pings as people just tried to prove tunneling was working (screw doing native IPv6, you couldn't get beyond a LAN with that, no major ISP outside of Japan had native IPv6 service). Looking at current networks, it looks pretty much the same, still 99% pings...
I was gung ho to set up IPv6 at home. I run linux on all the systems and figured it would be a piece of cake. However when I got to the router they provided, it does not support IPv6, even with firmware upgrades. I am trying to check if they have newer versions. Since they supply custom firmware for the box, I can't just go buy one at the store.
So, this big move to IPv6, Is this something that is recommended for LANS? I don't see a reason why a LAN would need 64 quadrillion addresses. Sorry, nothing sarcastic to say .. But if someone could enlighten me on this question, it would be nice.
how poor is this?
>>> dig -t aaaa slashdot.org
; <<>> DiG 9.4.2 <<>> -t aaaa slashdot.org
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 22121
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;slashdot.org. IN AAAA
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
slashdot.org. 495 IN SOA ns-1.ch3.sourceforge.com. hostmaster.corp.sourceforge.com. 2008080600 14400 1800 604800 3600
;; Query time: 79 msec
;; SERVER: 10.0.0.138#53(10.0.0.138)
;; WHEN: Tue Aug 19 15:28:08 2008
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 106
IPv4 addresses are like oil. We know we'll run out some day, but so far, it hasn't happened. So nobody really cares, no change happens, and we're stuck with old obsolete technology.
So we can only hope that both IPv4 address space and oil will be exhausted soon, so that finally there's real pressure to switch to a better technology. Yes it will be expensive, yes some people well be annoyed by the change, but it will be a good thing.
bye, Till
I think IPv6 has failed to garner any significant market share because the researchers who created it overthought the problem.
We still have no idea what kind of security issues we will face in v6, nor how to truly secure it (yes, we can follow the directions, but what about the holes and workarounds that have yet to be discovered?).
I think they could have done much better by coming out with an "IPv5" that simply has one more octet at the front. Routers could be programmed to filter/ignore it for compatibility on ISPs (while everyone has a chance to get their software updated), or to prepend our current four octets with "0.". It could be turned on in phases, starting with backbones and major sites (google, yahoo, etc.).
IPv6 has been too much of a leap with too many changes, and therefore has not been successful. I'm not saying it is bad (it definitely has some significant benefits), just saying that there are easier ways to move forward.
-m
"Praclarush Taonas isn't just the name; it's also the gate address."
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I recommend throwing your computer out the window
hmmm...That's why we have DNS,don't we?
Is that If there is much IPv6 hype in the future, or if IPv6 wins, you can say "I have x years experience with IPv6" (well, and more to the point, you have had x years of experience with IPv6. you have made your newbie mistakes that break things while IPv6 still doesn't really matter.)
First thing I do with any system is disable IPv6. Until I need to access something that is only reachable with it, then it stays turned off.
To the MANY who think a few nat devices makes it all better, please think again.
For one, most ISPs for home service already only give out 1 IP and we're still running out. Do you want your NAT to be behind another NAT (that you cxan't configure port forwarding on)?
Virtual servers don't help a lot either. Believe it or not, not everything on the net is a web server. Do you want to discover in a few years that you CAN NOT get a colo box hosted, but you are free to get a "virtual" home page on a one size fits all web server?
Unless IPv6 deployments get a lot more common, the other choice is to colo in IPv6 where perhaps one in a million people can even actually connect to it.
While we're not out of v4 addresses yet, actually getting a block from ARIN has become increasingly difficult unless you're AOL, Comcast, etc. Years ago, you could just ask for a class C and receive within a day. Now, you have to send in increasingly detailed "justifications" and they are increasingly likely to be found "insufficient". Next I suppose you'll have to include the results of your last colonoscopy as well. New customers want IP assignments NOW, but ARIN doesn't want to give them out until you can prove you have a current need for them. That pretty well assures that only large providers will be in the running. Don't you prefer a net where there are small and more responsive providers out there? Perhaps some who are a little less quick to automatically yank your site down if the *IAA grumbles that one file might be copyrighted?
As for why so many addresses this time rather than just adding an octet, consider that v6 has been specified for 10 years now and the adoption is pitiful at best. Do we really want to be right back here again in 2018?
Part of the freedom of the net is inextricably linked with the ability to get an IP address to be on the net with. If you don't want net access bottlenecked and controlled more than it already is, you should support a move to IPv6.
Is the stupid restrictions arbitrarily imposed on getting a block imposed by self-important registrars (eg, APNIC, ARIN, etc). They are so desparate to control this resource that nobody want's to use it. Especially when they already have IPv4.
Charging for IPv6 and rigidly controlling it's distribution is like building a five-hundred-lane toll-only-freeway with perfect roads right next to a two-lane freeway with acceptable roads, that is essentially free to use (because it was always there) and that isn't all that badly congested.
If they gave huge chunks of IPv6 away for a few years to early adopters, as they did with IPv4, then it would be more likely to lead to an environment in which corporate use would have to follow after the enthusiasts who picked up early on the idea because it was free and subsequently developed applications that require it.
Don't forget why we use WWW instead of the competing hypertext systems of the era... It was free and unrestricted. And once it's popular, there's a reason for everyone to use it.
And all they need to do to maintain their future stranglehold on an essentially limitless resource is impose appropriate technical criteria for anyone applying (eg, only provide to people who can demonstrate they know what they are doing... Like they used to a long time ago) .
Don't waste your time arguing that commercial realities will drive IPv6 implementation. I'm a consultant to government and the government has a real need for IPv6. They need it for VoIP and Toll Bypass between agencies and don't have enough IPv4 to meet this need - they all tend to use the 10.x.x.x block internally and then wonder why they can't connect up two agencies that have just merged... *sigh*.
Yet despite this, they don't see any value in going to IPv6 if no one else is going to... Why? Because it's going to cost them a few thousand in fees to the APNIC each year, so they keep putting it off.
If I could get a free permanent legacy block of IPv6 easily, I'd grab one... But there's no way I'd pay for one.
The only reason IPv6 is dead is that it's somebody's cash cow... And no one wants to buy it.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
For those of you interested, Cisco has documented which pieces of their hardware is IPv6 ready: Cisco IPv6 Solutions
Jumpstart the tartan drive.