No IPv6 For UK Broadband Users

BT (the incumbent telephone company in the United Kingdom) are in the process of spending millions of pounds on upgrading their network to an all-IP core. However, they have failed to consider 21st Century protocol support, preferring to insist that IPv4 is enough for everyone. Haven't they noticed the IPv4 exhaustion report yet?

Comments

2^32 ips

[Anonymous Coward]

ought to be enough for anybody

Re:2^32 ips

[corsec67]

But not enough for everybody.

Re:2^32 ips

[Artraze]

Oh come on, we've got enough for another 2 or 3 years. Who knows what could happen in that time! Global Warming disasters, World War III, you name it! A couple minor setbacks like those, and we could stretch IP4 for another century! They obviously just know something we don't...

Sounds about right

[lililalancia]

I read this snippet from Computer Weekly earlier on: - http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/it-downtime-blog/2008/10/microsoft-speech-glitch-raises.html Which pretty much sums up how not to do it!

Re:Sounds about right

[SkunkPussy]

next BT need to sort out their network architecture so that packets to your mate down the road on the same isp as you go into the local exchange and back out again, instead of go down to the local exchange, get trunked down to the isp's network, back out again to the local exchange and finally to ur mate.

Re:Sounds about right

[cjb658]

next BT need to sort out their network architecture so that packets to your mate down the road on the same isp as you go into the local exchange and back out again, instead of go down to the local exchange, get trunked down to the isp's network, back out again to the local exchange and finally to ur mate.

How often does that happen? Usually you're communicating with a server somewhere, or, if your ISP is smart, a caching server.

Re:Sounds about right

[SkunkPussy]

if your isp is in london you may for example have smaller pings to france than you do to some sites in the uk.

this is important for online gaming and so on

Re:Sounds about right

[TheRaven64]

I often connect to machines on the university campus ten minutes walk from me. Traceroute indicates that these packets go a several hundred mile round trip via London. Very few of the intervening hops are owned by BT, however, so it's not their fault. And since my round trip time is only 20ms it's not something I care much about.

Internet in the UK will fall over...

[click2005]

BT is too busy selling everyone's personal info and browsing habits to notice that in a few years their customers wont be able to do anything on t'internet because of a lack of IPv6.

It'll give them a good excuse to jack up prices because their 21CN (21st Century Network) is about as efficient as 1st century roman plumbing and is unable to handle current traffic let alone allow for any growth.

Re:Internet in the UK will fall over...

[Gizzmonic]

Did you know? First century Roman plumbing was actually...surprisingly efficient!

Those Romans brought it to your uncivilized land of drunken fog-priests, and you insult them like that. And I thought British people had a heightened sense of shame!

Re:Internet in the UK will fall over...

[R2.0]

But aside from that, what did the Romans ever do for them?

Re:Internet in the UK will fall over...

[petermgreen]

BT is too busy selling everyone's personal info and browsing habits to notice that in a few years their customers wont be able to do anything on t'internet because of a lack of IPv6.
I find that highly unlikely, some users are likely to get stuck behind nat which is far from ideal but any non-suicidal hosting provider is going to keep thier sites availible on V4 for a long time.

Also the protocol used on the network that connects users to ISPs is fairly irrelevent anyway since afaict users will be tunneled through it just like they are now.

Re:Internet in the UK will fall over...

[jabuzz]

I take it that you have never seen any actual Roman plumbing then?

Roman plumbing was very inefficient. Firstly they had no concept of a tap, the water just flowed continuously 24/7, so huge quantities of water was simply wasted.

Secondly it was largely done in lead piping. yeah way to go there.

Thirdly there was a great deal of corruption. The amount you paid for your water depended on the diameter of the pipe coming into your property. However it was common place to bribe the local water inspector to fit a larger pipe than it said on the records.

Yes it was another 1400 years after the Romans left before plumbing became widespread again in Great Britain. However that does not mean that the Roman plumbing was some paragon of efficiency.

Re:Internet in the UK will fall over...

[ScrewMaster]

Roman plumbing was very inefficient. Firstly they had no concept of a tap, the water just flowed continuously 24/7, so huge quantities of water was simply wasted.

Efficiency is relative. The Romans had (once the aqueducts were built) an effectively unlimited source of fresh water. Consequently, efficiency as a matter of conservation was irrelevant.

Secondly it was largely done in lead piping. yeah way to go there.

Their system did what it was designed to do: efficiently deliver water to the citizens of Rome. The fact that they used lead piping for much of it had nothing to do with efficiency: it just made it risky. In fact, there's often an inverse relationship between efficiency and risk. Industrial systems of all kinds can be made very efficient, if you don't bother taking safety into account.

Re:Internet in the UK will fall over...

[scipero]

Roman plumbing was very inefficient. Firstly they had no concept of a tap, the water just flowed continuously 24/7, so huge quantities of water was simply wasted.

Rain in mountains + aqueduct + gravity = 24/7 water supply. Waste? So what?

Secondly it was largely done in lead piping. yeah way to go there.

Hard mountain water quickly generates a coating of lime in the pipes. Lead? No problem

Thirdly there was a great deal of corruption. The amount you paid for your water depended on the diameter of the pipe coming into your property. However it was common place to bribe the local water inspector to fit a larger pipe than it said on the records.

Normal bureaucratic graft here. I cannot imagine any sufficiently civilized society without it.

In short, the Romans were not backwards. I've seen (and used) plenty of Roman plumbing. Did you know that the city's system still employs some of the (admittedly refurbished) lines? Best tap water I've ever tasted.

Re:Internet in the UK will fall over...

[geordie_loz]

Secondly it was largely done in lead piping. yeah way to go there.

From a certain point ov view, it can only really be called plumbing if it is lead pipes, right? Plumbum == Lead, that's where the name comes from.. Surely we should call it something different if lead isn't involved.

Re:Internet in the UK will fall over...

[squoozer]

Not having a tap was not that great a problem for them. Don't forget that the number of people back then was a tiny fraction of the number we have now. Most probably they were tapping natural springs and just diverting the water into a pipe. It would have been flowing away either way. Also, without chlorination you really don't want sitting water as it will gather all manner of "bad things".

There is a lot of rubbish talked about lead piping. The actual danger of lead piping is minimal to non-existant. Lead is exceedingly insoluble in water so the amount that makes it into the water is tiny.After a year or two lead pipes gather scale on the inside of them which actually stops the water coming into contact with the lead reducing concentations to tiny levels. Finally, lead taken in orally is not a huge problem for humans as it can't pass through the gut wall in any great amount. Lead breathed in has been shown to be a problem though.

This is not to say the Romans didn't have a problem with lead poisoning. They used to boil up old wine in lead pots because they discovered that they could produce a sweet tasing wine or crystal. That crystal was lead acetate. Some people used to consume vast quantaties of this stuff which was cause them to slowly starve to death (lead blocks the absorption of nutriants from food in the gut the treatment is normally just stop eating lead and eat lots of fibre rich food for a few weeks).

Re:Internet in the UK will fall over...

[ewanm89]

Well, it's ::1 for a start...

The border routers

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I'm sure that we can address at border routers with the UK. Since they have to switch all of the bits from the left side to the right side of the tubes, they might as well do 6to4 as well.

Re:The border routers

[AndrewNeo]

Actually, if everyone but the UK moved to IPv6, wouldn't there be plenty of room in the IPv4 space just for them?

Not all users though

[el_chupanegre]

The summary clearly fails to realise that not all broadband in the UK goes through BT's network. Virgin Media offers cable broadband through fibre optic. Don't know what their take on IPv6 is though.

Yet more FUD?

Re:Not all users though

[EdZ]

The parent clearly fails to realise that Virgin are a terrible provider (unreliable, capped transfers, packet shaping, unusually awful customer service, etc), the only users of which are those without a BT line who cannot afford to have one put in. As for their 'fibre optic' cable: It's plain and simple BS. They may use fibre between exchanges, but SO DOES EVERYONE ELSE. It's not even fibre to the kerb, let alone fibre to the home.

Re:Not all users though

[Bert64]

BT wholesale provide the underlying infrastructure, and then third party ISPs, or other divisions within BT, provide the IP level connectivity...

It's possible to get native IPv6 connectivity today through several ISPs in the UK, tho it's not really an advertised service because very few people are looking for it...

http://www.goscomb.net/
http://www.nitrex.net/

Incidentally, BT themselves used to offer an ipv6 tunnel broker service, so they clearly have some ipv6 capability.

Re:Not all users though

[farnz]

And that's entirely the problem. Both of those ISPs are advertising native IPv6 over BT's Wholesale infrastructure. Said infrastructure corrupts all small IPv6 packets - BT's answer is to say that it's not a problem, because they don't support IPv6.

Re:Not all users though

[moreati]

I used Blueyonder, before they were bought by NTL and became Virgin Media. They were the best ISP I've ever had. NTL was about the worse, sorry to hear they've dragged Blueyonder down.

It's a tricky situation in the UK, AFAICT there's no good ISP that doesn't require a BT land line. Alex.

Re:Not all users though

[Richard_at_work]

A significant proportion of Virgin Medias broadband customer base is infact nothing more than wholesale BT ADSL - Virgin Medias cabled area is relatively small.

Which makes their recent adverts comparing ADSL speeds to their cabled offering rather amusing, not often a company pays money to diss their customers on prime time TV...

Re:Not all users though

[caluml]

That's not flamebait - it's informative. Virgin aren't a good ISP by most measures. It's sort of the ITV, or Channel 5 of ISPs. If you're from the UK, you'll know what I mean.

Although I'm not sure about the claim about not running fibre to the kerb.

Re:Not all users though

[compro01]

Actually, I'm pretty sure BT owns the backbone network in the UK, so everything would go through them.

Re:Not all users though

[williamhb]

The parent clearly fails to realise that Virgin are a terrible provider (unreliable, capped transfers, packet shaping, unusually awful customer service, etc), the only users of which are those without a BT line who cannot afford to have one put in. As for their 'fibre optic' cable: It's plain and simple BS. They may use fibre between exchanges, but SO DOES EVERYONE ELSE. It's not even fibre to the kerb, let alone fibre to the home.

Depends on your region. I use Virgin Media, and there's fibre right up to my front door. Their customer service, historically terrible in the NTL days, has actually got a bit better lately too.

Re:Not all users though

[petermgreen]

Virgin Media offers cable broadband through fibre optic.
Well fiber optic is a half-truth. Afaict it's fiber to a local distribution point (not sure how many houses each serves off hand) and then cable TV cable to the premisis. Virgin media cable is only availible to about half of UK properties afaict. They are also not the best of ISPs but they are far from the worst (note: virgin media also do a service using BT wholesale ADSL in non cable areas. Afaict that is one of the shittiest services arround).

There are also the local loop unbundling ADSL providers which cover some places that virgin don't but while some of them (sky, be) are decent others (tiscali.

But I belive there are still quite large parts of the UK where the only broadband availible is BT wholesale ADSL.

All ISPs on BT wholesales network have a difficult descision to make. BT wholesales prices are too high to offer a true unlimited service at prices people will pay. So you either get so called unlimited but heavilly congested or traffic shaped packages or you get packages with an explicit traffic limit.

Re:Not all users though

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you actually read the file you linked? Virgin Media (the cable service) does very well in almost every category, in particular speed and latency. Virgin.net (an ADSL service running over BT Wholesale's lines) does badly, but this is not the cable service that GP and others are discussing.

Re:Not all users though

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet more FUD?

Yet another meaningless use of the term FUD, not reflecting the purpose that it was originally coined for. This has now reached virtually epidemic proportions.

It's almost like there is a conspiracy among those who use it in this was to cause panic, indecision and suspicion - or PIS, as I like to call it - within the public at large...

Re:Not all users though

[petermgreen]

note: I'm reffering to virgin media cable here, virgin media also do a service using BT wholesale ADSL which by all accounts is shit (the samknows report uses "virgin media" to reffer to the cable service and "virgin.net" to reffer to the ADSL service).

Umm most of the graphs are smaller is better and virgin medias line tends to be near the bottom. They do worst in the voip test but not so badly that it is likely to cause pracitcal issues. They do badly in the "current speed relative to max speed" tests but it seems the rates on virgins 10MBps or 20Mbps services are better than most people can expect from the "up to 8Mbps" services from BT wholesale.

Yes virgin do some throttling, but 25% of 20Mbps is still a very respectable 5Mbps. You have to be pretty close to the exchange to get that on BT wholesale ADSL and if you want to actually achive that performance in practice you will probablly need either a very expensive ISP account or one with a traffic cap.

Unfortunately the sky results do not seem to have been broken down into BT wholesale based and LLU (sky do both) and many of the smaller ISPs don't seem to be listed.

So virgin media cable probablly isn't the best ISP but afaict for most users they are a hell of a lot better than most BT wholesale based options.

Re:Not all users though

[petermgreen]

IIRC their cable service covers about 50% of uk households so a long way off total coverage but not exactly small either.

The cable network is bought and paid for so they are going to want it serving as many customers as possible. I doubt they care so much about the BT wholesale based ADSL.

Re:Not all users though

[Richard_at_work]

Virgin Medias cabled area covers around 3.3million UK subscribers as of 2007. BT ADSL subscribers were in the region of 6.4million in 2006.

Re:Not all users though

[petermgreen]

Are those figures current subscribers or people who can get the service if they want it? Presumablly the latter figureis the more interesting to marketers.....

Re:Not all users though

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Yes the article is FUD ... My provider uses BT ADSL and also supplies IPv6 if you ask for it.

The fact is that BT ADSL just supplies a pipe to the ISP (implemented originally using Frame Relay but with the 21CN project as a tunnel over IP) and it's up to the ISP to implement IPv4, IPv6, Chaosnet, carrier pigeon or whatever they want.

Rich.

Re:Not all users though

[KingDaveRa]

Be* would very likely support IPV6 I'd reckon, as they are one of the unbundled providers, and run their own network end-to-end.

Re:Not all users though

[farnz]

That's the problem - my provider has analysed the issue, and determined that ESR BRASes (a BRAS converts your PPP link into L2TP for the pipe to the ISP) corrupt small IPv6 packets in the process of taking them from the ISP's pipe and passing them onto my PPP link. ERX BRASes are OK.

BT's reaction to being told this is to say "so what if we corrupt packets between you and your customers? They're IPv6 packets, and we don't support that."

Re:Not all users though

[iangoldby]

The killer with Virgin though is that they have an explicit company policy of trying to make deals to charge content providers for the bandwidth used by Virgin's own customers, and deliberately throttling the traffic of those content providers that don't pay up.

Re:Not all users though

[quarkoid]

Erm. Fibre is narrowband, not broadband.

Just my 2 bits.

Re:Not all users though

[TheRaven64]

Virgin are bad, but not as bad as some of their competition. For one thing, they allow you to have an Internet connection without a phone line. Since I don't use a phone much, and spend well under five quid a month on my mobile for the calls I do make, I don't want to be paying ten pounds a month to BT for the privilege of getting a dialling tone when I plug a receiver in to the wall. Once you add in the cost of the line rental, ADSL providers cost five to ten pounds a month more than Virgin. Although they have very poor customer support, their network does work as advertised - I can get 500KB/s downloads on the 4Mb/s line I pay for (apparently it's going to be upgraded to something faster soon, but I rarely notice the difference between my home connection and the work one where I get 8-10MB/s downloads). They throttle your connection if you use a lot of bandwidth during peak times, but only for a few hours and it's protocol-agnostic (i.e. they throttle you whether it's HTTP, SCP, or Bittorrent using the bandwidth).

The most evil they've done is Phorm, but BT did that too and the best thing we can do about that is get OFCOM to ban it.

Re:Not all users though

[ewanm89]

Look up LLU, there are several backbones in the UK. You don't expect datacentres and big research institutions to use BT's backbone do you? JANET is a backbone dedicated to research and educational institutions. Mobile phone providers have there own networks, as do the cable providers.

Re:Not all users though

[ewanm89]

In fact, if I run traceroutes on my 02 ADSL connection, they never touch BT's network unless going to an actual host on BT's network.

Unwillingness to learn something new?

[erroneus]

I find a disturbing unwillingness to learn in the IT world.

I too am guilty of being reluctant to deploy technologies I don't fully understand...IPv6 being one of them. (I am told it isn't THAT big a deal but still... I don't know it and I know IPv4) And it is my guess that just as many IT groups want to solve problems with MS Windows (because that's all they know) BT probably wants to solve their problems with IPv4.

Re:Unwillingness to learn something new?

[TooMuchToDo]

Part of the problem with deploying IPv6 is that there are no best case practices. It's unexplored territory. Not every shop has the resources to research the protocal to find the best case practices to do the actual deployment (unless you're someone like Level3, Hurriance Electric [props to HE, their IPv6 works like a champ], and so on). As more people deploy IPv6 and learn the best ways to do it, others will follow.

Re:Unwillingness to learn something new?

[BobMcD]

What we're missing is the need to learn something new inside the enterprise. While the major carriers might conceivably see a need to communicate with every device on the entire planet, my corporate users feel no such pressure.

They just need to be able to hit the bright spots on the internet, send email, etc. IPv4 does all of these things, and more, just fine.

Therefore, I will not be deploying IPv6 inside this network any time soon. Will my ISP switch me to IPv6 on the outside of my network? Perhaps, but I'll be keeping IPv4 on the inside until something makes for a decent reason to change it.

No need = no progress.

Re:Unwillingness to learn something new?

[mollymoo]

They don't want to "solve their problem with IPv4". It's not like they've invested billions on 21CN and it can't do IPv6. There was some Cisco bug which meant IPv6 didn't work, so they said their wholesale broadband products (the products ISPs re-sell) don't support IPv6. The Cisco bug is now fixed, but they've apparently not deployed the fix everywhere. That's the story straight from TFA, so quite how they got that summary from it I don't know. BT haven't failed to consider IPv6 support at all, that's pure bullshit. IPv6 doesn't currently work properly on some of BT's kit, but is that because there's no demand so they haven't bothered with the fix? No, no. It can't be that. They must be idiots, or stuck in the past, or part of some fucking huge conspiracy to regress the country to the dark ages.

Re:Unwillingness to learn something new?

[Omnifarious]

Eventually it won't. In about 2.5 years IPv4 is going to be this island that can't communicate with a whole host of sites because they aren't IPv4 addressable because they can't get a public IPv4 address. And that problem island is going to get smaller and more disconnected as time goes on.

So, are you going to fix it now, or are you going to sit back and sneer about how useless it all is and wait for a crisis to actually bother to do anything?

All I see behind cries of 'NAT is enough' is some poor frightened IT geek who wants to act like a condescending know-it-all and is threatened by the idea that there might be something new to learn.

Re:Unwillingness to learn something new?

[BobMcD]

In about 2.5 years IPv4 is going to be this island that can't communicate with a whole host of sites because they aren't IPv4 addressable because they can't get a public IPv4 address.

Explain why.

Re:Unwillingness to learn something new?

[Omnifarious]

As IPv4 addresses become scarce, people wanting to set up a random public website will be forced to use IPv6, even though it limits who can see it. Anybody who has IPv6 will be able to access that website, and anybody who doesn't won't. Some of those websites will be very useful and popular, at least in the limited community of people who can access them.

As time goes on, there will be both more of those websites and more people who can access them. The size of the IPv6 accessible network will get larger and larger while the IPv4 network remains rather static.

If a market develops in IPv4 addresses, what will eventually happen is that all public IPv4 addresses will lead to well establish public companies and anything new and innovative will happen in IPv6 first, where it's easy to get an address.

The number of available IPv4 addresses is running out, and that's a simple and obvious fact. I don't know how you think a public website will happen without a public IP address.

You can select on name, but https doesn't support that well. And that just sets it up so the companies that host the public IPv4 addresses will be able to decide what websites can exist which again will tend to make sure that the most innovative and interesting websites actually happen on IPv6 first.

Re:Unwillingness to learn something new?

[BobMcD]

IPv6(...)limits who can see it

So we're pretending that NAT does not exist?

Would not a single IPv6 address shared across the corporate network be able to see this hypothetical site?

Re:Unwillingness to learn something new?

[Omnifarious]

V4 to V6 mapping NAT is possible, but I haven't seen any good implementations. I suppose some might come into existence once this problem becomes more prevalent.

I find the idea of using that just bass ackwards. Why would you want all that ridiculous complexity when you don't have to have it?

Re:Unwillingness to learn something new?

[ion.simon.c]

As more people deploy IPv6 and learn the best ways to do it, others will follow.

What different about deploying v6? Large scale network deployments is something that I know *nothing* about... I'd like to get educated.

Re:Unwillingness to learn something new?

[ion.simon.c]

It seems to me that most Slashdot IPv6 commenters forget that you can have a dual-stack machine. I'm posting from one right now!

This doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. *RIGHT NOW* (as in TODAY!) you can use IPv4 DHCP to get your DNS information and (maybe) an internet-facing IP address, then your ISP could setup a V6 route advertising daemon that'll give you an internet-facing V6 address.

Re:Unwillingness to learn something new?

[Omnifarious]

I would be perfectly happy with this solution, and it's what I do on my network at home. I have a 6to4 address.

Re:Unwillingness to learn something new?

[BobMcD]

Its the enemy you know, vs learning a new one, I'd say.

On the complexity scale, converting everything over to addressable IPv6 ranks right up there. Instead of relying on a NAT device to 'not have mapped ports', ergo firewall, you'll have to now specify which traffic goes where in an IPv6 firewall space.

Or you replace your existing NAT box, learning a little bit as you go.

For you see, even using IPv4, none of my users enjoy their own public addresses. So the very spirit of IPv6, in that way, is a change for which there isn't any business need.

Just a possibility

[BhaKi]

It might me possible that there's not much demand for static IPs in UK. When most customers don't have problems with DHCP, IPv4 address space will be sufficient because not all customers would be using their connections 24 hours.

Re:Just a possibility

[caramelcarrot]

Many people now use standalone modems often with a wireless connection in addition to ethernet. This means that most connections are actually permanently on and will require an IP.

Re:Just a possibility

[tergvelo]

It might me possible that there's not much demand for static IPs in UK. When most customers don't have problems with DHCP, IPv4 address space will be sufficient because not all customers would be using their connections 24 hours.

There's a few problems with that statement:
First: Unlike dialup users, broadband users tend to stay connected continuously (always-on).
Second: Even if the users were to disconnect from their service provider when not using the service, the DHCP lease would probably still be assigned.
Plus, it's not a long-term solution. Much like the other broadband issues here in the US (capacity), restricting users will only work temporarily. Eventually you'll still need to upgrade the system.
~t

BT

[fluch]

BT ... can one expect anything useful of them??

Have now been living 1 year here in this country and my experience with this company are enough for me (I have only a fixed line from them which I need to get internet from another ISP).

Re:BT

[Midnight Thunder]

BT ... can one expect anything useful of them??

True and BT will probably only go IPv6 once they are required to by the regulators.

Re:BT

[uglyduckling]

My recommendation - if you want decent broadband and don't mind paying for it, go with AAISP. These are the guys who wrote the blog entry that the article is based on. They use BT wholesale but actually know their stuff inside out, and when there's an issue they sort it out promptly and usually explain exactly what happened, hence this blog entry.

On the two occasions I've had to use their helpdesk during office hours, the phone hasn't actually rung - I've dialed the number, heard a little 'click' then speaking directly with an engineer. Scared the life out of me.

No, I don't work for them but I have been a satisfied customer for seven years. BTW they do landline+ADSL packages which can mean you have to deal with BT less because you're buying the phone line through AAISP's wholesale contract. They are expensive but you definitely get what you pay for. They even do a degree of monitoring for free - I manage a friend's small business IT and get a text message if the ADSL goes down (usually a power cut).

Re:BT

[innit]

You've got to remember that BT are, essentially, still a huge group of civil servants. BT is a privatised deparment of the former General Post Office, and is completely indoctrinated with civil servant and union-led work ethics. It would never have grown to be as big and overbearing as it is today had it started out as a private company.

Re:BT

[fluch]

I've got broadband from BeThere. Works lovely as does the custommer service. :)

Stop whining,

[alta]

I'm sure everyone is going to see that your IP address is 10.x.x.x soon. Enjoy the big NAT box in the sky. And I wish you luck getting your ports forwarded.

What BT Stands For

[manlygeek]

Didn't you know that "BT" stands for "Behind the Times?" OTOH, If you insist on IPv6 you get to do lots of tunneling since almost no one else is on it either. Just goes to show you what happens to innovation in the presence of a large userbase and expensive infrastructure.

Supply and demand

[slysithesuperspy]

Does this not work in this area or something, what is the scare?

Re:Supply and demand

[jimicus]

Does this not work in this area or something, what is the scare?

BT are the incumbent telco. They own the cable to the customer's home and the telephone exchange; ISPs may offer broadband but they're almost invariably buying BT's wholesale ADSL package and reselling it to customers.

There is some move to allow ISPs to install their own equipment in exchanges to handle the last mile, but this is moving painfully slowly - mainly because the regulator is generally reluctant to step in.

Setting up your own telephone exchanges and getting the necessary permits to run your own cables is prohibitively expensive, so the only alternative is the cable company (which merged into one big company a couple of years back).

Overrated

[Anders]

Haven't they noticed the IPv4 exhaustion report yet?

It seems IPv4 exhaustion is the new Y2K. Lots of reports, few problems.

Re:Overrated

[life atom]

Few problems because of the reports. Or do you think those high y2k salaries for COBOL programmers were for chatting at the water cooler?

Or for ipv4: would you buy cheap routers now if they lacked ipv6?

Re:Overrated

[Anders]

Or do you think those high y2k salaries for COBOL programmers were for chatting at the water cooler?

Uhm, yes. That was my point.

Obviously, there were some problems. There always is with software. But hell didn't break loose, power didn't go away, time didn't go backwards. This also goes for countries like Eastern Europe where little was spent on Y2K fixing.

Re:Overrated

[FlyingBishop]

Problem with that analogy: you might as well be talking about Y2K glitches in 1995. Also, Y2K was mostly a stupid high level programming problem with easy workarounds. This is hardware.

When the size of the internet requires it, we will have lots of problems. Switching everyone over to IPv6 over night will not work, and something has to happen soon. We haven't seen any problems yet because we do have ample addresses for the next couple years, and everyone can keep pretending like there's no problem until then (which will only make it worse when we hit the wall.)

Re:Overrated

[Anders]

Problem with that analogy: you might as well be talking about Y2K glitches in 1995. Also, Y2K was mostly a stupid high level programming problem with easy workarounds. This is hardware.

Buying new hardware is pretty cheap, compared to having a consultant go through millions of lines of code. You do it every three years anyway.

IPv6 will happen as quickly as DVD did.

Re:Overrated

[ohtani]

Except the reason Y2K wasn't a problem was because the majority of problems were all fixed BEFORE the time came around. Sure it was exaggerated, but this may have been A Good Thing or else companies wouldn't have gotten the clue that it was something that needed to be fixed.

Re:Overrated

[vtcodger]

***Or for ipv4: would you buy cheap routers now if they lacked ipv6?***

Well I certainly would. If my network is small enough to work with 10.x.x.x or 172.16.x.x-172.32.x.x, or 192.168.x.x addressing, why would I want anything on my network to be directly addressable by every hacker in the world. If there are any tunnels into my network, I definitely want to know about them. Others may feel differently of course.

I'm not sure that I like Network Address Translation, but I sure as hell don't see anything very appealing about the alternative of no NAT.

When "they" get internet security straightened out, (and good luck on that) then come talk to me about using Ip6v locally.

Re:Overrated

[petermgreen]

I remember a pretty long transition period between DVDs becoming readilly availible and vhs tapes stopping being readilly availible.

There are a few issues with IPV6

1: a lot of software needs modification to be able to use it. Many apps were written on the assumption that the only sockets they would work with would be IPV4 ones. For some of theese apps the people who hold the source will have dissapeared or be uncooperative.
2: until such time as the ipv6 internet is as fast and reliable as the IPV4 one moving to IPV6 as the default will mean throwing performance away. It doesn't help that browser writers seem to take a ridiculously long time to timeout and fallback to ipv4 if the ipv6 address is silently unreachable.
3: Many older professional routers have IPV6 options but implemented in software, that means they can handle far less IPV6 load than IPV4 load.
4: MOST home routers don't support ipv6 at all. Sometimes you can get arround this with custom firmware, sometimes that is hard (for example A friend of mine has a router which needs a specific kernel version for the binary driver fro the wireless to work and that kernel version has broken IPV6 support)
5: The linux kernel developers refuse to implement v6-v6 nat. They have good intentions in doing this but it will make it difficult to put one home router (home routers are very often linux based in my experiance) behind another (say because you want to isolate your machines from your housemates), especially if the ISP is a crappy one that only gives the user a /64.

Unfortunately I think we may end up in a situation with IPV4 ISP run nat the norm (note: it doesn't make sense for ISPs to go to ISP run nat until the addresses run out, they will want to justify as many as they can in the runup to allocation so they can use them for premium services later) public IPV4 addresses an expensive luxury and IPV6 used only by geeks.

Re:Overrated

[uglyduckling]

Ah yes, the United States of Eastern Europe, I learnt about that country in my geography lessons.

Re:Overrated

[life atom]

You can sort of NAT ipv6 although I won't drag up the reference material for you.

NAT isn't a firewall according to security people.

Re:Overrated

[ion.simon.c]

Mmm. My Tandy 1000TL was Y2K compliant. (I booted it sometime in February 2000 and played some ancient games. No problems whatsoever!)
It was running DOS 3.something.

Re:Overrated

[ion.simon.c]

5: The linux kernel developers refuse to implement v6-v6 nat. They have good intentions in doing this but it will make it difficult to put one home router (home routers are very often linux based in my experiance) behind another (say because you want to isolate your machines from your housemates), especially if the ISP is a crappy one that only gives the user a /64.

Two things:
1) A /64 is equivalent to *DOUBLE* the *ENTIRE* IPv4 address space. (Now, if you're complaining about not being able to subnet a /64, then I hear ya!)
2) What's so difficult about doing this:
Internet --> Housemate_Router --> WAN_Port_On_Your_Router --> Your_Machines
then setting up a firewall on Your_Router that DROPs traffic going to Your_Machines with a source address from Your_Subnet and is coming in over Your_WAN_Port? Is IP6Tables [1] so terrible that you can't do this?

[1] Or whatever it's called...

Re:Overrated

[TheRaven64]

why would I want anything on my network to be directly addressable by every hacker in the world

If you don't know the difference between a machine being addressable and being accessible then you really shouldn't be doing anything related to networks or security.

A military base is not secure because it has no postal address, it is secure because it has men with guns patrolling the big fences around the edges.

Re:Overrated

[petermgreen]

Now, if you're complaining about not being able to subnet a /64, then I hear ya!
That is the basic problem, if you want to use stateless autoconfiguration (and the only ipv6 addressing schmes windows XP supports afaict are stateless autoconfiguration and manual configuration from the commandline) you can't subnet a /64

2) What's so difficult about doing this:
Internet --> Housemate_Router --> WAN_Port_On_Your_Router --> Your_Machines
then setting up a firewall on Your_Router that DROPs traffic going to Your_Machines with a source address from Your_Subnet and is coming in over Your_WAN_Port?
It's not that hard providing the ISP is generous enough to give something a bit bigger than a /64 but it does mean you either have to use full blown routing protocols or manually configure a route table entry on the router nearest the internet. This is no trouble for us network geeks but may be difficult for normal users.

Re:Overrated

[ion.simon.c]

[Setting up that aforementioned firewall] is not that hard providing the ISP is generous enough to give something a bit bigger than a /64 but it does mean you either have to use full blown routing protocols or manually configure a route table entry on the router nearest the internet.

Why does your ISP need to give you something bigger than a /64 to do this? Is there some reason that you can't command ip6tables to use the source address and the input or output interface to decide whether or not to drop a packet? [1] For example: (On YOUR_ROUTER)

# Assume that your subnet is 2001::/64
# Assume that your WAN port is wan0
# Assume that your LAN ports are br0
ip6tables -A INPUT -s 2001::/64 -i wan0 -J DROP

Doesn't that effectively cut off your room-mates machines from your own? What have I missed?
Would you still need to muck around with routing tables?

This is no trouble for us network geeks but may be difficult for normal users.

Agreed. Right now it would be difficult for normal users.
Do you think that it would be difficult for a few smart geeks to design a tool [2] that would make some of this "replace a NAT firewall" stuff easier? Does this three point solution seem technologically feasible?
If we added a "Block traffic that claims to be from my network coming from the Internet" checkbox to the web-interface that inserted something like that ip6tables line into the firewall config, might that help resolve *your* "roommate" scenario?

Cheers,
Simon

[1] Be aware that I've never done this myself, I've only glanced briefly at the iptables docs. I could be (and probably am) WAAAY off base here.
[2] Maybe a "web page" administration interface for a router?

Re:Overrated

[petermgreen]

Is there some reason that you can't command ip6tables to use the source address and the input or output interface to decide whether or not to drop a packet
If your machines and your "roommate"s machines are on the same subnet then traffic between them will never hit the IP stack in the router and hence can't be filtered by it.

So if you want to filter traffic between your machines and your roommates machines you need them to be on different subnets.

With IPV4+NAT this is no problem, the private IP space is plenty big enough to have multiple private subnets either managed by one nat or with two nats one behind the other.

IPV6 was designed on the assumption that every subnet would be a /64. If you don't follow this then you will not be able to use stateless autoconfigruation which is iirc the only autoconfiguration option supported by windows. I'm not sure if windows even supports setting up an IPV6 interface with a subnet other than a /64 (if it does I can't find any documentation on it)

ISPs were supposed to give thier users more than a /64 to avoid this problem. Unfortunately many of them don't.

Re:Overrated

[Anders]

1) A /64 is equivalent to *DOUBLE* the *ENTIRE* IPv4 address space.

Define "double".

Re:Overrated

[ion.simon.c]

"Double" means twice the bits of a IPv4 address. [1] So, maybe you can have 2^64 addresses in a /64? [2]

[1] Yeah, I should have been *much* more explicit in my description. : <

[2] I recall seeing a graphic that broke down the number of possible IP address assignments for each subnet size from a /128 down to a /64. I *thought* that the graphic indicated that you could have ~4 million addresses in a /64. But the programmer in me knows that you can have 2^64 combinations in 64 bits... So either:
1) I'm mis-remembering.
2) The graphic was wrong.
3) There's something going on with V6 addressing that I don't know about.

Re:Overrated

[ion.simon.c]

If your machines and your "roommate"s machines are on the same subnet then traffic between them will never hit the IP stack in the router and hence can't be filtered by it.

Holy freaking crap. I never knew this. : (
(I just ran a little experiment that confirms what you're saying.)

Re:Overrated

[lamapper]

If your machines and your "roommate"s machines are on the same subnet then traffic between them will never hit the IP stack in the router and hence can't be filtered by it.

Holy freaking crap. I never knew this. : ( (I just ran a little experiment that confirms what you're saying.)

And if you tunnel your server out to the internet your ISP provider can't completely control that either. Of course they can do worse. They can spoof your packets with a Kill, (drop, reject, etc...) so that your communication stops and they can slow down your communication based on some arbitrary set of rules only beneficial to them.

Wait a second...

[PJCRP]

AAISP Blogspot

Hold on...

AAISP - Broadband you can work with

Waaaaaaaait...

Andrews & Arnold Ltd is a telephone service provider in the UK...

Can anybody say FUD business tactics?

Re:Wait a second...

[lga]

BT provides the backbone network and local loop used by most UK ISPs. AAISP is trying to provide IPv6 and can't because BT won't fix a bug in their network. Where's the FUD?

Re:Wait a second...

[Fzz]

Andrews and Arnold are actually very competent and no-nonsense - I've been using them for a few years now. Only ISP I know of where home users can interact with real human techies that actually understand the technology.

Re:Wait a second...

[uglyduckling]

I'll just join this little happy A&A lovin' club. No, seriously, I've been using them for seven years and never found a better ISP. So... *cough*... "me too!".

IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Spazmania]

There is a small but growing number of folks who think IPv6 may be stillborn. The rationale goes something like this:

1. It's very expensive to upgrade an infrastructure of non-trivial size to IPv6 and that's only one of the several serious disincentives against deploying IPv6.

2. IPv6's rate of deployment to date can only be described as an abysmal commercial failure.

3. IPv6 fails to solve the Internet's core routing problem (reference the IRTF Routing Research Group). It's possible that a protocol which does solve that problem will leapfrog IPv6's deployment.

4. 2^32 addresses IS enough for everybody, IF most client computers are behind a NAT firewall. The count is too low only if most client computers need their own globally-routable address. That most client computers need their own globally-routable address is a dubious claim in light of today's wide deployment of NAT.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[mikael_j]

1. It's very expensive to upgrade an infrastructure of non-trivial size to IPv6 and that's only one of the several serious disincentives against deploying IPv6.

Waaah Waaah! We cheaped out during our last hardware upgrade cycle so we'd have to upgrade everything this time around! Waaah!

2. IPv6's rate of deployment to date can only be described as an abysmal commercial failure.

True, this is partly because a lot of ISPs will simply say NO to customers asking about IPv6. The ISP I'm using at home basically told me they are officially "testing" IPv6 for residential users but that this testing is very very limited and that business customers who want IPv6 get to pay extra for it. So I'm using a Sixxs tunnel for now.

3. IPv6 fails to solve the Internet's core routing problem (reference the IRTF Routing Research Group). It's possible that a protocol which does solve that problem will leapfrog IPv6's deployment.

The main problem IPv6 is supposed to solve is the same problem that the original IP protocol was supposed to solve, the lack of end-to-end addressing on the internet.

4. 2^32 addresses IS enough for everybody, IF most client computers are behind a NAT firewall. The count is too low only if most client computers need their own globally-routable address. That most client computers need their own globally-routable address is a dubious claim in light of today's wide deployment of NAT.

NAT breaks the internet and is essentially an ugly workaround that results in the need for lots of other workarounds. If you think this isn't so then you need to get your head out of the sand/your ass (your choice) and pay better attention.

/Mikael

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[marcosdumay]

"NAT breaks the internet and is essentially an ugly workaround that results in the need for lots of other workarounds."

Yeah, but the pretty thing is that we are the ones suffering the problems caused by NAT, and spending on the workarounds. But the ISPs are the one economizing at the IPv6 migration.

You can arguee until the end of time that on a competitive environment, if the consumers want, somebody will supply them. But that doesn't make the broadband market competitive.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Angostura]

NAT breaks the internet and is essentially an ugly workaround that results in the need for lots of other workarounds.

Sorry, but you sound exactly like the Bellheads of yore who argued that the Internet was a horrid kludgy mess, and whay everyone actually needed was ATM to the desktop. Afterall, they argued, there's absolutely no way you could get effective video or voice over a medium with no decent QoS, end-to-end bandwidth reservation system etc.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[joh]

NAT breaks the internet and is essentially an ugly workaround that results in the need for lots of other workarounds.

It's exactly the non-brokenness of IPv6 in this regard that makes some people think twice about it. NAT is perfect for consumers, because you can't have *servers* strewn about every household with it, while you can perfectly consume (as you should). With IPv6 you can have every device having its own (even static) IP and as such can have it act as a reliably reachable server. This thought is a nightmare for some.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[MightyYar]

You could, um, still use a hardware firewall.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[gbjbaanb]

With IPv6 you can have every device having its own (even static) IP and as such can have it act as a reliably reachable server. This thought is a nightmare for some.

Not for me!! When you return home to find a truck-sized box of butter on your doorstep, you'll know to go to your fridge and turn off the 'automatically reorder on low stock' option on its internal webserver. Mouhhaahahahahhaa, my dreams of dairy domination will take over the world!

Now, who needs more cheese.....

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Stiletto]

It's only a nightmare to people who don't understand the difference between NAT and a firewall.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[fgaliegue]

There is a small but growing number of folks who think IPv6 may be stillborn. The rationale goes something like this:

1. It's very expensive to upgrade an infrastructure of non-trivial size to IPv6 and that's only one of the several serious disincentives against deploying IPv6.

2. IPv6's rate of deployment to date can only be described as an abysmal commercial failure.

3. IPv6 fails to solve the Internet's core routing problem (reference the IRTF Routing Research Group). It's possible that a protocol which does solve that problem will leapfrog IPv6's deployment.

4. 2^32 addresses IS enough for everybody, IF most client computers are behind a NAT firewall. The count is too low only if most client computers need their own globally-routable address. That most client computers need their own globally-routable address is a dubious claim in light of today's wide deployment of NAT.

I fail to understand point 1: at the hardware level, I see no reason why any hardware equipment needs modification to support IPv6, unless you rely on "firmware-accelerated" hardware (TCP offloaders and whatnot). At the upper layers, all you need is software which handles both protocols. They're pretty much universal today.

I agree and disagree with point 2:

* imho, the main problem is the "misdistribution" of the IPv4 space to begin with. Do you think it's normal that Hewlett Packard owns two (yes, two) A-class IP networks, yet certainly does not have 2*(2^24-2) reachable hosts? Or that, for instance (real life example!), a VPN, P as in private, for one of our clients, uses a 126.192.0.0/14 network mask?
* this very same poor address space distribution, on the other hand, incites so-called "developing" countries to embrace IPv6, especially in Asia: they just don't have enough unique IPv4 addresses to fulfill the current customer demand for Internet connections, so IPv6 is a reality over there already.

The IPv6 rate of deployment is abysmal in Europe and the US, maybe, but not in several other parts of the world - which happen to weigh more and more on the global state of things as time passes by.

I don't know about 3, so I won't comment.

As to point 4, I wholly agree that NAT won't go away. I'm not sure that even then, the IPv4 address space will be enough eventually.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[fgaliegue]

NAT breaks the internet and is essentially an ugly workaround that results in the need for lots of other workarounds. If you think this isn't so then you need to get your head out of the sand/your ass (your choice) and pay better attention.

Sorry but no.

For a machine that only needs to access other machines on the Net, but MUST NOT be reached at all (think: typical enterprise workstation, but that's just one scenario), NAT is THE solution. There is no better way for a machine not to be reachable than giving this machine a non routable address.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[CrtxReavr]

> 1. It's very expensive. . .

Too bad. It costs money to run a decent network.

> 2. IPv6's rate of deployment to date. . .

You could have made that argument about IPv4 in 1994.

> 3. IPv6 fails to solve the Internet's core routing problem. . .

I don't know what IRTF IPv6 research you're referencing, despite some cursory Googling, but there's several examples of large-scale IPv6 routing in deployment (sixxs.net, go6.net, tunnelbroker.net, AfriNIC, Et al.) and they're working quite well. When talking about IPv6, people always want to talk about the address space, but it has a lot more features and enhancements than that. One key one in regards to making things easier on the routing infrastructure is MTU Path Discovery, which puts the burden of packet fragmentation on the sending host, instead of the routers along the way.

> 2^32 addresses IS enough for everybody. . .

Well. . . it's not 2^32 though. Despite the address space, if you look at how the IP space was doled-out, it's barely 2^31 (http://icicle.dylex.net/~ipmap/). NAT's gotten us a long way, and it's fine if all you're into is web & E-mail, and it fits the anti-net-neutrality model of providers and consumers, but it breaks horribly the model of open, peer-to-peer communication. The internet can be so much more if everything's potentially routable to everything else.

I read somewhere (Can't find it now.) that IPv6's address space was intended to provide addressing for 250 years worth of expansion into the solar system. Well, that hints at all sorts of cool possibilities, but as someone who's done a lot of IPv6 deployment, when I think of the advantages of the address space, I don't think so much in terms of the billions (of billions) of devices across the solar system I can assign addresses to, but I think of it in terms like this.

I administer a very extensive network testing environment. About six years ago, we allocated a /22 sized VLAN (~1024 addresses) of RFC-1918 space for a very specific purpose and over the next four years, we gradually issued just about every available IP for active devices on the network. We knew we needed to add another VLAN for the same purpose, but we didn't think we'd need another /22, so we went with a /23 (~512 addresses), but now we regret having not just gone with a second /22 instead, because the /23 is full as well. I just recently allocated an other /22 in addition to the /22 and /23 we already had. I'd love to just re-do it all into a single /20 (~4096) addresses, but I can't take the downtime hit to do so.

Now had this been an IPv6 network, a standard /64-sized prefix, even using EUI-64/stateless-autoconfig addressubg (which burns two or three bytes of address space), we'd could still *IN THEORY* have 2^40 hosts.

Now since we're on the subject of IPv6, I do actually have one concern about its potential longevity, but it's not about the IP address space, but the "next header" field, or the protocol ID. Just like IPv4, IPv6 only allocates one byte for this field. If you look at the list (http://www.iana.org/assignments/protocol-numbers/), you'll see that in 30 or so years of IPv4, we've allocated roughly 140 IP protocols. The next 250 years protocol specs could get a little dicey. >=]

-CR

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Cowmonaut]

NAT is *not* a solution to a problem. NAT has a very specialized purpose that just happens to

enable a stop gap for the "address spaces we're running out of" issue.

If everyone NATs (like most already do) the routing tables get exponentially more complex, and they don't NEED to be.

Just hope, mod me +1 wishful thinking, that the hardware vendors start replacing RMA's and upgrades with IPv6 + IPv4 compatible equipment so we can switch over more easily later...

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[citylivin]

But who wants to remember some 32 digit hexadecimal number?

Maybe if they used decimal numbers it would be a bit easier for people to implement.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Yeah, like my parents, or just about anyone who isn't an internet engineer.

Sorry, but NAT/firewall is convenient for them and effortless to set up.

Before you say, I use IPv6 for some stuff at home and I was an internet engineer.

Rich.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[petermgreen]

NAT breaks the internet and is essentially an ugly workaround that results in the need for lots of other workarounds. If you think this isn't so then you need to get your head out of the sand/your ass (your choice) and pay better attention.
Yeah but the few non-geek apps that are affected have already got those workarrounds in place, tested and being used by large numbers of users (afaict most home users are behind a nat router and only fairly geeky ones will set up port forwarding on it).

ISP level nat sucks for us geeks who want to run servers at home but most ordinary users probablly won't notice. For the ISPs it also means a new revenue stream selling globally routable IPs to thier pickier customers.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Paul Carver]

1. It's very expensive to upgrade an infrastructure of non-trivial size to IPv6 and that's only one of the several serious disincentives against deploying IPv6.

Waaah Waaah! We cheaped out during our last hardware upgrade cycle so we'd have to upgrade everything this time around! Waaah!

2. IPv6's rate of deployment to date can only be described as an abysmal commercial failure.

. . . The ISP I'm using at home basically told me they are officially "testing" IPv6 for residential users but that this testing is very very limited and that business customers who want IPv6 get to pay extra for it . . .

If I may quote you, "Waaah Waaah!"

Do you think that companies pay for infrastructure out of their employees pockets? You mock companies because they "cheaped out" but you criticize your ISP because they charge extra for something that very few customers want.

Every company that doesn't fail and go out of business has to balance the things their customers want badly enough to pay for against the cost of providing things. If customers want IPv6 enough to pay for it then companies will provide it.

The reason IPv6 is going nowhere is because any company that offers it is going to have much higher expenses than a company that doesn't and they're going to either make that up in revenues or they're going to go out of business.

"Making it up in revenue" is a synonym for charging more. If 99.99+% of customer don't give a rat's ass about IPv6 then they're not going to buy from that ISP who's prices are x% higher to cover the pricy IPv6 capable hardware that their competitor didn't buy.

Of course, many areas don't have any broadband competition so it's just a question of whether they spend the money on upgrades and force the costs onto their captive customers. Until IPv6 has real benefit to me I'll be glad if my ISP "cheaps out" and keeps my IPv4 prices down. Buy IPv6 hardware when the current hardware is about to fail from old age, don't toss perfectly good IPv6 hardware in the trash and bump up my monthly bill to cover buying IPv6 hardware that doesn't do me any good.

There may come a day when IPv6 is needed, or something different may appear before that day arrives. In either case, until there's a real benefit to CUSTOMERS, any company that tosses out perfectly good hardware just because it doesn't support IPv6 is just stupid. By all means, verify that new hardware you buy is IPv6 capable, but don't waste money replacing hardware that's perfectly functional doing IPv4. There's just no good reason to toss IPv4 hardware in the trash just because it can't do IPv6.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of the work done by routers is implemented in hardware, and that hardware is specific to IPv4. IPv6 does require new routers, not just a firmware upgrade to the existing ones, most of which probably support IPv6 to some extent, but software routing IPv6 would overwhelm those routers.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[MattBurke]

I fail to understand point 1: at the hardware level, I see no reason why any hardware equipment needs modification to support IPv6, unless you rely on "firmware-accelerated" hardware (TCP offloaders and whatnot). At the upper layers, all you need is software which handles both protocols. They're pretty much universal today.

You're making a VERY big assumption that large networks are generally full of brand new installs (under 5 years old) and have been setup by people who can't be bothered to follow security basics and disable unneccessary things like IPv6 support. You assume that ALL the software will support IPv6, and that the software that doesn't can be easily brought up to date without having to pay $$$ for someone to re-impliment the software as the original developers went bust 10 years ago...

How would you propose testing and upgrading a few thousand servers knowing that just ONE missed server could cause substantial financial loss if it doesn't play ball when you throw the switch?

Network equipment wise, you're looking at spending a hell of a lot of money. 90% of the switches you see in datacentres and cable rooms for instance are Cisco 2900s/3500s and 3Com SS2s which don't support IPv6. I'll bet half the 7200 routers which run a substantial proportion of the Internet are running IOS versions which pre-date IPv6 too

Not everyone runs your average bedroom linux install in commercial environments.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Spazmania]

at the hardware level, I see no reason why any hardware equipment needs modification to support IPv6, unless you rely on "firmware-accelerated" hardware

100% of the network core uses firmware accelerated hardware. General purpose computers at the moment can't reliably move data much above 750mbps between multiple interfaces.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Spazmania]

We cheaped out during our last hardware upgrade cycle so we'd have to upgrade everything this time around!

Well, that's the rub: if few others do, they don't have to. Quite the contrary: the ones in controlling positions like BT can cheer on their competitors IPv6 deployment because it drains their competitors cash. That means that next year they'll no longer be a competitor.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Spazmania]

You could have made that argument about IPv4 in 1994.

Get your history right. By 1994, IPv4's deployment was a tremendous success, beggaring the deployment of any other unified data network in the world. Only the voice telephone network was more extensively deployed. Commercial use of the IPv4 Internet was restrained, barely, by NSF policy on the appropriate use of the federally funded backbone.

To find a time when things like x.25 or xns were still considered serious competitors to IPv4, you have to rewind to the late '80s.

A more accurate historical model for IPv6 may be the OSI protocol suite. It wouldn't be surprising since after OSI's failure in favor of IPv4, many of the same folks came back to design IPv6.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[ion.simon.c]

Easy.
The DNS server will!

Do this:

$ ping6 ipv6.google.com

OR:

C:\Windows> ping ipv6.google.com

IOW: Please stop trolling. You're hurting Slashdot.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[ion.simon.c]

Here's a hypothetical situation for ya:

Assume IPv6 is "mainstream" now. Every IP enabled device created in the last four years has supported it. All major OS manufacturers support it. All routers and associated devices on the public Internet support it.
Assume that every consumer-grade IP(v4 or v6) enabled device has a "friendly name" that can be queried programatically.
Assume that every home router sold for the past four years provided the following things:
1) A "web interface" for managing computers attached to the router. (Where "attached" means "has acquired DHCP lease or has been manually configured to communicate on the LAN".)
2) A default firewall policy that worked out to: "only accept inbound connections that are related to an already established outbound session".
3) A method to select a computer by its "friendly name" and allow inbound connections that are unrelated to an established outbound session. [1]

Given that situation, I'd like to ask you a question.
How is this any less secure than hiding your live servers behind a NAT?

Additionally, if we disregard all that stuff about IPv6, and only assume that IP enabled devices have a "Friendly Name" [2] do you feel that we currently have the technical prowess to produce the router described above?

Looking forward to your reply,
Simon

[1] You could make it a Wizard interface that asks you questions like "Is this a web server? Are you hosting $VIDEO_GAME?" Add in an advanced option that skips the wizard and permits you to specify ports or port ranges.
[2] All Windows PCs that I've run into have a hostname that would function as this "Friendly name".

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[ion.simon.c]

Yeah but the few non-geek apps that are affected have already got those workarrounds in place, tested and being used by large numbers of users

http://www.sinsofasolarempire.com/faqs.aspx

Look for:
"Q: The game is telling me that I may not be able to host the game. What do I need to configure?"

Is a video game a "geek app" or a "non-geek app"?

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[ion.simon.c]

If everyone NATs (like most already do) the routing tables get exponentially more complex, and they don't NEED to be.

How does NAT complicate the routing tables across the internet?

Consider this situation:

Internet --> Router --> Network A --> NAT --> Network B

Doesn't the routing table only get more complex for the NAT on the boundary of Network A and Network B? It's my understanding that all that Network A sees is a single host attached to Network B. (Please do correct me if anything I've said is incorrect.)

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[sjames]

4. 2^32 addresses IS enough for everybody, IF most client computers are behind a NAT firewall. The count is too low only if most client computers need their own globally-routable address. That most client computers need their own globally-routable address is a dubious claim in light of today's wide deployment of NAT.

and 0 IP addresses is enough if you're not on the net at all. So what?

Personally, I would rather not be behind an ISP's NAT. At least behind my own, I can forward a port without having to beg someone.

As for the internet's core routing problem, the only problem is routers with anemic memory and CPU. In a world where servers come in dual-quad-core w/ 32GB of RAM and dirt cheap laptops have dual cores and 1GB, there's not really much excuse for routers not being able to handle at least 32 significant bits of routing table. Current standards are to hand out /48's. That means the core routers would have 32 significant bits of v6 routing (plus 1 to route all of 2002/16 to the nearest 6to4)

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Spazmania]

I would rather not be behind an ISP's NAT.

And if you can request a static, globally routable IP address for $5/month? Remember, you're in the 99th percentile of power users. Success with ISP-based NAT -doesn't- require that all clients be behind a NAT; it only requires that most clients be behind a NAT.

only problem is routers with anemic memory and CPU.

Wrong. Even with a fast CPU dedicated to only managing the routing table, it would take tens of minutes to process 4B BGP updates in response to a nearby link failure. The RAM simply can't change fast enough.

Also, while the speed limit for software-routed packets keeps increasing, it's still only passing through 750mbps. When you want to switch traffic between a dozen 10gbps interfaces, you have to move the task from software on a CPU to custom hardware.

One of the solutions is heavy parallelism that reduces individual data streams under the CPU limit. But then you have to maintain a full CPU and memory for the routing table for -each- CPU. Not 32G for the router, but 32G * 100.

Another is a TCAM: a special kind of memory. The individual cells are like SRAM but they're not addressed directly. Instead, all cells of the TCAM are activated on each lookup, and the TCAM spits out the row that has the best match. Not only is that expensive to build, its a power hog. A TCAM capable of handling a 4B entry routing table would draw something on the order of 5 to 10 kilowatts just to operate the TCAM.

Long term, the solution is a different kind of Internet Protocol, one which doesn't require a global route every time a hobbyist in his basement wants two ISPs. Some of the theoretical protocols allow multihoming of every home office plus mobility (which can look a lot like multihoming) with less than 50k global routes. Modern CPUs can easily keep up with changes to 50k routes and a TCAM which handles 50k routes is cheap to build and cheap to run.

Unfortunately, IPv6 is not such a protocol. IPv6 routes exactly the same way that IPv4 does with the additional detriment that it takes 4 times the TCAM capacity because the address is 4 times as long.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[sjames]

If you've set up your network so badly that a single link going down alters 4 Billion routes, you're doing it wrong!

I'm not suggesting that the CPUs soft route all the packets, only that they handle the routing table. I presume (as is the usual case) that custom ASICs will read the table and do the actual packet switching.

Once you commit to having at least 4GB of memory, you no longer need TCAM at all. Just take your 32 significant bits and use them to index into the table and get a byte back.

That byte can be a table selector, a port selector or even a sub-processor selector. Given the cost of a (for example) Cisco linecard, a few extra Gig of fast RAM should hardly matter, even if it's ECC, mirrored, and hot swappable.

One reason I came up with 16GB is that it's enough to map any arbitrary 32 bits of destination information into an arbitrary 32 bit routing address. (without CAM)

What I'm thinking is that for now, we would be fine using IPv4 as a routing protol if we can get from routing /24s to /32s. Each and every v4 IP can be transformed into a v6 prefix big enough to hold every machine ever made 64K times over (at least).

It's not like a core router has to figure out which port of the switch on my desk should be used, it really just needs to choose the best AS to pass the packet to.

A lot of routers below the MAE could get by with less. If there are only 16 possible routes out, use 2 GB of RAM and the least significant bit selects high or low nybble.

Beyond all of that, there's no reason why any of the more advanced routing schemes can't operate on top (or depending on your perspective, underneath) IPv6. Like it or not, there are now millions of machines out there that are happy to speak v4 or v6 and not any of the theoretical protocols.

Do you really believe that any theoretical protocol that nobody has any practical experience with can get all the way to global deployment (passing through testing, international ratification, and actual product production) with actual hardware in the next 5 years?

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Spazmania]

If you've set up your network so badly that a single link going down alters 4 Billion routes, you're doing it wrong!

What, are you dense? What do you think happens when you're an edge node multihomed with exactly two service providers and the link to one of them fails?

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[sjames]

What, are you dense? What do you think happens when you're an edge node multihomed with exactly two service providers and the link to one of them fails?

No, as a matter of fact, I'm not. Were you raised by wolves? (as your choice of expression suggests)

An edge router w/ 2 uplinks losing one of them would at MOST change 2 billion routes. Of course, most people don't run full tables on an edge router, and will be much less likely to when tables are typically a full 32 bits. Simple eql will do the job. That way, if a link goes down, NO routes change (just a link state).

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Spazmania]

I apologize for the "dense" remark.

What I was trying to impart was that the CPU/DRAM approach has been thoroughly studied by groups like the IRTF RRG and while there is a chance of successfully accommodating 10M BGP-style routes on a 10-year horizon given a $2B annual systemic investment, that's about the limit. If you don't believe me, set up a copy of Quagga on four five-end PCs with BGP in a line. A-B-C-D-E, each with a different AS. Announce 1M routes from E. Announce the same 1M routes with 5 ASes prepended from A. Now, disconnect E from D and measure how long it takes for B, C and D's routing table to stabilize.

Then, realize that with a 10M table there will be routine link failures that churn 1M routes in the nearby routers. And realize that Quagga is only handling the RIB portion of the routing table. A real router has to process both the RIB -and- the FIB, a much harder task.

This has been studied to death in places like the IRTF RRG. The bottom line is that 4B route BGP-style backbone is not achievable with any known or projected technology. If we want 4B routes or route-like elements, a monolithic-push distance-vector algorithm (like BGP) isn't going to do the job.

And if you still don't believe me, come to IETF 73 next month and sit in on the RRG sessions.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[sjames]

Apology accepted.

BGP is quite another matter. BGP probably does need to go. I'm making a distinction between storing a routing table (quite possible with a larger amount of regular old DDR2) and the protocol to announce routes and generate that table (currently BGP).

That's what I meant about the ability to overlay a more advanced protocol on top (or under) IPv6. IPv6 solves the problem of not having enough endpoint addresses to go around. The next problem is how do we lay them out so we have a hope of routing them.

One consideration is that by making addresses less scarce, we will have less fragmentation. There are way too many cases where someone can't get more than a /24 because they can't prove they'll need it within 6 months. Sure enough, 6 months later, they're applying for another one, and then another after that.

Nevertheless, I am generally in agreement that BGP is running out of steam and will have to be replaced. Whatever is used, it would be better if routers have more rather than less CPU power to make sure they can reliably execute that routing scheme. To reiterate, I certainly do not expect the CPUs to actually do the routing, just compute the table (presumably based on some NOT-BGP protocol).

It may be that part of the answer will be that v6 prefixes must be at least roughly hierarchical. That is, start with 64K regions. The core routers then need only consider 64K entries to make their decision. A layer below them then make a decision from there. While it is not by any means impossible that someone will want to fail over across regions, that will be less common than someone simply being multi-homed at the same location. In effect, it pushes part of the routing decision back to DNS to figure out. If bind and friends would simply support prefix variables in zone files, failover would be quite easy.

All of that aside, my major point is that whatever might be done there, it won't require a new IP protocol. That's a good thing since it's a bit late to deploy a new IP protocol stack to all of the existing clients. Currently, the major OSes have been able to handle v6 for quite a while now (even XP! you just have to install the protocol) including embedded OSes.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Spazmania]

Actually, we've studied the routing by topology problem.

We've proven that routing by geography is not possible within the Internet transit business model, specifically geographical routing is only successful if there's only one backbone provider. Every geographic solution with more than one backbone has misroutes where packets transit links for which neither the sender nor the receiver has paid.

At this point, only two topological-oriented solutions have been found which hold out promise for a long term routing solution:

1. Map-encap (indirection). Large numbers of discontiguous addresses are mapped to topologically located exit-routers and then encapsulated into a packet addressed to that exit router. Once they reach the exit router, they're decapsulated and local routing takes over for final delivery. IPv6 offers no advantage in this approach versus IPv4.

2. Fully dynamic addressing in which the topologically based host address or addresses changes during operation to reflect changes in the network topology. This is wholly incompatible with IPv6's layer-4 protocols which require a stable layer-3 address in order to function.

#1 is a dirty hack and the closer we look the dirtier it gets. To make it clean, we'd need to design a layer-3 packet around the assumption of indirect routing with appropriate fields for the core ingress router to fill in plus headroom in the MTU so that the ingress router can expand the packet with transit information. IP header options don't work as it turns out. It's too hard to build hardware accelerators that can handle variable-length headers and when the source hosts get a packet too big message, they don't understand what to do about the additional IP options that they didn't put there.

In other words, we'd need to kick IPv6 to the curb.

#2 holds real promise but it means at least discarding IPv6's layer 4 protocols. Even if it keeps IPv6's layer 3 protocol there's absolutely no reason it can't also keep IPv4's layer-3 protocol at the same time (just as IPv4 and IPv6 run over multiple layer-2 protocols). If that were to happen, deployment of statically addressed IPv6 would end up being a waste of money that will require the same work and cost from both the folks who upgraded and the folks who didn't in order to deploy the new dynamically-addressed protocol.

See, the layer-4 protocols' reliance on the static-during-operation nature of the layer-3 address really limit the possible ways to route packets. The options are distance-vector (like BGP) and link-state (like OSPF). That's pretty much it; every other approach we've tried has unresolvable failure scenarios. Neither one is capable of an additional two orders of magnitude of growth.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[sjames]

We've proven that routing by geography is not possible within the Internet transit business model, specifically geographical routing is only successful if there's only one backbone provider. Every geographic solution with more than one backbone has misroutes where packets transit links for which neither the sender nor the receiver has paid.

I'd like to know a bit more about that. I'm not sure I see why correctly configured routers would (or even could) route over a link where no appropriate agreement exists. If I am provider A in New England and have a packet bound for London (for example), my routers would send them over links I either buy transit over or have some sort of shared cost peering arrangement for. If B (with whom I peer for domestic traffic) foolishly announces a route to London to me and I accept it, then we're both mis-configured. For that matter, my top level router shouldn't even see B.

Regional routers should concern themselves only with the parts relevant to them. That is, my inter-regional router(s) should know how to reach other regions and the intra-region router(s) for my network. The intra-region routers know about peers within the region and my inter-regional router(s).

I'm not saying there isn't a problem there, just that I'm not seeing it.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Spazmania]

I'd like to know a bit more about that

Take a look at: http://bill.herrin.us/network/geoag.gif

Nodes A through H represent autonomous systems.
The black lines indicate physical network connections.
The blue circles represent geographic areas which you want to aggregate into a single global route.
The green arrows indicate payment for service. (thus the green. Get it?) The black lines without green arrows are peering links.

If you construct the routes with normal BGP ignoring the geographic areas, all nodes can reach all other nodes and the packets will only travel peering links and links where there is a trail of green arrows from either the packet source node or the packet destination node. In other words, it accurately represents the business relationships that form the basis of the Internet's physical construction.

With geographically aggregated routes, the nodes in one circle see only a single route for all of the nodes in the other circle. No matter how you construct the forwarding information base (FIB) at each node, at least one of the following is true:

D routes to E via the B-C link (payment violation)
H routes to A via the F-G link (payment violation)
Some nodes can't reach other nodes.

The only way it functions without violating one of the company's networks is if B and F are the same company and C and G are the same company where from a payment perspective it doesn't matter which of the inter-geography links your packet transits to get to its destination.

So unfortunately when the IPNG guys back in 1998 thought they were going to solve the routing problem with hierarchical aggregation (which at least at one level is identical to geographic aggregation), it turned out they were in error about the feasibility. That really wrecked the whole routing plan for IPv6. The Regional Internet Registries are still adjusting to that reality, which is another drag on IPv6's deployment.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[sjames]

D routes to E via the B-C link (payment violation)

D paid C for connectivity B presumably has a relationship with C that allows traffic in that direction as well. Otherwise, C shouldn't be advertising that route to D or it should have a route in the other direction that it can use.

Same for H->A through F-G

Mp>If H routed through C-B, THAT would be a payment violation, but then the peer-link between C and G is mis-configured (if C didn't want to haul G's traffic to the other region, it shouldn't have offered to do so by announcing a route. If H doesn't want the potential payment liability for that, it shouldn't have accepted such a route. OTOH, if that is a legitimate route for emergencies (with a settle-up agreement I presume), then H should have added a cost penelty to the route.

Now, if on the other hand, D REALLY has no right to route inter-regional traffic through C, then C shouldn't announce any routes for other regions to D at all. (presumably, D gets someone else to handle that for them).

The idea is that inter-region routers DON'T see anything but their peer on the other side of the inter-region link. They just see a /16 through the link. They may (or not) aggregate the function of the intra-region and inter-region routing into a single physical device, but they'll need to make sure they get their communities correct. (extensive use of communities or other route filtering is a good case for a decent CPU).|

In other words, in an imaginary utopia where everything is free and done for the common good, routers announce to everyone. In the real world where someone has to pay somehow, don't announce a route you're not paid for and don't accept routes you're not paying for (where paying for may be a peering arrangement w/ or w/o settlements).

If the above is too complicated to implement, it's probably a strong case that you've allowed your business arrangements to get way too complex and the complexity management is probably costing you more than you capture from that complexity. What do you mean we can't route every other packet through Xco on alternate Tuesdays in months with an s in them except on the full moon or when Ico's CEO is eating a ham sandwich?

One case I could see is if you have multiple links into a region where you must use different ones depending on which provider in that region the packet is going to (let's say it's in region abcd::). Firstly, that's your fault from a business perspective. However, the solution is a logical (or physical) router announcing a route to that region to your internal network. It then decides based on the next region level which link to look at. That is, it's tables have a default route back to your core and carries provider prefixes for the destination region. In other words, once one router forwards the packet to a router for the abcd region, that router then just has to pick the best link to reach provider ef01.

Note that I distinguish logical and physical routers. It may be that a logical router is just one of several policy routing tables in a single physical router. The idea is that routes in the same table may interact in complex ways (n to N interactions) such as path costs etc., but don't affect other tables.

The added complexity will be an issue, but will exist no matter what the routing scheme is. The only way to prevent it is to decide the net's as big as it's going to get and everyone else is just SOL (not a very good option). Perhaps the complexity will lead the business people to understand that it can be better to capture 70% of the money than it is to capture 75% when the added cost is 12% of the revenue.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Spazmania]

D paid C for connectivity B presumably has a relationship with C that allows traffic in that direction as well. Otherwise, C shouldn't be advertising that route to D or it should have a route in the other direction that it can use.

With BGP, C has a route for E advertised via G. With geographic aggregation, C has a route for "left area" which includes A, B, F and E. This route comes from both B and G. If the route to left area has priority via B then packets from D to E will improperly travel from C to B, ripping off B. If the route to left area has priority via G then packets from H to A will improperly travel from G to F, stealing bandwidth from F. That is an inescapable result of aggregating all of Left Area into a single route.

And it should be fairly obvious that unless B, C, F and G are reconnected into a strict hierarchy (which the so-called "valley free" path model defined by the business model on which the Internet functions does not permit) that result remains true.

The added complexity will be an issue, but will exist no matter what the routing scheme is.

No, actually, it won't.

The indirection map + encap approach, the the relatively small number of decapsulators follow the same rules as BGP does now while the destination address is mapped only to decapsulators with whom the destination has a business relationship. Map-encap doesn't lose the information about individual destinations so it doesn't suffer from geoaggregation's problem.

The dynamically addressed approach dynamically sets one or more addresses on each downstream host such that the host's address always accurately reflects its location within the business-defined topology. For example, in the diagram there are only two global routes: the one originating from C and the one originating from G. In addition, B advertises its subset of C's prefix to F as a shortcut while F advertises its subset of G to B as a shortcut. Plot the fibs on the diagram accordingly and you can see that those aggregated FIBs actually work both in terms of full connectivity and in terms of honoring the business relationships. But the price is that if A changes his connection to F then A always has to renumber, and if B buys a connection to F (instead of peering) the B and A have to manage -two- address blocks and assign two addresses to every host, one from the subset of addresses that originated with C and one for the subset that originated with G. And when one of those links fails, every downstream host has to respond by deprecating the corresponding address.

Which is very complex and eliminates the possibility of preserving the IPv6 versions of TCP and UDP, but it does not suffer the fault present in geographic aggregation.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[sjames]

With BGP, C has a route for E advertised via G.

AH, there's the problem! You CAN filter that advertisement at G and C (both) so that C will not see E. Instead, it will see the aggregated region (/16) through B. C filters it because they didn't agree to pay G for inter-region transit. G filters it because C hasn't agreed to pay them transit.

In the event that G is an emergency route for C (should the C-B link be cut), then instead of filtering outright, they add cost to the path so the C-B link will be preferred if it exists.

Think of BGP announcements in this case as routes you are willing to carry (or use) based on business relationships, not routes you technically can carry. It's not that different than a multi-homed edge router not advertising routes that would make it provide transit between the two providers (and pay for the 'privilege' no less!).

The language to express those filters might could use improvement, but that's a matter of a firmware update, not a fundamental problem.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Spazmania]

With geographically aggregated routing, neither G nor C have a route to E. They only see Left Area. That's the cause of the misroute. Even if you disaggregated and allowed G to see E (since E is paying for it), C would still route the packet to B because C wouldn't have a route for E, it would only have a route for Left Area.

Look, write out the announcements and compute the FIBs. You'll quickly see that what you're saying doesn't make any sense. The only way you can route according to who pays who is if you -don't- aggregate the routes according to the indicated geographies.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Spazmania]

Maybe it will make more sense to you if I explain it this way:

A: 1.1.1.0/24
B: 1.1.2.0/24
E: 1.1.3.0/24
F: 1.1.4.0/24
C: 1.2.1.0/24
D: 1.2.2.0/24
G: 1.2.3.0/24
H: 1.2.4.0/24
Left Area: 1.1.0.0/16
Right Area: 1.2.0.0/16

Using normal BGP, C's RIB looks like:

1.1.1.0/24 via B distance 2
1.1.2.0/24 via B distance 1
1.1.3.0/24 via G distance 3
1.1.4.0/24 via G distance 2
1.2.1.0/24 local distance 0
1.2.2.0/24 via D distance 1
1.2.3.0/24 via G distance 1
1.2.4.0/24 via G distance 2

And C's FIB looks the same. If C has a packet with a destination in E such as 1.1.3.1, it will find the 1.1.3.0/24 entry and send the packet to G.

With geoaggregation, C's RIB looks like:

1.1.0.0/16 via B distance 1
1.1.0.0/16 via G distance 2
1.2.1.0/24 local distance 0
1.2.2.0/24 via D distance 1
1.2.3.0/24 via G distance 1
1.2.4.0/24 via G distance 2

C computes its FIB by selecting the best routes in the RIB:

1.1.0.0/16 next hop B
1.2.1.0/24 local
1.2.2.0/24 next hop D
1.2.3.0/24 next hop G
1.2.4.0/24 next hop G

If C has a packet with a destination in E such as 1.1.3.1, it will find the 1.1.0.0/16 entry and send the packet to B. But this is incorrect: D doesn't directly or indirectly pay B to transit his traffic. E isn't paying B to move his traffic either. B is paying for the link from B to C, so C is stealing bandwidth from his customer B in order to deliver a packet to E.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[sjames]

With geographically aggregated routing, neither G nor C have a route to E.

Correct, For C, the route to left area is B. For G, the route to left area is F. Neither announces a route to left area over the C-G peer link because they're not willing to route each other's traffic to left area.

C announces a route to D over the peer link and G announces a route to H.

Meanwhile, B announces a route to left area to C but not to F. F announces a route to left area to G but not to B.

That's the key, don't announce every route you know to everyone you know, just to the people who paid you to carry traffic destined there.

F can not route to left area through B. It has no route to left area that goes through B and B will not accept packets bound for left area from F.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Spazmania]

Correct, For C, the route to left area is B. For G, the route to left area is F. Neither announces a route to left area over the C-G peer link because they're not willing to route each other's traffic to left area.

Actually, you have to announce the left area route over the peering link or you end up with a connectedness problem. It isn't evident in this diagram but its a trivial matter to draw one where it is.

Anyway, if C's route to E is via the left-area route from B then C steals B's bandwidth to get to E, an unacceptable situation. To change that, you have to radically redesign the business model for the Internet, something that has a lot lower chance of happening than deploying a new protocol to replace IPv6.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[sjames]

It may be that portable IP space will need to be limited (which can be accomplished by charging more for portable allocations). The theory was always that the IP address was just an internal address and that names should be used to reach devices. People are reluctant to do an IP migration mostly because it's a giant pain to re-configure all of the addresses not just on the machines, but in the server software. If more software could accept a single prefix variable and just configure the host part, it wouldn't be such an issue.

A big help would be if machines didn't mind receiving multiple router announcements and doing something reasonable about them (like creating prefix based aliases for each and wildcarding the prefixes in server software, perhaps also trying to use a reciprocal route unless configured otherwise)

But I do now see your point wrt geographical routing. I was mis-interpreting the diagram. It may be that making the provider the top level would help, but there are probably cases where that would equally be the wrong thing. It may be that some business arrangements simply cannot scale and will have to be modified (not an uncommon situation in business anyway, change happens).

Given that whatever new routing scheme that may be invented will not likely be deployable before exhaustion happens and the considerable investment that already exists in v6, plus the countries that are already much further along in deployment, whatever is come up with if it requires a different header should be an encapsulation rather than a protocol replacement.

Currently, I'm encapsulating v6 in v4 (as are many others). That, in turn is being encapsulated in a variety of layer 2 protocols in transit.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Spazmania]

It may be that some business arrangements simply cannot scale and will have to be modified (not an uncommon situation in business anyway, change happens).

Unfortunately, we're not talking about oddball hair-brained business relationships. We're talking about the basic paid transit and peering relationships which have been the foundation of the commercial Internet ever since the NSF announced its intention to end the NSFnet way back in the early '90s.

It may be that portable IP space will need to be limited

This has already been done. The maximum savings we're going to achieve from provider aggregately addresses has already been achieved by ARIN. That's why we only have 260k routes in the table right now instead of 2M. The plain reality, though, is that anybody from the smallest home office to the largest corporation who wants to multihome with two or more Internet Service Providers must announce portable address space. And as the Internet invades our lives ever more thoroughly, the need for reliability via multihoming is only going to increase.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[sjames]

The multi-homing is exactly what I am suggesting as a point of attack. IF (admittedly, a big IF), servers could accept more than one prefix automatically and the software was set up to easily deal with that, then multi-homing would not require a portable netblock. It would just be a matter of having round-robin DNS and an easy way to change all instances of a prefix or not publish it at all should the link go down. TYhe provider whose link drops might be required to temporarily carry an extra route itself to re-direct any left over packets for the non-functioning link.

Still, it's just buying time to get a better solution in place.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Spazmania]

It's not any kind of IF. The DNS-change approaches have been thoroughly investigated and proved unwieldy to the point of uselessness. The Shim6 folks gave tried to find a way to modify existing IPv6 TCP to allow for multiple addresses and got the same result.

We had to invent two new terms for network addresses to describe the problem: locator and identifier. A locator specifies a node's location within the network hierarchy while an identifier uniquely identifies it. The layer-3 IP address in both IPv4 and IPv6 overloads both functions. That's root cause of the routing scalability problem: Locators aggregate well. Identifiers don't. As long as the layer-3 address serves as an identifier, it won't aggregate well enough for the routing system to scale.

I personally suspect that we also need to differentiate between a node identifier, a service identifier and a session identifier. The rest of the RRG isn't there yet, but if you think about it, a node identifier doesn't serve much of a purpose. We want one because there has always been one, but it really doesn't doesn't help us to know that a particular machine exists independent of any services that machine may provide. What we really need are service identifiers (e.g. http at www.slashdot.org) and session identifiers (my particular http connection to www.slashdot.org).

The service identifier is needed to map a service (such as a web site) to the locators that currently provide the service. The session identifier is needed to keep track of individual communications sessions even though the locators in use change while the session is ongoing.

But in all fairness, we've now moved past what's proven and into my own personal hypothesis.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Spazmania]

TYhe provider whose link drops might be required to temporarily carry an extra route itself to re-direct any left over packets for the non-functioning link.

Unfortunately, the provider in the midst of a failure can't be reliably expected to accomplish anything with success, least of all a redirection task. The whole point of multihoming is to address the case when operations at one of the providers are -not- working.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[sjames]

Hrmmm, I will say that if we currently had service identifiers, we could do a lot to stretch IPv4 out by assigning port ranges within a single IP and letting a NAT/translator handle the last hop routing for a group of machines with the same IP address.

For what we have now, one approach is to have the edge routers encapsulate v4 and v6 packets in a routing header (locater address). They'll need to do a translation involving a large but fairly static table (only changing when permanent topology changes happen rather than whenever a link changes state). Effectively, you'd have an inter-router protocol and addressing system. A single locater address might cover a great many netblocks. A multi-homed netblock might have more than one locater (depending on the details of the scheme). The routers corresponding to that locater would be somewhat (sorta) analogous to an authoritative DNS server.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[sjames]

True, but often the provider isn't entirely isolated from the net, but has instead lost an important link somewhere perhaps the last hop to the customer, perhaps a whole region of the country. Very (very) rarely every single peering point.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Spazmania]

That's like buying a second computer, doing no backups and then finding out if the first computer malfunctions it has to still work well enough to copy your files to the second computer or else you're screwed.

If reliability is important enough to you that you're willing to pay for two Internet connections, you don't want to "often" be able to recover from one of them failing.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[sjames]

The primary recovery is still changing the DNS. The secondary is just an attempt to keep the existing sessions alive. It would beat having less than complete reach of the net 100% of the time.

Re:IPv6 is a dud (maybe)

[Spazmania]

DNS is still unworkable as a failover mechanism. Existing software simply isn't very good about honoring the TTL. The primary API for accessing the DNS (gethostbyname) doesn't even return the TTL to the application.

Its easier now

[sdemjanenko]

i would think that some sort of mandate would be put out forcing any new networks that are put down to be IPv6. I mean its not like we do not see this coming. Maybe people have the mentality of Moore's law that electronic will be cheaper in the future so we might as well keep putting it off. But heck, those IPv4 networks will just upgrade themselves.

Re:huh?

[admcd]

Nope. This isn't a problem with CPE support for IPv6, it's a problem in BT's network.

There's some more information in this discussion thread:
http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Board=btsupplier&Number=3448119&page=1&view=expanded&sb=5&o=0&fpart=

IPv4 exhaustion is a myth

[gmuslera]

from the same alarmist that warned about global warming, market dropping and dodo extintion. Nothing to see here, move along (but not too much, you will hit someone's else IP space).

Misleading title

[johnw]

The title "No IPV6 for UK broadband users" is significantly misleading. BT are far from being the only broadband provider in the UK. My ISP - using ADSL over BT lines - provides me with full IPv6 connectivity and has done for some time.

BT and the other big players are targeting the mass market and Joe Public hasn't even heard of IPv6 yet, let alone asked for it. If you want competent technical support then you don't use BT or any of the other mass-market players.

Re:Misleading title

[admcd]

In this case "BT" actually means "BT wholesale", so the issue applies to any ISP which uses BT's DSL platform. This includes both AAISP (the ISP in the linked article) and Entanet (resold by various other ISPs), the only two UK ISPs I know of who offer native IPv6 over DSL.

Re:Misleading title

[williamhb]

The summary is also misleading when it says "they have failed to consider 21st Century protocol support". BT no doubt have considered it; they are apparently well aware of the routers that would need patching; but at the moment IPv6 does not have enough market share for the benefit to justify the operational cost of patching and re-testing the equipment at fault; in a few years time it probably will. (It's not as if BT will have to rip out the entire network and start again, just fix those last few recalcitrant devices that are stopping them from saying "we support IPv6 now".)

Commercial home products and IPv6

[neokushan]

As far as I'm aware, business-grade networking stuff has been IPv6 aware and compliant for a few years now, but I've yet to see a Router marketed towards the home user that seemed to support it. I bought myself a new Wireless-N ADSL2+ router/modem comby unit only a few weeks ago and IPv6 isn't mentioned anywhere near it. I'd love to see a good Router that supported IPv6 and didn't cost 3 figures, does anyone here know of any out there?

Is it possible for ISPs to run an IPv6 network while the home users still use IPv4? Would it be possible to assign them any ol' IPv4 address, have the BT servers slap an IPv6 packet around it and send it on without breaking everything?

I'm guessing this is the real problem with upgrading the network - you can't just upgrade a few big hubs here and there, you need to update EVERYONE using the network and I doubt many people are going to take kindly to having to fork out £50 (because that seems to be the price all the ISPs here quote for their own supplied routers/modems) just to keep using their internets, which have worked fine for years anyway, forcing ISPs to foot the bill for all that new hardware.
However, the least they could do is support IPv6 and just roll it out to new customers, while encouraging old customers to switch over (such as faster speeds - spend £50 and get a "Free" bandwidth upgrade, or something). If new customers go directly onto IPv6, there shouldn't be a problem with regards to costly upgrades and we'll not run out of IPv4 addresses (Simply because nobody should be allocating more) before everyone has a chance to migrate to the new networks.

Re:Commercial home products and IPv6

[Fastolfe]

There is a thing called "dual stack", and methods of moving IPv4 packets over IPv6 and vice-versa, so it is completely possible (and likely) that the two will co-exist for many years before the transition will be complete (my PC here is dual-stack, and has a public IPv6 address, but I'm communicating perfectly well with Slashdot on IPv4). While consumer routers usually don't support IPv6 (except with custom firmware), Mac, Windows and Linux do, right out of the box. You probably have everything you need for an IPv6 home network already available. But you're right: until DSL routers/modems support it, and ISPs support it, you're going to have to set up your own tunneling over IPv4 if you want IPv6 Internet.

Re:Commercial home products and IPv6

[Venture37]

your router may not support IPv6 but your machine does, stick the router into bridge mode & use pppoe on your machine to initiate the connection.

Re:Commercial home products and IPv6

[petermgreen]

I'd love to see a good Router that supported IPv6 and didn't cost 3 figures, does anyone here know of any out there?
A WRT54GL with one of the third party firmwares?

Re:Commercial home products and IPv6

[neokushan]

Such is the benefit of Open Firmware, but I don't think you can expect most regular people to flash their own firmware, the very thought would terrify some. I meant a good off-the-shelf one.

Re:Commercial home products and IPv6

[ion.simon.c]

THANK YOU for mentioning "dual stack".

However, it doesn't mean what you think it means. (I think.)

IIRC, a dual stack machine has IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and routes, and can send both IPv4 and IPv6 packets. It doesn't necessarily act as a bridge between the v4 and v6 networks that it's connected to.

(Correct me if I'm wrong here.)

Re:Commercial home products and IPv6

[Fastolfe]

I was trying to make two points:

1. A dual-stack system allows IPv4 and IPv6 to exist on the same physical network at the same time. I read the parent post as wondering how the two would work together.

2. A dual-stack system is necessary to tunnel IPv4 over IPv6, or vice-versa. You could run an IPv4-only network at home, and an IPv6 gateway machine on your ISP's side could then wrap that in an IPv6 packet. My PCs at home, being dual stack, could also do this automatically for me.

hey don't worry man

[Colin Smith]

They'll just NAT the world.

 

Re:hey don't worry man

[petermgreen]

My guess would be that since there will still be competition between ISPs running over the infrastrcuture the IPs used on the internal network will be seperate from internet IPs anyway. Whether users get public IPs will probablly be at the discresion of the ISP.

Re:hey don't worry man

[cjb658]

They'll just NAT the world.

I hope I get to share an IP with an RIAA executive.

Re:huh?

[lga]

Try reading the article. AAISP states that the problem is in BT's routers and a patch is available but they would rather say they don't support IPv6 than install the patch. How is it FUD?

here in the states

[circletimessquare]

we are switching over from analog to digital television transmission in february 2009. at that date, analog tv will simply disappear. if you have an older tv without a converter, it simply won't work. to get this to happen, the government and broadcasters had to sit down, make a timetable, and implement it

in this way, and ONLY IN THIS WAY, were we ever going to switch to digital transmission. furthermore, in this way, and only in this way, will any country ever make the switch to IPv6

there is no free market solution to this problem. in fact, according to principles of the free market, you are punished for making the extra expense and becoming a first adapter: you spend all this time and money, and no one is going to consume what you offer on the new protocol. why? because everyone is making their material avaiable on IPv4, so that's where the audience stays. the inertia is heavy

so either everyone switches to IPv6, or no one switches IPv6. there is no gradual changeover, because there is no incentive, and only punishment for all of the effort, for being a first adapter

governments have to mandate IPv6 changeover. that is only way IPv6 will ever happen. doesn't matter in the slightest how superior IPv6 is. punishment of early adapters trumps all observations of technological superiority

Re:here in the states

[Daimanta]

"we are switching over from analog to digital television transmission in february 2009. at that date, analog tv will simply disappear. if you have an older tv without a converter, it simply won't work. to get this to happen, the government and broadcasters had to sit down, make a timetable, and implement it"

There is a HUGE difference. You can stick to analog transmission as long as you(as a govt or broadcasting corp) like because the analog singnal won't run out. With ipv4 you can simply run out of available adresses. After that, you won't be able to get another ipv4 address. And NAT is a big turd so that isn't going to solve anything. Neither is big corp. ipv4 handout of addresses since it will only delay the inevitable. In 2 years the world NEEDS to be ready to accept ipv6 addresses and routing. Failing to do so will create a stagnation in the development of the internet on a massive scale.

I think it is absolutely ALARMING that people are no casual about this. Is the internet going to stop working? No, but it will stop growing. We need to be ready when the ipv4 well dries out. Don't do this and expect a LOT of problems.

Re:here in the states

[tlhIngan]

we are switching over from analog to digital television transmission in february 2009. at that date, analog tv will simply disappear. if you have an older tv without a converter, it simply won't work. to get this to happen, the government and broadcasters had to sit down, make a timetable, and implement it

Except that a majority of TV viewers don't have to do anything when the switchover happens. That's because analog over-the-air is switching to digital. The few people who still receive analog OTA signals will need a digital-capable receiver. (The people who are using OTA because they get better HDTV signals aren't affected - they already are picking up digital signals).

The majority who don't have to do anything? They have cable, satellite, FiOS, or IPTV.

There isn't any equivalent to this in the internet world - it's not like people are using other protocols and the few using IPv4 will be affected.

Re:here in the states

[j h woodyatt]

"governments have to mandate IPv6 changeover"

Wrong wrong wrong. The reason we're turning off the analog television stations is to reclaim the spectrum. There is no need to "reclaim" the IPv4 protocol. We do not need to turn off IPv4 to use IPv6. I certainly didn't.

Re:here in the states

[sjames]

I'm running a dual LAN now and it cost exactly zero. People using Vista have a dual stack by default even if they don't know it. By default, it's teredo tunneling, but if it sees a router announcement, it'll use that instead.

In fact, I am gradually seeing more and more v6 clients in my server logs.

I can easily imagine a setup where clients are v6 and the ISP proxy's v4 only web servers automatically.

The punishment is on the server side where you end up with many potential clients still unable to connect.

Re:here in the states

[ion.simon.c]

Heck. I don't see why we can't turn v6 *everywhere* and use DHCP and v4 for all of the DNS information.

BTW: Do you know how to set something up that'll inform a IPv6-only host of DNS servers on the local LAN? I've tried passing some magic stuff via radvd. That was a no-go. It would seem that the RFC's for that method are "experimental" and unsupported pretty much everywhere.
(Please don't tell me that I *HAVE* to setup a DHCP6 server and client. : )

Re:here in the states

[sjames]

Alas, that seems to be a big oversight in the specs thus far.

I'm afraid you'll have to [deleted at addressee's request ;-)]

The difficulty of radvd is that on the client side, radvd doesn't currently reach userspace, it gets processed in the kernel IPv6 stack, but the kernel isn't concerned with DNS at all. The other non-DHCP6 strategy is to place a recursive DNS server at a well known local address.

It seems to me that if you're going to take that approach, you might as well put a recursive network resource enumerator there and have it provide information on printers, file servers, non-default routes, etc. as well as DNS.

Non-story.

[Pahalial]

The whole issue has come about because of a bug in CISCO equipment which BT use which is affecting use of IPv6 for some of AAISP's customers. It only affects some of BT's network. Even though we believe this bug was identified and fixed by CISCO a long time ago, BT appear to be refusing to rectify the problem, preferring to simply say they do not support IPv6.

So in short, as soon as they start having to pay more for IPv4 blocks, they'll update their firmware. Merely some billable network admin hours, not millions of pounds wasted as the summary implies.

Re:Non-story.

[A beautiful mind]

The problem is perception. There is no analog way of gauing shortage by the price going up slowly. First of all, for big ISPs there is no price, IP is handed out on a need-to-have basis by the regional agencies afaik.

From an economic perspective the second problem - the digital nature of IPv4 is worse. One week you're getting your new IPs that you need and the other week you don't - because it's been exhausted. Most likely CEOs at telcos don't understand that they won't be able to just get more by paying more. Once it's gone it's gone. Rationing would create a large mess and extend the deadline just a few more months.

Offshore IP address drilling

[jassa]

The solution to IPv4 address exhaustion is offshore IP address drilling, but Obama would rather punish small business owners with outdated equipment!

...I think I've been watching too many political conferences/debates.

Re:Offshore IP address drilling

[ionix5891]

Maverick is that you?

Re:huh?

[peachstealingmonkeys]

well, obviously with the PPP in the network you'd need a BRAS/NAS type of a gateway in order to 'enter' the backbone. But it's still part of the 'user connectivity' leg, not the backbone. Modding me as "troll" is a bit harsh. I was merely saying that the central backbone nodes in BT already run IPv6. The backbone-to-users gateways will be and ARE the biggest problem for IPv6 deployment and adoption. Every single ISP develops a migration plan, BT is behind like every one else trying to weed out and come up with user access scenarios. I'm not defending BT, don't get me wrong, just saying that uneducated trolls like that blog users create panic and spread FUD.

naaahhhhh...this is the plan

[OutOnARock]

They'll just NAT the whole country, everybody, behind one honking big firewall and monitor everybody's traffic :)

At first this was funny, but on review it got a little bit scary.....

IPv6 vs. IPv4

[savanik]

Haven't they noticed the IPv4 exhaustion report yet?

IPv6 will continue to be used until the pain of using IPv4 exceeds the pain of switching to IPv6. The issues are many, varied, and thoroughly discussed elsewhere. My personal highlights are NAT having eliminated most of the address space limitations - most companies, even medium-large ones, can make do with 4-8 external IPs - and the complete and utter unwieldiness of IPv6 addresses. No way am I going to be able to memorize one of those, ever. DNS will become mandatory to do anything. That, and nobody uses IPv6 in the first place.

Re:IPv6 vs. IPv4

[Shados]

DNS will become mandatory to do anything

Oh that would be something. They need to let us register domain names that look like IP addresses... add sub domains, and I could map something in the format XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX to some IPv6 address! Epic!

Re:IPv6 vs. IPv4

[petermgreen]

No way am I going to be able to memorize one of those, ever. DNS will become mandatory to do anything
You have to rememeber your sites prefix but that shouldn't be too bad. The complexity of the rest of the address will depend entirely on your internal allocation policies.

If you use stateless autoconfiguration (which I would only do for end user desktops) then yeah it will be a PITA as you will essentially have to memorise the machines MAC addresses.

Re:IPv6 vs. IPv4

[MattBurke]

My personal highlights are NAT having eliminated most of the address space limitations - most companies, even medium-large ones, can make do with 4-8 external IPs

If you want redundancy and have multiple provider connections, the absolute minimum you'll have is a /24. Usually though you'd want bigger as a lot of people set a bgp filter on /24s and smaller as you don't want your router's memory filling up

Re:huh?

[peachstealingmonkeys]

You want FUD? Saying "BT insists IPv4 is enough for everyone" is FUD. WTF is wrong with you people.

Upgrading "to an all-IP core"

[Otis2222222]

Upgrading to an "all-IP" core? What had they been running on? Appletalk? IPX? Banyan Vines? DECnet?

Re:Upgrading "to an all-IP core"

[caluml]

ATM, I'd guess.

I rang my (otherwise extremely good, if a little more expensive than most) ISP, Zen, and asked for v6. They said they didn't do it, as not enough people had asked for it. I asked if they'd make a note of my request - they said they would.
I offered to run an IPv6 tunnel router for them, if they'd stick it in their network, and hook it up to a v6 feed somewhere. They declined.

Re:Upgrading "to an all-IP core"

[AlecC]

Various synchronous protocols which are not IT related at all. Before the migration to IP, telecoms networks were completely different from networking ptotocols and woild never be seen inside a computer. They were based on a digital equivalent of the original analog system ogf connecting together a lot of ire pairs, so a a single conductor led from one end to the other. Teleom protocols created a logical conductor consisting of reserved bits in packets into which your data was fitted. Call setup required reserving these bit in all the packet-based links between source and destination.

Re:Upgrading "to an all-IP core"

[zoefff]

sdh, atm, pdh or other transmission protocols. Or even the famous POTS protocol. See your local wiki for more ;-)

Re:Upgrading "to an all-IP core"

[Otis2222222]

I get that, but I don't see how that translates. I have run IP over Packet-Over-Sonet links before. Sonet is a layer 2 protocol. IP is layer 3. I was poking fun at the summary, which said "converting to an all-IP core". That in and of itself makes no sense. It implies, to me at least, that they were running on a DIFFERENT layer 3 protocol before. What you do at Layer 2 (Ethernet, Token Ring, Sonet, etc.) is another matter entirely.

Re:Upgrading "to an all-IP core"

[canix]

How did you register your interest? I, too, am a Zen customer and wouldn't mind adding to this request.

Re:Upgrading "to an all-IP core"

[bickerdyke]

ATM, I'd guess.

IMHO no bad choice for a backbone.

Re:Upgrading "to an all-IP core"

[Isvara]

Move to Andrews & Arnold. They do native and tunneled IPv6 and are generally clueful.

Re:Upgrading "to an all-IP core"

[Isvara]

Your confusion comes from thinking this is about their data network. What it means is they're moving *voice* from a circuit switched network to (IIRC) an IP-over-MPLS network.

Qwest in the US too...

[neowolf]

While I don't know of their entire network structure, I've been trying to get an IPv6 block from Qwest in the USA for over a year now. The last thing I heard from them is they "might" be "beta testing something" next year.

I'll admit I haven't actively looked in about a year, but I don't believe there are any broadband ISPs in the USA actively working on IPv6.

Considering the figures for IPv6 that have been paraded around- everyone should be able to get their own block, and every device can have it's own IPv6 address. We don't seem to be any closer to that than we were five years ago. Hasn't it been over ten years since IPv6 was first RFC-ed?

Re:Qwest in the US too...

[neowolf]

I meant to clarify too- this is for a DS3 line for the business I work for, not just something like DSL at home.

Re:Qwest in the US too...

[gravis777]

This does not surprise me. I have lived in areas where you pretty much have the choice in Broadband between US West and Cox. US West was AWFUL, and everyone thought that when Qwest acquired them, everything would change. It soon came apparent that all Qwest did was slap their name on the side of the trucks. For internet, at least, we ditched them after another year of putting up with their crap and went with Cox.

I am so glad I live in an area now where I don't have to put up with Qwest. I had SBC who bought out AT&T (and took the AT&T name), and I must say, they are great. As for whether they have IPv6 or not, I would assume AT&T does, but I really don't care. I don't think it does, I think I still have an IPv4 address. I don't care, that goes to the modem, then I guess my router is doing a NAT thingy (I use this term loosely - i know what NAT is, and what IPv6 is, the point is I don't care). I mean, I can get online, I get good fast downloads, I never get booted - the only issues i have is I sometimes have to reboot that cheap-ass modem or router because they get flooded with errors - thanks P2P. But no, I really do not care. I do not need every machine on my network to have its on global IP address - in fact, I would prefer if it didn't. In a large corporation, I really could care less if I have a global IP address. Our webservers, yes, but not every single client. That is ridiculous.

Truthfully, yeah, I see the end coming for IPv4, but at the moment, I really do not care. You can NAT away for all I care - it works, and I have yet to see a notable difference.

IPv4 is drying up - and i'm not helping

[KingJ]

I moved to a new UK ISP today (away from BT) and included free of charge was a block of 8 static IPv4 addresses, on a 'home' package. Don't know what i'm going to do with all of them... It seems that it's only BT the ISP that are doing this however, not BT Wholesale, who are required to provide open access to any ADSL provider on the phone lines. Therefore, while my data with my new ISP travels across BT's phone lines, it's switched into my ISP at the local exchange, completely bypassing all of BT's nasties.

Re:IPv4 is drying up - and i'm not helping

[MattBurke]

Provided, of course, your ISP has kit in the exchange. Most ISPs rely on BT to terminate ADSL lines and tunnel it (IPv4 only) to their datacentre. Even the largest ISPs do this as it's a waste of money to put expensive kit in an exchange which only has 10 of your customers hooked up to it

It's BT...

[lattyware]

Do you actually believe they'd do something good for their customers?

Our lines are way behind, and we don't even have the excuse of the low-density population the US does.

The UK is by far behind when it comes to this kind of thing, and it's only getting worse.

Re:It's BT...

[lattyware]

I'll believe it when I see it. BT havn't done a damn thing for me in my lifetime. Well, my exchange should get ADSL2+ in March, that said, with my line attenuation, it won't make much of a difference.

Speaking of IPv6

[caluml]

Speaking of IPv6, you'd think that the leading tech news site would, in 2008, be supporting it.

$ dig +short slashdot.org aaaa
$

Re:Speaking of IPv6

[Anonymous Coward]

The leading tech new site may support IPV6.....but Slashdot doesn't.

Re:Speaking of IPv6

[ion.simon.c]

Mm. Yeah.
I've been waiting for /. to go V6 for MONTHS! wtf.

Netware died because

[feld]

IPX isn't routable. durrrrrr.

Re:Wait a second..

[johnw]

AAISP is trying to provide IPv6 and can't because BT won't fix a bug in their network

Huh? I use AAISP and have no difficulty with the IPv6 which they provide (over a BT line).

Breaking the Internet

[PCM2]

You have succinctly summed up the opinion of most of the network-engineer types that I have spoken to on the subject. Especially the part about "breaking the Internet" -- that's a very familiar refrain.

And you know what? You're probably right, in a hypothetical, pie-in-the-sky network engineer's world. But the rest of us have already accepted the fact that, as with so many other things in life, we're going to have to put up with what we get. I don't own an ISP. You don't own an ISP. So what are we going to do? Write letters? Threaten to take our business -- where? To the ISP down the block? Which has the exact same policies as the one I subscribe to now?

Telling the major telcos that they need to convert their entire infrastructures to IPv6 is like telling America it needs to switch to the metric system. Again, quite astute -- so where are we on that? The engineers have pretty much gone over to metric, but the rest of us are still counting rods to the hog's-head. Think it's going to change?

It takes force to overcome inertia. The more inertia, the more force to overcome it. In this case, the "force" is going to have to be a market force. Until the telcos see a real problem with IPv4 -- a business problem, such as being unable to reach new customers, or their services not being perceived as competitive -- they won't change. Network engineers are demanding change, but they aren't offering any reasons -- not reasons of the type that businesses understand.

And not the type of reasons that customers understand, either. I get my email, I get my Web, I get my movies and MP3s and chat rooms and everything else. In 1988 I had a 1200 baud modem. In 2008 I have a 6 megabit dedicated Internet feed. "Waah waah," indeed! Your response? "I have my head in the sand/my ass." Well, again -- as well-reasoned and cogent an argument as that may be, it's just not a compelling reason to go IPv6, in my opinion.

Re:Breaking the Internet

[BJH]

You do realise that the "hypothetical, pie-in-the-sky network engineer's world" you're talking about is actually what keeps your 6 megabit dedicated Internet feed running? That box you've got hooked up to the phone line doesn't send magic pixie dust packets.

IPv6 either happens now, when ISPs can make an ordered transfer of customers, or it happens in two years time, when they suddenly find they can no longer get any new business.

Re:Breaking the Internet

[ion.simon.c]

Comcast is running nothing but IPv6 on their "network monitoring and management" network.

What, exactly do you think it would cost them to turn on v6 for their "internet distribution" network?

Re:Breaking the Internet

[PCM2]

If you're talking about Peer-to-Peer, good luck without end-to-end connectivity. Well, if you don't care about that then you may as well kiss goodbye to SSH, Remote Desktop, Skype, P2P, hosting PC games or running your own IRC/HTTP/SMTP server.

I do all of that right now, and guess what? My PC has a non-routable IP address, so it's not end-to-end. Amazing, I know.

ban IPv6 posts on slashdot

[shakuni]

I propose a ban on IPv6 posts on slashdot. I used to be an IPv6 fanatic at some point but now i am sick and tired of the FUD created elsewhere and on slashdot on the good and bad of it. None of us have frigging clue about anything. The end of days is near where our creations far exceed our ability to control, predict or stop them. Look at the beast called financial market... its a frankenstein that cannot be tamed by us jokers any more. the cat is out of the bag now !! with IPv6 we will again create a system that we will not be able to control and it will have a life of its own. IPv6 and the financial system are 2 beasts that remind of the alien vs predator movie... we will f**** be dead either way.

lets go back to our amish ways..........

for a start i will be turn a blind eye to anything about IPv6

with no love for any of this

frustrated but enlightened
Imemyself

The cisco tagline applies here

[Venture37]

"Cisco - empowering the internet generation" or not in this case!

you're not weighing the pluses and minuses

[circletimessquare]

from the proper perspective

form the persepctive of the entire organic internet, yes, IPv6 is a nobrainer, all of your observations of the negative of staying IPv4 are dead on

but from the perspective of individual companies and actors on the net, the only perspective that actually matters when it comes to actually implementing the change, btw, spending a ton of money, a ton of time, in order that 2 people are able to (optionally) view your IPv6 offerings is, again, a complete nobrainer: its not worth it

such that the only way you will get anyone to suffer the pain of making the switchover is to force them too. and the only people that can force the change is the government

we are never, ever, leaving IPv4 until a government body steps in and forces it. free market principles ensure stagnation. that's the flipside of the network effect

Re:ipv6 is bloated

[xOneca]

But NAT is not the solution. The solution is IPv6. We have to get used to it.

Re:We can switch to IPv6 in about week

[xOneca]

Yeah! Good idea! I'm with you. But maybe it's too radical...

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absolutely correct

[circletimessquare]

its all about incentive

right now, for a company to outlay the time and expense to go to IPv6 isn't worth the benefit... from the persective of the company

from the persective of the internet, yes

but you are asking everyone to sacrifice for some noble cause voluntarily. this never works. you need to make the sacrifice compulsory

if there is a fire in a theatre, it makes sense for everyone to leave the theatre in an orderly fashion. it will be quicker and safer. but the evacuation does not take place from an omniscient view from the sky. it takes place in terms of individual decisions by bit actors in a burning theatre. from their individual persective, it makes sense to make a beeline for the exit and claw over anyone caught under your feet. even though this means, in aggregate, and as individuals, they have a greater chance of dying

individual decisions about what is best for you are not often not in synchronicity with what is best for the group as a whole, and sometimes, paradoxically, not even in synchronicity with what is best for the individual. its a tragedy

the only solution in the burning theatre is have some guys with guns yelling at people to stay and line and promises to shoot anyone who steps out of line, and then actually doing that when someone panics

same with going to IPv6: the government must mandate it and make it compulsory, with financial punishment. only way it will ever happen is with a central authority enforcing it

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Re:Wait a second..

[grahammm]

So do I use AAISP and IPv6, but I am still on the 'old' ADSL1 BT backbone and I tunnel IPv6 over IPv4 as my ADSL router does not support native IPv6. The status information refers to the problem with provision of native IPv6 over the new 21CN (ADSL2+) BT backbone. So the problem only affects a small proportion of customers.

Geez, guys. When BT decides they need it ...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

... they'll just buy the firmware upgrade.

NAT for the UK

[OrangeTide]

They will just put everyone behind a firewall NAT. This will be pushed through to address the growing problem of child pornography.

You use fake solutions to irrational fears to push through your totalitarian regime.

Our series of tubes,,,

[Colourspace]

Will be an empire worth ignoring!

Re:More FUD

[ion.simon.c]

MS may not always be the technially best solution, but they are always the most reliable solution. If there are problems, they will address those problems.

Would you please back up this statement with personal anecdotes? In your anecdotes, please mention the following:

1) What problem or problems were you having?
2) Which MS-backed product were affected?
3) What did MS do to address your problems?

I'm genuinely interested in your answers. I work in a rather strange software shop, and I'd like to believe that my experience with MSFT software is atypical.

What problem?

[jandersen]

I think one of the problems here is that IPv6 hasn't really presented a conving case yet. I have, like most, only taken a very limited interest in the issue and all I can remember is that with IPv6 we can have networking in all our home appliances right down to the RFID tags on our cornflakes packages. So it seems rather like something that isn't seriously needed.

I am very open to the idea that it may be an absolutely fabulous idea, but then what are the real benefits - how can we justify spending the money and time it will inevitably cost? It seems reasonable to me to assume that those in charge have made a cost/benefit analysis and found that it isn't worth it; you tend to do that before spending large amounts of money.

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Re:BT is an IPv6 pioneer

[c_g_hills]

A&A are not asking for anything unusual. All they want is for BTW to deliver the service as specified. The problem is a well known bug in the IOS image that BT has installed on some BRAS, which has been demonstrated to also affect certain IPv4 packets, making the IPv6 argument completely spurious.

If you want a laugh at their incompetence, have a gander at the following:-

http://david.woodhou.se/bt-clueless-1.html
http://david.woodhou.se/bt-clueless-2.html