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US Has More IPv6 Eyeballs Than Asia, Because of Apple
An anonymous reader writes "Google has been checking to see who's using IPv6. According to the company's tracking, half of all IPv6-capable systems seen by Google are Macs, helping the US land in fifth place in percentage of IPv6 users world wide, ahead of China and Japan."
Apple has a far greater market share than Linux desktops, but you can't completely ignore that Linux has been pushing IPv6 for some time.
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IPv6 Eyeballs! Run!!!!
OK, so I have 7 computers in my house. They all run either Linux or Vista. (Some both as two are dual boot). They are all IPv6 capable. However, my Linksys NATing router is not. So unless my machines find an ISATAP server somewhere, there is going to be no information that Google gets showing that all my machines could do it if I just sprung for a new router. I would imagine there are a lot of people in the same situation. I guess if they are trying to find out how many homes are capable - then maybe this is the right way. But if they are trying to just see how many COMPUTERS - then it isn't going to be correct.
I have 4 machines at home, all run Linux and do are IPV6 capable. Most mac users have one mac though. I'm guessing they are only checking the external facing router?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Google modified their home page to try to load a URL over IPv6; if it works then the client supports IPv6.
I don't believe any US ISPs have begun providing IPv6 connections yet, have they? So, does this statistic reflect that not only are Macs IPv6 capabable, but all of them are automatically setting up an IPv6 tunnel over their IPv4 connections? If so, what tunnel broker are they using as an endpoint (is Apple itself providing a tunnel broker service for them)?
Or, instead of using a tunnel, are they using the technology (don't remember the name, maybe 4to6?) where an IPv6 address is automatically generated from the public IPv4 address, and then IPv6 packets are sent to an IPv4 anycast address which automatically routes them to the nearest 'public' 4ot6 gateway? Unfortunately, I don't believe the latter solution works well behind NATted connections, which I think would dramatically reduce these statistics, so the sheer size of the Mac IPv6 'population' suggests to me that tunnels are being used instead?
I've recently been playing with IPv6 via Hexago Freenet6, but truth be told, there's really not much use for IPv6 yet, since very few apps (like IM clients [skype: I'm looking at you], network games, etc) or websites actually support IPv6 on the other end yet. I've also noticed a problem with packet loss and high latency with Freenet6, so I'm thinking I'm going to try to find a different tunnel broker.
From the article, I picked up the reason for this result (but not until after posting a similar question, I must confess). Most home computer users, regardless of their platform, tend to connect to the internet through some sort of router device. Most of these routers use IPv4 only, and use NAT to share the Internet connection.
Many Mac users, instead of using some 'generic' WiFi access point, instead use Apple's Airport Extreme router. Per the article, Airport Extreme's have support for IPv6 built right into the router, and the router will *automatically* route IPv6 traffic using the 6to4 standard (which basically tunnels the traffic over the IPv4 connection from the ISP).
I suspect that if you connected your Ubuntu computer (or Vista, or XP if you installed IPv6 manually) to the Internet using an Airport Extreme, then IPv6 would work fine under Ubuntu too. That is, I think the 'magic' here that makes IPv6 "just work" is in the router, not in the OS.
The fact that according to this chart, the country in Africa most adapted to IPv6 is Nigeria. Guess those scamsters are getting more sophisticated daily, or maybe the 400k this woman gave them upgraded a few routers.
...in bed
I know that most of the people registering as Mac users with IPv6 are actually Mac users with an Airport Extreme wireless base station (which many Mac users like myself don't have), but is there anything that can be extrapolated about Mac market share from this?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
IPv6 is enabled on all OS X installs as the default. Few, if any, users -either at home or in a corporate setting- turn it off. At my site, IPv6 is not enabled on the network so all Macs have it disabled in all system images.
Sig this!
Without a NAT, how does a "NoNAT router" know what public IP range to give via DHCP (or other means) to Joe User's WinXP/Mac box, BEFORE it manages to get that public IP range from the ISP?
A public IPv4/IPv6 range that needs to be preconfigured on the router, is one more thing for the ISP and router manufacturers to deal with and one more thing for Joe User to screw up or have trouble with.
Go think about that.
My guess is you can't be a fucking moron since you're a slashdotter.
Many Mac users, instead of using some 'generic' WiFi access point, instead use Apple's Airport Extreme router. Per the article, Airport Extreme's have support for IPv6 built right into the router, and the router will *automatically* route IPv6 traffic using the 6to4 standard (which basically tunnels the traffic over the IPv4 connection from the ISP).
Indeed. I was quite impressed to read about that. I have been thinking for quite a while that router makes should be doing exactly that, so it's good to see that at least one of them does.
On the quite opposite hand, there's Vista. While the article pointed out that Vista sets up 6to4 automatically when it has a globally routable IPv4 address (which is a good thing, of course), there's an annoying other side to that coin. See, Vista announces that it routes through its 6to4 address, but then in actual fact doesn't (it just drops the packets silently). It has been annoying me quite some times when I've connected to a public WiFi access point at my university, only to see every IPv6-enabled site (including my own!) fail miserably since my Linux laptop will try to route through one of these Vista black holes. That's Microsoft for you...
I don't know about anyone else's definition, but I would consider distros marking themselves as Phase 2 Certified as one way you could define "pushing IPv6". Another might be to enable IPv6 by default in the kernel (since we're talking about IPv6 capability in the article, rather than usage), or to use IPv6 by default on all connections where it is supported at the kernel and application level, whether or not it is genuinely supported end-to-end. Far as I can see, very few distros are certified for IPv6 (I can't honestly remember seeing the logo anywhere), those that provide it don't take advantage of it, and those that do don't make it easy to take advantage of it (Ubuntu provides some IPv6 tunneling software, but nothing that works with any of the IPv6 gateways I'm using, and network administration using IPv6 under Ubuntu is a pain -- and it's by far the best distro I've used in this regard).
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Can we get a list of home wireless routers that will support this?
I didn't see it in any Belkins or D-Links I purchased in the last 2 years, though IPv6 was somewhat of a hot topic.
So I have to ask. In this age of "Now supporting Draft N!!!" and "MIMO ANTENNAE ARE GOOD FOR YOUR MULTIMEDIA HOME!" "I'M TWICE AS FAST AS G ROUTERS IF YOU BUY MY SAME BRAND G-RECEIVER!" With all the excuses to upgrade your router, where are all the much wanted "NOW WITH IPV6! FUTURE PROOF YOUR HOME LAN SO YOU'LL NEVAARR RUN OUT OF IP ADDRESSES" (wink)
I know cash is hard to come by these days, but geeks in the US are slaves to gadgets.
Sonic.net will, if requested, deliver IPv6 packets to their DSL subscribers. Unfortunately, their upstream connections are IPv4, so they're just offering tunneling at their end.
What is Russia then? Or does all the IPv6 traffic come from Moscow?
This may be the answer
Apple's secret "Back to My Mac" push behind IPv6
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/08/19/apples_secret_back_to_my_mac_push_behind_ipv6.html
Every device having an IP address? *shudders*
Are there any real costs or difficulties in the way, or is it just that they cannot be bothered to do until customers actually demand it.
!PASA 6vPI tuo yrt ot enoyreve egaruocne ylgnorts I .smelborp yna deciton t'nevah I dna pu tes ot hguone ysae demees tI .yppah yllaer neeb ev'I dna ,won thgir 6vPI gnisu m'I
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I think it's more likely due to the fact that Apple has typically had an advantage in educational institutions. Most residential ISPs still don't provide IPv6 support, but I would not be surprised if nearly every college and university in the U.S. supported IPv6 to the end user.
Doesn't matter if your router supports IPv6 if your ISP does not.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Don't ISPs have to support IPv6 at the modem level for consumers to have true IPv6 connectivity?
Dell Axiom Palm tops had IPV6 capabilities.. if I recall.. Let me dig one out of the "Freebie" bin at the thrift store and find out.. Stay here.. wait for me ..
... I'll have a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster with a side of Plutonium Nyborg
That's exactly right. To get IPv6 working on my system at home, I just set up the router. My Powerbook, my Ubuntu machines, and my wife's Windows Vista machine, all automatically picked up IPv6 and can all connect to http://ipv6.google.com/
For those rolling their own router boxes, you can see what I did here (caution - it's my blog and this is a tag that brings up a bunch of articles, start reading at the bottom...) I used 6to4 as well. It's worth getting a static IP address if you plan to use 6to4, and it's also worth noting that some ISPs, notable BellSouth/AT&T FastAccess, actually block use of 6to4, for reasons I don't really understand. Before wasting any time on it, try to ping 192.88.99.1 from a machine directly connected to the Internet. If you get responses, you can do 6to4. If you don't, you're going to have to try one of the IPv6 tunnel brokers, which is a supremely inefficient way of doing everything and makes you dependent upon the goodwill of a third party.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
IpV6 is about as exciting as changing your home address to 13::13 Mockingbird Lane. Big Whoop. Oh, I guess DHCP is in danger, Oh nos!
Have the security issues (i.e. the fact that it makes it trivial to forge addresses) with 6to4 been fixed yet? If not, enabling 6to4 by default is not a great idea...
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Unless you are looking at a fairly strange cross-section of consumer routers, most of them do not run Linux. Only a handful of the ones offered by Linksys, D-Link, etc. do. The majority run VxWorks, I believe.
A few years back there were actually more Linux-based routers but as cost pressures and competition have increased the manufacturers seem to have moved away in order to reduce the parts count. Broadband routers are the only pieces of equipment I've seen where the hardware specs have actually fallen, year over year, for comparable pieces of gear.
Anyway, if you do happen to get a real Linux router (like the Linksys WRT54GL, or early *G editions) and reflash the firmware to DD-WRT, you can enable IPv6. I don't think it does automatic 6to4 (at least it doesn't in the version I'm running) so it's not quite as slick as the Apple routers, but the capability is definitely there if you're running a decent load of software. I don't know if the capability is actually been removed from the kernel in stock firmwares or just not enabled.
I don't know what VxWorks' support for v6 is like, so I'm not sure how trivial it is for manufacturers to enable it, if they wanted to.
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They've offered IPv6 for years now:
http://www.sonic.net/features/ipv6/
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Have the security issues (i.e. the fact that it makes it trivial to forge addresses) with 6to4 been fixed yet? If not, enabling 6to4 by default is not a great idea...
Oh right because I forgot that it's very hard to forge addresses with ipv4...
FYI, for those running routers that can run DD-WRT:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/IPv6#6to4_Setup
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Doesn't matter if your router supports IPv6 if your ISP does not.
Sure it does. The whole point, and what makes it so cool, is that the AirPort sets up 6-to-4 tunnelling automatically. So you *can* have IPv6 connectivity even if your ISP doesn't provide it.
noah
I would be. Maybe some of the leading high-tech universities, but almost certainly the minority rather than the majority. Most educational institutions aren't going to spring for more expensive IPv6 equipment at this juncture.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
More expensive IPv6 equipment? You'd be hard pressed to find any contemporary, decent quality networking equipment without support for IPv6. The majority of this gear is even IPv6 capable with basic software licenses.
Universities have little reason to move to IPv6 beyond novelty. They generally have huge IPv4 blocks already.
You assume that people are going to spring for new equipment just so they can get IPv6? Not likely. Perhaps in five more years the equipment of today will be making up a significant portion of equipment in use.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
It's your hypothesis. Not mine.
Thanks for the explanation, I have probably not seen enough to see a representative sample, and several of them would have been old, so more likely to be Linux.
Have you ever heard of Internet2? There's quite a large number of schools that are involved with I2, and I'm 90% certain that I2 requires IPv6 capability.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Yeah, I am aware of the I2 project. According to them IPv4, IPv6, and others are supported. Also, their list of 213 participating universities would make that about 5% of the total number of universities. It also begs the question of what subset of the participants are actually running IPv6?
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
I see all this talk about tunnels and brokers. I can argue that the biggest US group that uses IPv6 (other then military pushing it) is Research and Education. Look at Intenet2 it has been running a dual stack and natively routing IPv6 for years.
In a dual stack native v6 environment, yes Vista has v6 enabled by default, but often it still doesn't work without still having to screw with it. The Macs just work, so much so that the users don't even know v6 is working and they are using it.
And before anyone makes the K12 cracks, those of us in the R&E community are using Macs more and more. A lot of College students are also switching. I'm a Unix/Linux guy, but with the switch to OSX and Intel I get to have my cake and eat it too. A decent BSD Unix under the hood, a decent graphical environment that vendors support and I don't want to kill my self getting multi-media to play in, and oh yea Windows when I have to.
Corporate guy who love their NAT are scared to death of v6 anyway and try to kill any of it that they see. Never mind the fact you could just run a statefull firewall and be more secure then NAT anyway.