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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.'"
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!
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?
99% of IPv4 traffic is bittorrent. Switch it to IPV6 and the traffic figures will spike!
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
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.
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
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.
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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.
It's not that simple. IPv6 already has a space for IPv4 mapping. While it's not an all-zero mapping, IPv4 traffic can be routed across IPv6 networks relatively easily, and transparently.
To move to your IPv5, you're still going to need to replace the core infrastructure, and change all the applications to support it. If you're going to do that, you might as well move to something that you're not going to need to replace again in a couple of decades, and something that's easy to route.
The big L3 switches that drive your traffic across the net are not just PC's with a couple of NICs on them; they are highly optimised hunks of silicon, that try to route packets before the CPU even knows a packet has arrived for processing.
It's a *lot* easier to decide which of the couple of hundred interfaces to direct traffic if that decision is being made primarily on a 4 byte pattern in a relatively known location. If you're going to go to 5-bytes, you might as well go to 64-bit. IPv6 has gone that little step further, using 128-bit addresses, but also taking out some of the "features" of IPv4 that lead to uncertainty in the positioning of addresses.
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
If people could actually get IPv6 service from their providers instead of having to route everything through congested tunnels, THAT would help.
Myth: We need IPV6
Fact: PITA to use IPV6 so we use IPV4
There isn't really a shortage of IP addresses at all. There is an extreme waste of IP space.
Case in point, take China squandering class A after class A (x/8). Why not just NAT the typical home users? Could do the same in Chicago, NY, California and London too. I know businesses that still have /16 spaces when in fact a /24 would do. And any business today using network routable addresses internally, well, their incompetence shines through. 10/8, 192.168/16 and others, plenty of space.
Take the waste of home IPs on my DSL, if you use one, you may be really using 4.
Or at least that is how my DSL used to work and my cable does today (yes, I have 2 static). There are some variations to this, but we waste most of the address space. In this case, 1/2 wasted and that is efficient.
And like domain squatting, many companies IP squat hogging not just IPV4 space, but have hogged IPV6 space too.
We haven't gotten to the logistics of the changeover and costs of IPV6, let alone the technical issues. At this point, IPV6 is pie in the sky for most. Oh, a few tunnel it over IPV4, or the ones with enough to rent fiber by the strand for bragging rights. But it is a macho thing.
In the end, many years out IPV6 is needed. But it isn't that impending as Cisco and others who would profit by it would have you or I believe. That is why it's adoption is small until the costs and technical issues are completely addressed.
I've been thinking about this sort of thing for ages, mostly in conjunction with ponderances on things like interplanetary news.
Between Earth and Mars, you can't FTP - the RTT is so long that the protocol-specified maximum timeout expires before a response can be returned to you. Obviously loading up a web page would be a senseless waste of time. We would need a way of transporting or requesting information in batches in order to effectively communicate things like news between planets.
In my mind, while at university, I envisioned a system consisting of 'packages', which contained some data or subset of data. It could be an entire website (which, for many companies, is merely a brochure, menu, etc. anyway), part of a website (an updated to a company's product information pages, for when e.g. Apple ships a new iMac), or even a single file - a press release, news clip, etc.
Each parcel of information would belong somewhere in a heirarchy. You could start with 'Apple' and grab their default content (say, most of what's on their website at first glance), and then delve deeper into areas like 'support', 'developer info', and so on. Those packages, while not necessarily retrieved by default, could be requested, and would slot into the heirarchy. Without them, you see that they're there and what kind of content is available; you can then request the content be updated, and when the 'package' arrives, you suddenly have access to that content as well.
Likewise, you could start issuing specific identification that computers could use to narrow down who you're looking for. Instead of www.apple.com, you could just do a search for 'Apple Computers' or 'Apple, Inc', and you would be able to find relevant information from (and about) the company. Because we can now uniquely identify business electronically, it's easy for someone writing a news article to 'tag' the article as being about Apple, Inc., and your client can do any associations you might want - stock updates, press releases (especially relevant press releases to the story), and so on, and whatever isn't local can be updated.
Obviously, this would require two things; firstly, a complete overhaul in the way the internet works; secondly, local (possibly hierarchical) caches wherever relevant, so that information doesn't need to be transmitted multiple times. Also, the caches can pre-fetch or be pre-seeded content ahead of time, so that (for example) major/popular news sites could send updates to their content in batches every hour/day/etc.
Because everything in this scheme would be tagged, dated, and versioned, it would be trivial to do a search for 'what this document (e.g. website) looked like in 2005', or 'a news article about communism from last Wednesday' or what have you.
Somehow, though, I think this sort of thing is a long ways off. Then again, maybe not.
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.
You don't know what you're talking about. What on earth is this "portal"?? NAT doesn't keep people out of your affairs. Some people, perhaps many people, CAN route to your network. If your ISP created a route for your RFC1918 blocks, everyone connected to that ISP would be able to get into your affairs if you don't have a firewall that drops those packets. Practically all cable ISPs and some DSL providers plop all their customers on one big logical ethernet. Any of those people can, in theory, set up a route for your private network gateway via your public IP address.
The ONLY thing keeping all these people off your network is your firewall. And guess what? That firewall works exactly the same way without NAT.
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.
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...
Ever read mythical man month? IPv6 is a textbook example of the second system effect.