Slashdot Mirror
IPv6 Adoption Up 300 Percent Over 2 Years
Mark.J - ISPreview writes "The Number Resource Organization, which is made up of the five Regional Internet Registries, has revealed that the rate of new entrants into the IPv6 routing system has increased by 300% over the past two years. The news is important because IPv4 addresses (e.g. 123.23.56.98), which are assigned to your computer periodically, are running out. IPv6 addressing (e.g. 2ffe:1800:3525:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf) was invented as a longer and more secure replacement." IPv6 is still gaining ground slowly, particularly in the US.
And the rate of downloads of Ubuntu 8.10 is up infinity percent in the past two years.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
you mean it went from 1 person to 3 people?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Doing a trace route to that IP address went from my computer, to China, then back to my laptop, one more hop, and then timed out. Weird!
God, I'm tired of it being repeated that IPV4 addresses are running out. Everybody who's not a journalist should know that it's not true.
There's no reason every person on earth needs an IP. Nat+uPNP is perfectly capable and 100% backwords compatible.
That's not even getting into all the millions of unused IP's being held by the early internet companies.
IP's just need to be charged for on a early basis. Start with $1 per year per ip to EVERYONE who owns an IP's and you'll see the "IP Shortage" vanish overnight.
So which is it... change of rate of adoption (as the summary indicates) or adoption (as the headline indicates)? (And no, I have not RTFA.)
so we went from 20 ipv6 systems to 60. yippie...
I so wish that the major backbones would grow a pair and simply start a migration plan and force all customers to upgrade to ipv6.
Oh wait, they would have to spend money to upgrade their gear as well...
So now the total number is what... 4?
Ah, the IPv6 Mess.
Why is that lying?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That's impossible. No one can give more than 100%. By definition that's the most any one can give.
From 2 to 6 users! Cake for all 6 of you!
The title is misleading, the rate of adoption went up 300%, that doesn't mean there are 300% more users.
woot
In other news:
The number of solid gold statues in my living room increased by over NINETHOUSAND percent
from 2 to 6 people??
that it went from 1 person, to 4?
My company sells some monitoring software to people like Verizon Business and other MSPs and the big boys are finally seeing some IPv6 buy-in. There's a government mandate or two floating around as well (for their governmental services) that require it as well. It's one of our priorities in the next year or so.
I'm not sure why but I was always under the impression that an ipv6 ip looked more like ipv4, ie, 192.168.1.1.1.1. The way it actually looks, why not just use MAC addresses?
Whale
Wow - usage went from 1 to 4! Outstanding!
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
particularly applies to the US, not necessarily the adoption part :)
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
The news is important because IPv4 addresses (e.g. 123.23.56.98), which are assigned to your computer periodically, are running out. IPv6 addressing (e.g. 2ffe:1800:3525:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf) was invented as a longer and more secure replacement.
Look! IPv4 addresses just have numbers and dots. IPv6 addresses have numbers AND letters . . . and colons (TWO stacked dots)!
No question, which one is better, and tastes better, and lasts longer, and is less filling.
I'd like the IPv6 prefix dead:beef, please and thank, you.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Most of the big blocks of addresses are *very* badly distributed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IP_address_blocks
Does Palo Alto research center need 24 million IP addresses? I'm pretty sure it doesn't.
etc.
No sig today...
I mean it seems like I have been seeing this statement for years. We are running out of IPv4 addresses and the sky is falling. There has to be something real behind at least part of this right? So does anyone have a real number or time in which we will really run out of IPv4 addresses?
ACK
46:49:52:53:54:21
I will turn off my two routers ASAP.
The news is important because IPv4 addresses (e.g. 123.23.56.98), which are assigned to your computer periodically, are running out.
I dunno, most computers I know that receive IP address leases periodically use 192.168.x.x and 10.x.x.x because they are DHCP'd off a LAN. Please let me know when we run out of those. On the other hand, many computers with permanent IP assignments or consumer modems that request public IP addresses may be in danger...
123.23.56.98 is my IP, you insensitive clod.
So is 127.0.0.1 for future reference.
Normally this is what you do to spin an adoption increase from 1 to 4 in a positive light.
Any chance Slashdot could get IPv6 connectivity?
Progress in this direction is "stuff that matters", after all...
a 300% increase of 0 is still 0
Seriously, what percentage of internet nodes are now IPv6 compliant? Anyone have those numbers?
Technoli
Great news! What _other_ two systems are using IPv6 now?
First off, anybody who thinks that NAT is a long term solution to the IP address shortage is fooling themselves. NAT is a stopgap solution that has a scant handful of years left in it (some estimates say as little as 3-4 years). IPv6 is the only long term solution we have at the moment.
The biggest thing holding me back from switching is that my ISP doesn't seem to care one whiff about switching. The only way I have available to get on is to set up a tunnel, which seems to defeat the entire purpose of IPv6. I don't want to run IPv6 just for the sake of saying that I run IPv6, I want to run it so I can have an address for every device and finally get rid of the annoying NAT solutions.
I read the internet for the articles.
The one thing I don't understand about all of these IPv6 stories is who are we waiting on? Do I need to make some change to my router? My computer? Should I be calling my ISP demanding that they make the change?
Yes, IPv6 is up. It could hardly be otherwise from such a small base. However, I still have major concerns about privacy/anonymity/security and separately about overhead.
I would not be at all surprised to see IPv6 as the choice of policemen and totalitarian states. Far easier user traceability.
I know I'm gong to be modded down for this crack, but...
Wow! It went from one user to three!
Truth, Just Us, And Hatred For All Mankind!
What's not mentioned in this article is the fact that a significant percentage of the increases are coming from Macintosh OS X systems being brought online, which enable IP6 by default.
I had to get mine in. I'm done now. I also, in seriousness, want the raw numbers.
Truth, Just Us, And Hatred For All Mankind!
Seems like we all could switch over fairly easily if there was a DNS type of system for translating between the address spaces.
Would work like this:
Every current IPv4 address would be assigned a concurrent IPv6 address.
When a client node requests an IPv4 address, that request gets routed to a DNS type server somewhere close by which translates it to an IPv6 address and passes the request on to the proper end node along with the requesters IPv4 address for return responses which then get routed similarly.
As more IPv6 client and server nodes come on line, more and more simply pass through the translation router with no modification.
i'm sure I've vastly simplified things, care to comment?
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Just wait until IPv6.66, Fractional Satan Edition. Only then will our colons contain enough bits to address every atom in the universe.
It seems like every month we see something more about IPv6, and the pressures to move to it, etc. etc. My question is, from both a corporate and home end-user perspective, what should I be doing?
We're a small company, in a small office. We have a T1, we run a Windows domain, and host our own web and mail servers. We have NAT inside the office, and holes poked through our firewall for the external facing servers. We're all on XP workstations. What should we be doing, if anything?
At home, I'm on a residential cable modem. Everything is behind a WRT54G running DD-WRT. I'm running Ubuntu on my laptop, my wife has XP. I've got a couple other hobby PCs, but nothing publicly accessible yet, but everything inside the network is locally addressed 192.168.etc. What should I be doing, if anything?
How would I go about reserving an IPv6 block for myself? Is there a central agency controlling that yet? Is a reservation free, or is there a periodic payment?
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Three users then.
Have you ever looked at the specs? Did you understand anything?
I thought so.
Here's a simple case where you can't argue there's enough IPv4. Soon all mobile phones will be IP capable. Each having a unique address would be nice. BOOM! Impossible with IPv4. Not even enough room in 10.0.0.0/24 *right now* to put all mobile phones.
I seriously considering setting up my internal network for IPv6 and trying to get connected to the web via IPv6, but ran into so many roadblocks that I just gave up.
It's no wonder adoption is so slow if this is the way things are.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
So the number of users has skyrocketed from 4 to a whopping 12.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Do remember how long it took /. to move from a tablefest of tagsoup to a CSS-based design? A good 10 years, give or take.
IPv6?
And everyone who's a network admin knows that it is.
You're right, 100%, and I fully support IPv6 adoption end to end, because I know managing port assignments is a pain in the ass for non-UPnP compatible apps, and the problems that NAT has created. Even more absurd is the solutions to those problems (e.g. Skype-style) that are more like hacks than fixes.
NAT has created a very lazy fix to the problem of network security and filtering. If you're behind NAT, you're not addressable unless UPnP or an explicit port forward does it for you, and that's extremely convenient.
In a situation where every single computer in a network is internet addressable (something not always desired in business, which is probably the reason IPv6 adoption is so slow), you have to implement a very strict firewall to block and filter unsolicited traffic to those machines. If you're NATing them, as long as your network is physically secure, you don't have a problem.
This puts a lot less stress on network security than there should be in a business environment, and much less attention to what should or shouldn't be allowed through a local firewall, let alone a site firewall.
I'll stop ranting, but the point is that NAT has created an artificial deficit of proper network security, and I fear that when IPv6 becomes ubiquitous, NAT will linger on as a replacement for real security. The skills required to secure a fully addressable network of machines simply aren't needed in the majority of current environments because making every host in a network internet addressable today is simply not an option.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
I really enjoy statistics that are made to be big deals. Who says ____% over 2 years? Why not just up 150% over one? That's like saying in the past 23 1/3 years there have been 20 million people that died. Loses relevance. Blather. Blah.
1. start with 1 throwaway silly joke
1
2. multiply that by the Humorlessness constant
1 * H
3. add 300% overhead cost of a mediocre informative rating
1 * H * 300%
4. factor by the coefficient of who gives a shit
F(1 * H * 300%)W
and you are left with 3 users of IPv6
so there
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm wondering how far behind the popular adoption of IPv6, the nay-say'ers admissions that they were wrong will lag.
Progress will never happen. Things will always be the way they are now. There's no reason to change now, and there never will be. Pshaw.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Seriously, what percentage of internet nodes are now IPv6 compliant? Anyone have those numbers?
Not many. Certainly not enough to make even simple web browsing do-able over IPv6. Anyone with IPv6 connectivity right now is tunneling most of their traffic.
Does Slashdot even have IPv6 connectivity?
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Someone tell that to Comcast residential services
That's IPv4.
The main problem with IPv6's slow adoption is that no transition scenario was ever devised. The protocol was spec'd, implemented, debugged and ... that's it. Nobody ever asked the question, who's gonna switch and why?
Currently, if you want to use the Internet, you need to be on IPv4. The only existing transition mechanisms are those which allows an IPv4 host to emulate IPv6 on top of it. And 100% of any other hosts you might be interested in talking to are on IPv4, even if they happen to also be on IPv6. So basically, in the rare cases where you can use IPv6, you can also use IPv4 to do the exact same thing.
So there's no point.
What's missing here (and has been missing since the beginning of IPv6) is a mechanism whereby an IPv6-only host can talk to an IPv4 host. I believe there's something called "nat64" that's being worked on, but it's in preliminary stages.
Here's how it's going to happen: for a veeery long time (10, 20 years), most corporate networks will remain IPv4 only. They have no reason to switch. It's not just network stacks, it's networking equipment, firewall rules, inertia but also stupidity and incompetence. Consider this: right now, there are major websites still incompatible with Explicit Congestion Notification. It's not that they just don't implement it; it's that their networking equipment suffers from a 10+ year old bug that prohibits hosts with ECN enabled to access them. Non-buggy stacks just ignore the bit and let packets through, buggy ones silently drop the packets and cause the connection to hang. This used to be the case on www.cnn.com up until a few months ago, and is still happening on www.afp.com.
Instead, it's mobile networks that will implement IPv6. There is not even enough addresses in a class A (10.0.0.0/24) to even give addresses to all mobiles phones in an European country. It's trivial to implement proxies for HTTP and other common protocols, so that those mobile devices will be able to see CNN.com. But obviously, it would be much better to have a way to NAT those devices onto IPv4.
I'm in pretty much the same situation as you, and I'm curious as well. I use ipcop & Tomato on a WRT54GL, and ipcop at least doesn't have IPv6 support; DD-WRT seems to, but I don't think Tomato does. I guess I'll be waiting a while longer.
It's called 6to4. If you have a router that supports it then you can run v6 on your private network and every machine has a publicly-routable v6 address as long as your router has a routable v4 address.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's just there a lot more to go until the end~
Hey, I did say technically.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Next, you deploy 6to4 on your routers and start running dual-stack clients. Then call your ISP again and say 'we're currently using 6to4, but we want to disable this soon and switch to a proper v6 address, do we need to go to one of your competitors to do this?'
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There's no reason every person on earth needs an IP.
There's no reason everyone needs their own phone number, either. In the old days, several houses shared the same phone number. Calls were distinguished by different rings. They got along just fine with that.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
running out??? I'm only up to 192.168.0.27 -- and that includes my toaster
On my Mac (on right now), I can connect to IPv6 (http://ipv6.google.com/).
On my PC on the same network, if I type http://ipv6.google.com/ into Firefox, it fails to connect. But I can use nslookup to look up ipv6.google.com (and get 2001:4860:0:2001::68), and then connect to http://200148600200168/ and it works fine.
Does Firefox not work correctly with IPv6 on Windows?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
DD-WRT seems to support it in theory, but almost twelve hours of keyboard time later, I was still unable to get it working with a Hurricane Electric tunnel despite following the instructions on multiple places to the letter.
Pretty much like everything else I've seen. IPv6 stacks are happy to install on any machine and generate themselves fe80:: addresses, but expecting them to actually do anything is another matter.
Nearly ALL marketing uses "3 times faster" or "300% better" when the truth is "3 times as fast" and "200% better". (And those are often lies too!)
So... 0% up 300% is... 0%
Well, I'm impressed.
Just another ignorant American.
Now is a good time to get up to speed. At home, set up 6to4 tunneling on your WRT (DD-WRT can handle that) and run a dual protocol LAN. Once you have the WRT sending v6 prefix announcements (with radvd) Ubuntu will just work. For the XP machine, just go to the network configuration and install the IPv6 protocol and enable it (if it's not already installed). Then it will just work as well.
Once you have a good grip on things for the home lan, you can move on to the work setup.
If your firewall or router at work is able, you can also set up 6to4 there and get your firewall rules set up. A good start is to set up one prefix for your DMZ (the public facing servers) and another for the office machines. For the office machines, a good start to the rules is to drop any incoming connection (SYN but not ACK set).
By doing that now, when lack of v6 connectivity isn't a huge problem, you'll have an easy time of it when v6 becomes business critical.
The IPv6 spec allows for this already. You can represent your IPv4 address as ::x:x:x:x, where each x is one octet of your IPv4 address. The issue comes when you have to convert from IPv6 transport to IPv4 and vice versa, which is what 6to4 is supposed to do. The issue is that SOMEONE needs to host the 6to4 endpoints to provide this service, which costs money in terms of gear, bandwidth and maintenance, among other things.
It has been on my plate to get my company a block of addresses and IPv6 connectivity (through a tunnel for now since our uplink doesn't do ipv6 natively; it's time I asked again) but I've never been quite sure how to go about doing it. So, how do I get a block of IPv6 addresses assigned to me?
Quick, everyone, switch to IPX!!! It would be SOOOO much better than IPv4 or IPv6!!!
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
shameless plug:
http://debian6to4.gielen.name/
It will happen in 2009, I swear!
::
If you can't say something nice, make sure you have something heavy to throw.
Eh? You think your IPv4 address is untraceable? Think again. IPv6 actually has some very serious privacy-enhancing features, like temporary addresses, which are intended to be used once and then discarded, so that web sites can't track you by IPv6 address. Of course, they can still track you to the prefix, but that's no worse than what you have right now with IPv4.
On the other hand, with IPv6 addressing, you get end-to-end connectivity to the machine in your house, and you can generate IPv6 addresses randomly, which means that a virus trying to infect your computer has to try 2^64 different IPv6 addresses in order to get a single packet to your host. So it makes a lot of attacks that are dead easy in IPv4 really hard in IPv6. Big win. And it makes VoIP and peer to peer work a *lot* better. Another big win.
But yeah, if you spend all your time surfing internet porn sites, IPv4 and IPv6 are pretty much equivalent, so there's no reason to upgrade.
There's work on this happening in the IETF. And you can already do this with Teredo, which any Windows Vista machine has installed. The trick is that you need to spoof AAAA records in the DNS to make it all work, and that's non-trivial and interacts badly with DNSSEC. However, not to worry - if you just do the AAAA translation on the host that's doing DNSSEC validation, you can validate the A record, then provide a translated address to the application.
So the short answer is that if you want to do this, the technology is available, but it's not yet turnkey - you need to be a geek to get it working at this point. Stay tuned - in a few months that story will probably change.
Still more than you think.
A couple of weeks ago I started to notice that quite a few websites and other things where really slow and took around 30 seconds to a minute to actually draw the page.
I couldn't figure out why, then because I was debugging something else I was using tcpdump on my computer, I searched for some information to help debug the problem and again got on a slow webpage. My tcpdump showed IPv6 DNS and HTTP packets being send which where not being replied.
You see I somehow forget to add my Apple base station to the adsl-router-firewall to let the IPv6 tunneling through. So my webbrowser was trying the IPv6 addresses for each piece of media on the page, failing, timing out and falling back to IPv4.
I think a good 5 % of the websites I was visiting had IPv6 enabled, granted I seem to go to websites for technical subjects and to asian websites for my micro helicopter hobby.
Not to mention the dangling comparatives. 3 times faster than what, exactly?
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
IPv6 _can_ be used in privacy-enhancing ways, but where there is determined government opposition, it will not be. A communications authority could easly require that certain of the 128 bits addr contain UIDs. What could an ISP do?
There may not be a need for 2^32 network elements for Singularity research. Once it hits, nothing else before it matters.
the first good reason I've heard for having a networked microwave. I don't think too many people would be happy about needing a network cable for the microwave so we'll be using wireless.
do we need to go to one of your competitors to do this?'
"Competitors? What are those?"
1) the fact that NAT exists means we ran out a long time ago
/8s and stuff is not a permanent solution, denying that IPv6 is needed due to the application of a growing list of band-aids is obnoxious to listen to.
2) NAT is not a proper solution. It crosses the Network and Transport layer boundary to provide a hack solution to a Network layer issue. Having something like NAT prevents anything besides UDP or TCP from being used behind a NAT, since NAT relies on port mapping between UDP and NAT
3) What makes people think uPNP is a good idea? Wouldn't it be better to just have *real end-to-end connectivity* like was actually intended and used to be the case?
4) As the world of networked devices and content providers increases as fast as it always has been or faster there will be a growing need for content providers (servers) that cannot be behind a NAT while still hoping to use well-known ports for services
5) NAT does not scale. State tracking tens of thousands of connections? Since state needs to be tracked, load balancing something like NAT is just yet another hack on top of a hack.
I would love to hear someone explain how using NAT is a feasible solution permanently. Reclaiming unused sub-allocations from legacy
IPv4 isn't the issue, it's the method of assignment that is the root problem.
Whatever they're comparing it to. The competitor, usually.
What should I be doing?
Probably, not a lot. Either at home or at the office. For a while.
At the office, wait until you need to grow past your current IPv4 allocation, or you find yourself wanting to do business with somebody who insists on communicating with you over IPv6 and not IPv4. That may take a while, depending on who you are.
At home, you might load the IPv6 version of DD-WRT firmware on your WRT54G and sign up for a free tunnel broker account. Then you can see The Dancing Google Log. I know: W00t!
jhw
Sort of. Ok, what I describe below might not really fit the definition of NAT, so read on for what I mean.
Allow me to explain. One of the 'hardest' problems I hear mentioned when people discuss transitioning to IPv6 is the problem of legacy devices - printers, video game systems (think XBox Live), Tivos, etc.
It occurs to me that, at the ISP level, or possibly at the home/company router level (depending on your needs, it could be either place), a device could 'translate' packets between IPv4 and IPv6, so that legacy devices talk using IPv4 to the router, and the router does something similar in concept to NAT, where it creates IPv6 packets to forward on to IPv6 hosts and devices.
In such a situation, every ISP or home user can have their own entire IPv4 "virtual Internet" worth of IPv4 addresses.
I posted a longer article, a few weeks ago, in my user Journal, describing in a little more detail what I have in mind. Is there any reason something like this couldn't be made to work, to assist in transitioning to IPv6?
That makes me wonder, is there a listing somewhere of what ISPs and providers support IPv6? Residential and/or commercial? Are the major home broadband providers (Comcast, AT&T, etc.) even on board yet?
I did of course mean "16 million"...
(give or take)
No sig today...
DNS is the solution to the problem you're describing; but the current common tools are probably not practical enough. What would be needed would be something based on mDNS, whereby each machine on the network would announce its name, and a DNS server would collect that information and distribute it as needed.
Well it appears that avahi kind of does that (try avahi-resolve-host-name -6 hostname.local, assuming that IPv6 was enabled in avahi.conf), but it doesn't integrate automagically with standard hostname resolution AFAIK. But I might just be missing something.
Is it such a pain to deal with such long addresses that admins who would be configuring v6 "just because" don't? Those of you who have v6 networks, are there automated tools that keep you from ever having to key in an address, do you have the address range printed on your t-shirt, or what?
There isn't much entropy in most IPv6 addresses. The first 32 bits don't change much, you share most of it with everyone on the same continent, and then ISP. The lower 48 bits are usually mapped to the mac address. The lower 48 to 63 bits are basically free for you to do your own in-house routed network, so unless you have a router inside your network (not the one connecting to the outside world), it's 0.
So far all intents and purposes, when you're managing a few machines, you will mostly pay attention the lower 48 bits.
Would it have been better to use a smaller (40? 48?) bit range, and perhaps supplement that with an "extension" mechanism that could be appropriately sized for the network involved?
No, the extended size allows for great flexibility in routing.
There's an infinite difference between 0 and. . . almost 0. If IPv6 adoption was 0.001 percent of total Internet hosts last year, and it's 0.003 this year, that is, technically, 300% growth. Not necessarily very meaningful, but still 300 percent growth.
> A communications authority could easly require that certain of the 128 bits addr
> contain UIDs.
The same authority could require that ISPs keep accurate, detailed logs and retain them forever.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
We are running out of IPv4 addresses? Why the heck did no one tell this before?
IPv6 allows for address abbreviation. It is common for IPv6 addresses to have a relatively short network prefix, a bunch of zeros, then a non-zero host address. IPv6 specifies that addresses may be provided in a full form, or abbreviated form, where all the internal zeros are replaced by ::
This still only helps so much but, you can think of IPv6 addresses more as
pre:fix::host:addr
Now, that said, IPv6 addresses do still tend to be pretty long, because the 'host' portion is often the 48-bit MAC address of the host computer. The upside is that allows for automatic configuration without needing DHCP. The downside is, common IPv6 addresses are still about 80 bits of information (32-bit prefix, 48-bit host).
The real answer is, of course, host names/DNS. Don't bother remembering numeric addresses, except for the DNS servers, routers, etc and give them an address like:
pre:fix::1
(I believe you can statically assign an arbitrary host IP to something like a DNS server or router, so you can use ::1, ::2, ::3, etc. for the servers/devices that absolutely must be accessed by static addresses).
It's not so bad remembering 2579:2a3d::1
enough said!
Is there a way to even register a static ipv6 address?
Until someone can explain to me some actual real benefit me and people like me are not going to undertake expensive upgrades. This is why a protocol launched in 1996 FFS is still not adopted, there's just no advantage - its solving a problem that has not arrived yet. When the problem does arrive I will be the last affected because I already have IP addresses.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.
Everything is a question of ease. Do you want this to be easy?
I was a fan of IPV6 when it first was proposed (back in '93 i think and it was a battle betwen ip128, ipng and something else), it looked like a good solution to what would evidently be a problem at some point.
But these days its seems like no one actually learned from the mistakes of the past. All the things that were done wrong with ipv4 and now being done again with ipv6 (classes for eg)... "I can only have a /64 or /48 network?" are you for real?.
I guess the point im trying to make is that /64 is a HUGE number, but back in my day when they were handing out class A subnets like candy, 32 sounded pretty big too. Given the love we have for gadetry, that address space will be consumed mighty fast and so we'll go through a very painful migration for something that may put us back where we were with people calling out the "doom of the ipv4 address space".
On top of that we have idiots running around saying things like "NAT is evil! IPV6 will be the end of NAT" and in other areas the same thing except "we wont implement NAT for ipv6 in the linux kernel". Without even understanding the reasons NAT came to be in the first place. NAT was absolutely not developed as a solution to the ipv4 address space running out. In reality it gave people a way of "getting" an address space without having to be assigned one, not because it was hard to get one but because it was a temporary space. Later on this became very important because the internet suddenly became popular outside the academic space. When internet first came to Australia at the consumer level it was AGAINST THE TERMS OF USE to have more then one machine on the other end of the link, but thankfully by then we had linux with its natting kernel. Later home consumer routers became ubiquitous and the problem mostly solved itself. NAT also has its uses in the corporate world, which I wont bother going into.
On top of that you have people who scream things like "NAT isnt scalable". Well, yes, If i try and push 1000 people through a single NAT thats going to be an issue. But its such a rediculous argument anyone who makes it should be shot anyway, I mean how dumb do you have to be to say something like that? have you never dealt with large networks?. That was never and will never be an issue regardless.
But, for me the most important part of NAT is simple the ability to own my own address space - something that no one can decide for me, and if you think thats a bad thing then you really have lost the plot.
As for NAT breaking protocols, well, IMHO people should be designing protocols to work through a NAT. In most cases it forces people to do things the right way (look at h323 as a good example, a very poor protocol that just doesn't work very well with or without NAT, and later SIP - personally, im not a big fan of SIP, but at least its better then h323) at the network layer. There are obviously places where NAT is definitely not feasible (incoming services for the most part). But every incoming service has an initiator, which should work behind NAT with few exceptions.
But, anyway, i've had enough of a rant.
That would make zero a desirable digit to have just from convenience, probably more so than it deserves since any random digit should be equally valid. Maybe we can have it so that
2001:DB8:/1/:1428:57AB
is short for
2001:DB8:1111:1111:1111:1111:1428:57AB,
and
2001:DB8:/3e/:1428:57AB
would mean
2001:DB8:3e3e:3e3e:3e3e:3e3e:1428:57AB.
We don't even need to make it a divisor of 16; for example,
2001:DB8:/faded/:1428:57AB
would be short for
2001:DB8:fade:dfad:edfa:dedf:1428:57AB,
an address easy to remember (for geeks, anyway). If everyone else wanted a mostly-zeroes IP address, I wouldn't mind getting the 2001:DB8:/faded/:xxxx or 2001:DB8:/c0de/:xxxx subnet or something. (I guess we can grab 65536 addresses at the same time since there are so many IPv6 addresses.)
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
"Woah, a Duke Nukem Forever server? No way. How long has this been sitting here?!?"
There is a fully fledged commerical reason for wanting IPv6 support and end-to-end addressing, from Microsoft of all people. It's called DirectAccess and corporate IT types want it.
Basically, your corporate network is IPv6 IPSec based. Add a static IPv6 nameserver and put it on the internet. You just then allow your servers to be directly accessed over the Internet via IPSec IPv6. No messing around with VPNs, no nothing, your users will be able to access company resources on corporate laptops by just plugging them in to the Internet because your internal servers are just plain accessable via the 'net.
Imagine if everything Just Works on your employees laptop - if they're physically wired in to your LAN, or sitting at Starbucks.
Item #1 IPV6 is a good idea in principle
Item #2 I am a big boy, and I can handle any problems NAT causes, up to and including a DMZ, or turning off NAT altogether.
I understand that when the IPV4 version of IPSEC was adopted, a NAT-compatable version was voted down specifically in order to "break NAT". The net result is that IPSEC adoption has been hobbled. Talk about cutting off your face to spite your nose.
And a note to all those aging pony-tailed hippies who remember "the good-ole-days of a fully-open internet". You're living in the same drug-induced twilight zone as the 20,000,000 aging baby-boomers who all remember having been at Woodstock in 1969. In the "good-ole-days", only sysadmins had real end-to-end connectivity. 99% of end-users sat in front of green-screen terminals like VT100's. And they toed the line, or got kicked off by a BOFH.
The real reason that corporations love NAT is that renumbering when moving between ISPs is relatively painless. Move to a different ISP, and you only have to re-number a few publically visible servers. The 500 desktops in each building don't have to be touched. What's that you say? A *SIDE-EFFECT* of NAT is that office workers can't run VOIP, P2P, or any servers? One... two... three... awwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
Take the anti-NAT fanbois and lock them up. Make IPV6 NAT-agnostic. Don't be assholes deliberately trying to break NAT. Use some diplomacy for a change, and you might find IPV6 adoption speeding up.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
I know someone else already mentioned 6to4 but...
If you have a router that is 6to4-capable, (ie, an Airport Extreme, or any router running DD-WRT or OpenWRT), you will have IPv6 independently of your ISP.
Your routers public IPv4 address is used to create a whole fully valid IPv6 subnet. All your hosts behind your router will get real public-accessible IPv6-addresses.
Even easier is to (on each host you want IPv6) install Miredo (implementing the Teredo protocol). In Ubuntu you basically make a
$apt-get install miredo
Thats ALL to get an IPv6 address that truly works. Works though a normal NAT without opening any ports or anything.
There is basically no adoption of IPv6 because there's no point to it so far, because, today, if you have IPv6, you also have IPv4, and you end up using anyway, even when talking to other IPv6 hosts.