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Comcast Plans IPv6 Trials In 2010
Mortimer.CA writes "In a weblog posting, Jason Livingood, Executive Director of Comcast's Internet Systems has stated that they're beginning public trials of IPv6; Comcast hopes 'that these trials will encourage other stakeholders to make plans to continue, or to begin, work on IPv6 in 2010 so that all stakeholders do their part in ensuring the future of the Internet is as bright and innovative as it has been in the past.' Interested guinea pigs can volunteer at Comcast6.net (FAQ). Those who have IPv6 connectivity via other means can check out their IPv6-only web presence."
I have no ipv6 at this location and it loads just fine here, not exactly 'ipv6 only' like the Dancing Kame ...
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Pinging ipv6.comcast.net [68.87.64.59]
woops.
Nope. Can't see the IPv6-only web presence from my IPv4-only internet. I guess it got slashdotted.
I know most IP6 fan will say that you don't need them but you just know when the smoke clears Joe customer will still get ONE Address.
Besides, most IP-enabled toys wont like IP6 (Wii, VOIP boxes, etc.)
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
what is the per ip cost? $5? WILL there cable boxes also start useing ipv6? they use ipv4 now.
I've been waiting for mediacom to roll out some DOCSYS 3 / IPv6 forever. This little town I happen to be in, has excellent infrastructure and is physically capable of running it -- unlike most cities. This town is dependent only on major hardware upgrades, not cable plant upgrades.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
The main page mentions tunneling IPv4 over what it calls "Dual-Stack Lite technology (aka DS-Lite)". But Comcast must not have been aware of Nintendo's prior use of "DS Lite" for a handheld video game system with Wi-Fi support. Do Nintendo video game consoles even support IPv6?
ipv6.google.com is IPv6 only, and if you can reach it, you are IPv6 enabled.
We actually used this for the IPv6 test in Netalyzr as the basis of the IPv6 connectivity test. Our servers don't have IPv6, but we have a small amount of javascript on the analysis page that tries to fetch the logo from IPv6.google.com and reports success or failure back to the server.
Test your net with Netalyzr
My ISP has given me (and any customer who wants it) 18446744073709551616 IPv6 addresses free of charge, That should keep me going for a while...
If Comcast actually does what they're saying on the tin, maybe the other ISPs will follow suit.
This just might be a good thing.
One of these days, I am going to flip out. When I flip out, I'll be back in five minutes.
It is very hard to block NATs even if they aren't allowed.
Hard, but doable. An ISP can "protect the security of its network" by requiring the customer to run a "dialer" or "supplicant" before the ISP will route the customer's packets outside the quarantine. The ostensible purpose of network access control methods is to make sure that the operating system and antivirus signatures on customer equipment are updated and that the botnet-of-the-week isn't running. But the side effect of Trusted Network Connect deployment is that connecting to a home-class Internet requires an approved and unmodified copy of Windows or Mac OS without any programs that interfere with the ISP's business model, such as Apache HTTP Server or NAT software.
Ipv6 is going to suck on so many different levels.
By the time IPV6 is fully deployed, the IPV6 space will be rapidly filling up, and people will be talking how we really need to deploy IPV8...
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Will the addresses by dynamic or static? Is there any good reason for them not to be static?
You got trapped by OpenDNS. OpenDNS is VERY agressive at wildcarding network failures:
132.219.67.208.in-addr.arpa. 18794 IN PTR hit-nxdomain.opendns.com.
So even though there is a valid name for ipv6.google.com (the Google DNS servers return a valid reply with a 0-size answer for an A query, and the whole data for an AAA query), OpenDNS instead goes "hey, lets wildcard it and return our server!"
This behavior is why I'm NOT a fan of OpenDNS.
Test your net with Netalyzr
I'm impressed that Comcast is talking about it trials publicly and engaging customers. Many service providers run stuff in private, don't tell their guinea pigs, I mean customers that they experiment on, and then just select whatever seemed convent for the service provider. Engaging people in a trials like this, seems win/win for the customers and service providers.
http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Search/en-US/?query=disable%20IPv6 (Myself being one of them.) Being as the vast majority of home users and small businesses still send their money to One Microsoft Way, Redmond Washington, the standard Slashdot solution of install Ubuntu/Gentoo/OpenBSD/FreeBSD/Buy a Mac might not work for everybody. (I am a dual-booter, by the way.)
This is a good thing, but lets not forget how Comcast continually raped their customers and fought for a closed internet. I urge you not to give them too much credit. If nothing else it is nice to know that they are perhaps not *pure* evil.
I guess it means most companies (aka dlink, linksys, etc) have to get off their ass and add support to their routers since most home routers don't support ipv6.
For what it's worth, I signed up for the trial. Despite the level-1 tech support's crappiness, and the relative overpricing of their services, Comcast's network department does a pretty good on the backend. Our area has gone from 3mbps to 16mbps (with a 50mbps tier available) in 8 years, and has already completed the analog reclamation process in our area. Good on them for getting a head start on IPv6.
I presume they are going to want to do end-to-end IPv6 eventually, instead of assigning a single IPv6 address to my modem, and then continuing to use IPv4 NAT behind it. However, if they are going to do that, several things are going to have to change:
1. Router default settings will have to change. Out of the box, most home routers use NAT by default, and, since most people don't change the settings (based on the number of 2WIRE### SSID's broadcast to my house), they'll have to redo them for IPv6.
2. Auto discovery services will have to get better. I can say, categorically, that OS X is better than Windows and Linux at automatically finding nearby machines and devices that do not have a static IP/DNS A record assigned to them. The other 2 OSes will have to catch up, because, while a quartet of triplets is annoying but manageable to type, an IPv6 address will be a bear to copy down.
3. A debate between static and dynamic IP addresses will have to take place. Ideally, a device would get a static IPv6 address assigned to it and keep it forever, no matter where it roamed and went. It'd be akin to a routable MAC address. However, if we do that, we'll run out of IPv6 addresses more quickly (though still not fast), since things like phones get recycled fairly frequently. But there are several obvious downsides to continuing to use totally dynamic IPs.
Finally, as an aside, it's interesting to me, at least, how Apple Airport Base Stations do IPv6 routing automatically via a tunnel provider (as another commenter noted). Comcast doesn't support any IPv6, but when I'm connected to my router at home I get full IPv6 support transparently. Apple doesn't even mention this as a feature on the box, and it's not highly configurable either. So why did they spend all the effort to get it that way? Are they trying to stay so far ahead of the IPv6 curve no one will ever complain they're behind?
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
I still fail to see why we can't just extend the address space of ipv4 all of those new ipv6 features are just wasted overhead bullshit. Here's looking forward to my net being disabled for a month and being extorted to buy some new modem or other crap only to have my ping never return to the way it was before :(
I would totally be in on this. What, its Comcast? Bwahahahahahaha, forget it then. Not available in my neck of the woods. Seriously, I think this is just a ploy for them to figure out how to do their throttling, packet inspection, and spying on an IPV6 network.
but this comca$t that makes you pay as high as $20+ per tv for there hardware.
I'm feeling the Chinese are the only ones that can benefit from the ipv6 and they would get the help of everyone for free ?! Economically it would be foolish to make the world switch to ipv6 for nothing. China is not fair to anyone they don't respect patents and counterfact items so I don't see why we should make them the ipv6 gift. Make them trade this ipv6, let every ISP in the world test it and then regroup and ask China to trade ipv6 for something. It doesn't have to be money : pollution reduction laws or human rights sound fair. Anything they can do fast and not just a promise would do. They're the ones who'll run out of addresses not us.
IPv6 yeah, for making somebody some money. Go ahead and spray us with all the radiation you want fellas because you live in it to. Nothing like a little more autistic babies.
Your ISP can easily protect you from IPv6 by giving you a NAT router, or you can get one yourself. As IPv6 gets rolled out, I expect more and more IPV6 to IPv4 NAT routers will become popular.
I've been using IPv6 for many years and I don't get it. My obvious question when reading this is: WHY, why would anyone do this? The primary reason I use IPv6 in the first place is to have real globally routable IPs on all my boxen. I expect zero people who understand that most stories who are repeated time and time again on television these days have huge gaping holes will want IPV6 to IPv4 NAT. ISPs may decide to only hand out one IPv6 IP pr. subscriber and force such garbage upon the people, but it seems clear that those 2-3% of the population who have that now rare quality called "ability to think" will want and demand their own /64 subnet and not even consider foolish IPv6 to IPv4 NAT solutions. It's simply a very dump idea to begin with.
Yes, I know the IPv6 address space is galactically huge, but what exactly good purpose is served by giving each customer 1.8*10^19 addresses? Seems a bit excessive, doesn't it? Wouldn't most customers be fine with 16 bits of host/subnet (obviously, there might be som), and the rest of them shouldn't conceivably need more than 32 bits of their own address space? (And if someone needs/wants more than 32-bits of addressing assigned to them, then, sure, by all means, give them 48 bits). But why, 'by default', give people so many addresses I don't even know the name of numbers that large? (18 quintillion, I guess?)
I've been using IPv6 for many years and I don't get it. My obvious question when reading this is: WHY, why would anyone do this?
Well, here's a plausible scenario.
You have IPv6 apps on your box, but a few of them are old and only work on IPv4.
For example, your mail server is IPv6, but your preferred mail client is IPv4.
The GP speculates that this could be handled in routers... but I reckon this could be handled much more locally: in software in your OS. It would automatically intercept outgoing IPv4 traffic, and network-address-translate it to IPv6.
Everyone knows the IPv4 internet will grind to a halt in 2007.
I think DOCSIS 3 areas might have been assigning IPv6 addresses to cable boxes for a while now.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Depressingly, the grandparent isn't an idiot. This actually was the reason that a lot of corporate networks stayed with v4 for so long, and the v6 to v4 NAT arrangement was only finalised about a year ago. The main reason for it was printers. Lots of corporate networks contain network printers that only support IPv4. If you switch the network to v6, then you either need to upgrade the printers (expensive) or provide some hack to connect to them. Another issue was CCTV cameras. Lots of companies have IPv4 CCTV cameras which connect to a central monitoring station and stream video footage.
They needed some mechanism by which these v4-only appliances could keep operating. Most of them didn't actually need to connect to the outside Internet, so they can be put on a private v4 network with a gateway handling translation to v6 addresses.
A typical implementation of this would put all of the v4-only devices on the 192.168/16 subnet and use the 10/8 subnet for v6 NAT. Any connections to 10/8 addresses are automatically forwarded to a manually-configured v6 address. In the other direction, the gateway accepts connections on a few v6 addresses and forwards them to 192.168/16 addresses, with the origin address set to a 10/8 address. The v4-only appliances talk to the gateway via IPv4 and the rest of the network talks to the gateway via IPv6.
Gradually, you replace the legacy devices (as they wear out) with ones that support IPv6 and move them out from behind the NAT.
As the other poster mentioned, for v4-only software you can do this in your local operating system's network stack, but for embedded systems you can't (although, given that Adam Dunkels wrote an IPv6 stack that runs happily on a 6502 with 32KB of RAM, there's not much excuse for things not to support v6).
It's not a high priority for home users, because they can just run a dual-stack network and switch off IPv4 when they run out of v4-only devices.
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