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IPv6 Challenges and Opportunities
1sockchuck writes "Opinions differ on when the Internet will run out of IPv4 addresses, prompting a wholesale transition to IPv6. In recent videos, John Curran of ARIN provides an overview of issues involved in the IPv6 transition, while Martin Levy of Hurricane Electric discusses his company's view that early-mover status on IPv6 readiness can be a competitive advantage for service providers. Levy's company has published an IPv4 DeathWatch app for the iPhone to raise awareness of the transition."
According to my copy of the CorpSpeak to English dictionary "challenge" and "opportunity" both say "See 'problem'."
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
"Challenges" means problems. "Opportunity" = cool features.
Features of IPv6:
Every known star in our universe can now have 252 ip addresses with ver6.
My frigging socks can tell me they need to be cleaned via a script. My shoes can use GPS to track where I'm going, how many miles I walked/ran that day, etc.
Problems of IPv6: Screw it, we'll just nat our existing IPv4 addresses.
Sent from your iPad.
Dan Bernstein has chimed in on this before:
http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html
He is basically dead right.
The people who came up with IPv6 seemed to be too ivory tower: they forgot about
the reality on the ground. Few ISPs are even thinking about IPv6.
-paul
...and always will be!
US government contracts are starting to require IPv6 support. This is the main reason I'm seeing for IPv6 adoption. If it weren't for the government, we would all be keeping our heads in the sand until the internet starts slowly failing and Goldman Sachs starts selling remaining IPv4 netblocks to speculators.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Stolen from wikipedia:
"As of April 2008, predictions of exhaustion date of the unallocated IANA pool seem to converge to between February 2010 and May 2011"
Meta will eat itself
OK, here's a handy checklist to see if IPv6 is ready for prime time:
Use case: access a common web site (e.g. Slashdot) entirely by IPv6 packets: .org DNS server): CHECK .org DNS node via IPv6 packets (lookup slashdot.org address): ???
1) Look up host's IP via IPv6 packets:
1a) Access a root DNS node via IPv6 packets (look up
1b) Access
2) Access slashdot.org via IPv6 packets:
2a) Route IPv6 packets from my computer to "the Internet": FAIL
2b) Route IPv6 packets from "the Internet" to Co-Lo facility: ???
2c) Route IPv6 packets within the Co-Lo to Slashdot's servers: ???
When you (a presumably technically skilled user) can do that, then IPv6 is ready for the masses.
www.eFax.com are spammers
2002 called. They want their impending-IPv6-transition stories back.
Apple's market share for routers is tiny compared to Netgear and Linksys. I'm one of the 8% or so of people who uses a Mac, but it talks to a Netgear router.
...is that even new devices don't support IPv6, even when they're in entirely controlled address spaces.
For example, why the hell don't, for example, cell phones internet capabilities have IPv6? I mean the IPv6 routing would seem exactly designed for cell phones, devices external to the network don't need to reach them, and it's a frickin closed system with device upgrades fairly quickly. If we can't even use IPv6 in closed systems like that, it has failed.
The reason, of course, is because IPv6 is, in fact, an EPIC FAIL in actually working, because no one apparently bothered to figure out any sort of actual transition for it.
It's like, if instead of self-driving cars, they invented self-driving micro-monorails and expected us to buy them. But, don't worry, they have a handy monorail carrying rack we can install on top of our car that not that hard to set up so we can carry our monorail to the monorail tracks fifty miles away.
D. J. Bernstein is an ass, but he's right about this.
IPv6 should have been built by changing the damn format of the packets, but using the exact same IPv4 addresses with a specific prefix, routed exactly the same place. Any router that talked to devices that didn't understand IPv6 could just 'dumb it down' to IPv4, and, they should eventually do the same in reverse!
We could actually include a bit in the packet that upconverted IPv6 packets get, so we could keep statistics on how many packets were IPv6 their entire distance, and how many got converted down and back up at some point. So we could see what networks are actually switching out their equipment, and see what misconfigured gear thinks it's talking to IPv4 devices when it's talking to IPv6, so it needlessly converting. (IEEE 802.2 specifics a way to autonegotiate IPv4 or IPv6 using the EtherType, but it might not always work, and it's only for Ethernet anyway.)
At some point, as routers and OSes got replaced, large amounts of traffic on the internet would end up being IPv6 their entire distance, and at that point we can start assigning the IPv6 addresses that don't have a equivalent IPv4 one.
And, incidentally, we should keep the IPv4 network operational forever. 95% of the people can give their IPv4 addresses back, and as people stop connecting IPv4 devices, routers and whatnot will lose the ability to speak to them but there will still be some devices that cannot be upgraded, some embedded device that speaks only IPv4 or whatever. The company should be able to keep an IPv4 address, and require people to install one of the routers that can still upconvert in front of the device, and it gets routed over the internet and back just like anything else, because, for almost all the trip, it's IPv6. There would be no reason to ever turn off the subset of IPv6 that is IPv4.
Instead we invented a new fucking network that doesn't interact with IPv4 at all. Yes, yes, you can get IPv6 versions of IPv4 addresses, but routers and OSes do not automatically translate them. And it's actually against the rules for someone to try to contact a IPv4 server 'over' IPv6. They have to use their IPv4 address, like there should be a difference.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Ok kids. Go home tonight and turn ipv6 on. I know you're all running homebrew linux nat routers.
Here's all you gotta do.
Install radvd. It's a Router Advertisement server. Router Advertisements are how your LAN clients learn what the hell their IPv6 "prefix" is. You're going to use something clever called 6to4, which basically converts your public ipv4 address into the first half of your ipv6 address. You plug that information into your radvd configuration, and voila, all your LAN clients can learn their unique global ipv6 address. Then you just run a little script, which turns up the 6to4 tunnel on your linux nat, and all of a sudden, all your LAN clients have globally routable ipv6 addresses! And once the v6 stack fires up, your computers will try resolving AAAA records, so you might even get to visit some v6 websites!
You're not strictly running native ipv6, since 6to4 is a tunnel to an anycast server (dont worry, there's plenty of them sharing the same address). It emulates pretty damned close though. Enough for you to try it out!
Here's the thing that keeps blowing my mind. Remember back before NAT? The Internet was actually symmetrical back then. Any host could contact any host. Well, it's restored. I keep forgetting I can literally contact ANY lan host from remotely, using its v6 address. Security nightmare? You betcha. Restored services? Makes up for it! Maybe I can figure out what a firewall is, after all!
Sure, there's tunnel brokers out there too... don't waste your time with all that. 6to4 is quick and easy, and it works fairly faithfully. By the time a tunnel broker OKs your info, you could be pinging already with 6to4.
Oh yeah. That malarkey about "ooh my address is so long, it's just not worth it" -- My address is 2002:xxxx:xxxx::1 through ::5. Also, a few weeks ago they released an interesting workaround to memorizing ip addresses, called "The DNS". As ominous as that sounds, it's actually pretty clever and I've been enjoying it for a while.
And yes, ::1 is easily guessable and that makes it hackable. So please, no nmapping the 2002:xxxx/32 subnet tonight. (At the rate of 2^96 pings per second, it should be done by next century)
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Every time something on IPv6 comes out, there's a thundering herd of people who've never used it but are certain that it's awful and won't ever work. What's wrong with you people? Do you feel threatened because you're used to being the networking expert among your clique and don't want to lose that reputation? If not that, then what is it that's making you sneer at a cool new technology without even trying it first?
I'm not addressing people who tried to make IPv6 work but had problems along the way, or who otherwise had bad experiences with it. That's totally understandable and I'm not going to tell such a person that they're wrong. I am talking directly to the people who've read old articles talking about why it won't work, or who are trotting out the same tired, invalid reasons to dislike it.
Here's what you need to know about IPv6:
I think that about covers it. There's no reason to be afraid of IPv6. If you haven't tried it, give it a shot before bragging about how smart you are for recognizing that it can't work. Again, if you've tried it and had problems, I can understand why you're leery of the idea. If you haven't at least used a free tunnel to see what IPv6 is like, though, then you don't have a lot of room to comment on the subject.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
IPv6 should have been built by changing the damn format of the packets, but using the exact same IPv4 addresses with a specific prefix, routed exactly the same place.
Yes, that's what was done the last two times the address space was upgraded.
When ARPANET IMP addresses went from one byte to two bytes, to allow the number of nodes to increase beyond 256, the old addresses retained their 8-bit value, with a new prefix.
When the ARPANET was extended to the Internet, the two byte IMP address was the low two octets of the IP address, and the first two octets were 10 and 0, so IMP addresses converted to IP addresses as [10.0.xxx.xxx]. And that's where "network 10" came from. When the ARPANET went down, it freed up that address space for other uses.
But we have DNS now.
I can't wait for the day I get home from work in my flying electric car to play Duke Nukem Forever against my friends over my new IPV6 connection.
it failed ;)
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