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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?
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
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!
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.
Make all porn only reachable through IPv6.
Let me get this straight... It's not a truck?
No it's like a truck, except you can't dump stuff on it like it's a big truck.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
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.
You don't. As is the benefit of IPv6, if it's installed it should be automagically configured. It shouldn't require manual configuration.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
What's the downside to being ready?
Because it's work. Work takes time. Time is money.
A certain product at a certain company (forgive my being vague, you know how these things are) has a network interface. This interface is currently IPv4 only, no IPv6 support. When anybody asks the design team why not, they say that no customers have asked for it. Somebody suggested that IPv6 was the sort of thing you want to support ahead of need, but these guys have a lot of deadlines to meet and not enough resources to meet them. They aren't about to spend time implementing features nobody's asked for.
Of course, the time will come when their customers realize they've put off changing over to IPv6 much too long, and will start crash programs to make it happen. They'll demand that this product start supporting IPv6 immediately, if not sooner. So the design team will begin their own crash program, and IPv6 support will be added to the product in a hurry. The implementation will probably cost more and be less robust (at least initially) than if they'd planned ahead.
But they have no incentive to plan ahead. It's a common pattern.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why is everyone so eager to use NAT? I've never quite understood this, once NAT use became widespread things became a lot more problematic, in my first year of college all the workstations in the computer labs (Ultra 5s and older Sparcstation 5s) had public IP addresses and the ISP I used gave all 10 Mbps customers 5 public IP addresses. I've recently started taking a few college courses again, the uni's labs are all NATed (so you can't access /tmp or /var on workstationname-57.lab04.cs.unidomain.tld from home any more, you have to dump the files on your NFS mounted 150 MiB home dir and then access that, great fun) and my current ISP gives each customer ONE public IP address, but I suppose I should consider myself lucky for not being NATed...
Seriously, we need to move back to an internet where a machine connected to the internet can almost always be assumed to have a proper, public, IP address. It would simplify a lot of things. Also, any trolls pulling out the "yuo cant has teh firawalls withouts teh NAT!!!11" crap can please not respond to this as packet filtering does not in any way require NAT. (Not directed at parent post, just tired of trolls and ignorant fools always using that argument).
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
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
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.
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"
So what you're saying is that you have no real reason to be anti-IPv6?
2) "End 2 End" isn't a selling point. I dont want my home network to be publicly visible.
So stick it behind a firewall that blocks incoming connections to all IP-addresses assigned to you unless you allow them?
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.
So, you'd rather have ugly workarounds than see the internet work the way it's supposed to work?
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.
See answer to #1
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.
Have you even heard of the OSI model? Why in god's name would you want to have a Layer 3/4 P2P protocol? That's what TCP and IPv4/IPv6 are for.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
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.
Read the article more carefully.
If the IPv6 transition never happens at all, which seems likely at this point, then the carrier-grade NAT engines are still needed for operating the IPv4-only networks we have today.
If the IPv6 transition actually does happen, somehow, then you're right. The carrier-grade NAT engines are only needed for IPv4-compatibility. In the unlikely event that IPv4 goes the way of the OSI stack, then maybe the NAT engines will be obsoleted. Not until then.
In any case, if you're using IPv4 now and you haven't started transitioning to IPv6, then you need to prepare for a future when most of your residential and mobile customers will be communicating with you from behind carrier-grade NAT engines that multiplex multiple customers behind a single address.
For example: identifying your customers by the IP address from which they connect to you has always been a bad idea, but it will soon be an extremely bad idea.
jhw
And yet they're more secure than NAT, which you do trust?
Ever wonder how you're able to receive calls on Skype through NAT? I'll give you a hint: your network is not terribly private behind NAT ;). Private from TCP packets, sure, but NAT has to be incredibly stupid when it comes to UDP.
If you want to keep your network private, you should get a firewall that keeps your network private. NAT does not do that, but there are a lot of firewall implementations that will.
In short, when it comes to security, public IP + firewall > NAT.
Not any less handy? you have _got_ to be kidding. You expect people to whip that monstrosity up every fucking time they want to match for addresses? When working over a serial terminal on a barely-capable quirky embedded shell? And who the fuck compiles regexes? Programmers, that's who. This represents the core problem - IPv6 addressing seems to have been designed by programmers, not sysadmins.
I disagree.
I used to run an amazingly high traffic site. It required quite a few GigE pipes to run the network. The datacenters combined would have required an OC192 to stay within acceptable growth potential.
I had the urge to switch or run IPv6 in parallel. I found out what was proposed to be mandatory was quite a bit harder than it appeared.
I never did find the clear path of "this is what you need to do."
The only way I found to get my traffic to other IPv6 users was to tunnel IPv6 over IPv4. If (if, if) we had done it, it would have likely swamped those gateway services. Sure, some people want to make it happen, but what happens when many multiple big companies do it. I know Google set up the IPv6 version of their site, but they have quite a bit of negotiation power. My negotiation power was in that I could say "I'm going to need lots of bandwidth, make it available to me", and the provider would ensure it was available and that the standard growth potential was available. We had our growth down to a science, almost so much as I could tell you our aggregate 95th percentile for 12 months in the future +-5%
If I, senior tech guy at a large bandwidth customer couldn't get it done, why do we think every home user, T1 user, and average Joe Slashdot User could get it done.
If IPv6 is what we're SUPPOSE to be migrating towards, a clear well defined path must be established, and some sort of encouragement must be provided.
IPv6 for us was just a play toy, even though I wanted it done. There was absolutely no demand for it. We were only using 6 to 8 /24's, so we weren't a huge burden on the available address space. Even still, I wanted to do it, and never got it done. Queries were left unanswered. No firm responses were ever given. Even the senior techs at the Tier 1 ISP's gave vague answers like "I think we can. Ya, we should be able to support it, but we don't know. We'll try to find out."
Now I work for a company with even less pull. We discussed it, but it's a much different product, and was put together in such a way that you can't be fuzzy with it's addressing. Things are very specific. Clients will connect to exactly where you tell them, and there's no room for "and you could do this...." I no longer have the opportunity to even attempt to switch, and since the client base isn't prepared, it won't happen.
I was looking forward to the change. I know there were neat proposals involved. Unfortunately, we were never able to implement it, and most people won't be able to.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
If people like you ran the world, we'd still be afraid of using fire to cook meat, or of sowing grain to produce wheat. Fortunately, the world is usually run by people who apply reason.
The OP is right. Packet filtering has nothing to do with NAT, and it's only your paranoia (or trollishness) that's preventing you from seeing that.
I've noticed that most technical people pass through a phase where they want to do everything themselves, where writing to the bare metal is cool. We've all had that urge at one time or another. It takes a certain amount of humility and world-weariness to realize that there's plenty of good work that's already been done.
IPv6 has a feature that allows an admin to renumber an entire network quickly an easily.
See RFC2894
If I, senior tech guy at a large bandwidth customer couldn't get it done, why do we think every home user, T1 user, and average Joe Slashdot User could get it done.
I got it done perhaps because I'm not running a giant network. I set up tunnels from Hurricane Electric at home and at work, let our {Free,Open}BSD firewalls announce routes, and started using it. See my home page next to my name? There's no dancing turtle, but you can get to it over either protocol.
One of the huge wins for me as netadmin is that I can stop screwing around with port forwarding just to be able to SSH or make VOIP calls from home to work or vice versa. I'm loving me some end-to-end connectivity again.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?