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Google Engineers Say IPv6 Is Easy, Not Expensive
alphadogg writes "Google engineers say it was not expensive and required only a small team of developers to enable all of the company's applications to support IPv6, a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol. 'We can provide all Google services over IPv6,' said Google network engineer Lorenzo Colitti during a panel discussion held in San Francisco Tuesday at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Colitti said a 'small, core team' spent 18 months enabling IPv6, from the initial network architecture and software engineering work, through a pilot phase, until Google over IPv6 was made publicly available. Google engineers worked on the IPv6 effort as a 20% project — meaning it was in addition to their regular work — from July 2007 until January 2009."
Google allows it's employees to use 20% of their WORK DAY for personal projects. So technically this wasn't "extra" work.
It's very easy to do. Most if not all servers are currently IPv6 compatible and most of the software has this type of stuff abstracted away by the operating system.
Then all you need to do is ask your provider for an IPv6 range and put some records in your DNS, enable your clients for IPv6, tell your routers that they'll from now on see IPv6 addresses as well (usually already in the firmware or it's in an upgrade somewhere) let your DHCP server give out IPv6 addresses and then you're done. Add an IPv4 to IPv6 gateway if your provider doesn't support IPv6 yet.
This all can be done in several steps and IPv4 can keep chugging at the same time as well so there is practically no downtime to the systems. It's the same as adding an IPv4 range to your network (if you ever run out of space in your range) except that there are more digits and that some of your older hardware needs a small upgrade.
The problem is that it requires manpower to do so which isn't cheap. In an organization like Google it takes a group a while at 20% of their time. In many organizations, those groups are 1) not as competent, 2) don't have 10% of free time, let alone 20%, 3) this has to be justified as far as manpower costs go.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
What about convincing many corporate users who have come to believe over the years that private IPv4 NATed networks are an essential part of their security?
Already taken care of.
Private Addresses in IPv6
If you told me that my business needed to take 4 months to do something, I'd tell you it had better be revenue-generating.
If you're Google, and you're thinking long term (something severely lacking with many people), it is revenue generating...especially if they're in the forefront of providing support for the technology.
If you told me that my business needed to take 4 months to do something, I'd tell you it had better be revenue-generating.
That's the big problem with the IPv6 transition.
Regardless of how easy or necessary it may (or may not) be, it isn't going to generate a whole lot of revenue right now. Maybe for a web-based company like Google it might actually get them some revenue... But for your average business that just uses their network to email, browse the web, transfer some files, etc... It'll take some money and some labor, but won't really get you anything in return.
It's hard to pitch something like that to management.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Hacking your router would take you less time than the time it took you to post.
No joke. It's just a firmware upload.
Or, if you like big numbers with lots of commas, 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 (compared to the 4,294,967,296 in IPv4). Of course, a very large number of those (but still an insignificantly small fraction) are reserved for various purposes and cannot be used for normal addresses, but the same is true for IPv4.
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
there will be additional latency and significantly more overhead involved in routing IPV6 traffic
Errmm.. I think you would actually find out that with some IPv6 features like route aggregation and the checksum-less IPv6 header, things should be faster. But yes IPv6 routing without hardware capable of switching IPv6 packets will definately be slower.
If the entire net were converted to IPV6 today, it would melt.
The only reason it's going to melt is because the majority of "IPv6 support" out there uses software-based routing
Fortunately people will likely continue to use IPV4 for a long time and the IPV6 traffic will grow slowly enough that router technology will improve as necessary.
Router technology IS already here. Most hardware vendors already support IPv6 switching.
"IPv6, on the other hand, uses 128-bit addresses and can support so many devices that only a mathematical expression -- 2 to the 128th power -- can quantify its size."
Except that in the standard IPv6 addressing scheme, we immediately throw away 64 of those bits and use them as host identifier. Then we divide the rest heirarchically up into networks, each division of which can leak addresses. We probably won't be seeing a lot of 2-bit subnets for point-to-point links, as we have now in 32-bit CIDR; they'll grab 8 bits instead 'just in case'.
Since every network operator will think 'it's okay, I can be sloppy because 64 bits is enough for everybody', I'm sure it will be perfectly possible to get address space exhaustion in IPv6.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
pirate bay supports ipv6:
3.511.154 registered users. Last updated 03:10:04.
IPv4 18.113.972 peers (8.726.310 seeders + 9.387.662 leechers) in 1.604.503 torrents on tracker.
IPv6 32.210 peers (15.477 seeders + 16.733 leechers) in 31.800 torrents on tracker.
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
Read.
The reality is there are TONS of legacy systems out there that can NOT be replaced with any currently available "solutions".
CURRENTLY AVAILABLE.
Are all those fortran programs are around simply because people are too lazy to switch over to the C/C++/web versions that were written?
(Since you won't get it, the answer is NO. Those fortran programs are around because there is NO replacement. One can be written, sure. But we have working shit already, why add cost, time, and disruption for zero gain?)