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."

Comments

IpV6 reality check

[AbbeyRoad]

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

Re:IpV6 reality check

[r7]

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.

Amen to that. But I don't see an academic angle so much as an ILEC angle i.e., IPv6 is being handicapped by large telcos, large ISPs, legacy netblock owners and their proxies in order to drive up fees for IPv4 addresses. The threads on new fee structures, in mailing lists like arin-ppml, make this obscenely clear. IPv4 netblock owners are salivating over the potential for profit from what should be a public resource.

Only thing more disappointing than ARIN's failure to either reclaim unused IPv4 netblocks (and there are plenty of those, both large and small) or speed the adoption of IPv6 is the DOC and FCC's failure to foresee the damage, both economic and to communications, which the coming address shortage will cause.

What, again?

[Nobo]

2002 called. They want their impending-IPv6-transition stories back.

try it tonight

[digitalsushi]

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)