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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
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.
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.
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
99% of IPv4 traffic is bittorrent.
Coincidentally, 99% of percentages seen in Slashdot comments are made up on the spot.
You just got troll'd!
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
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