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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.
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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.
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.
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.