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Why You Shouldn't Worry About IPv6 Just Yet
nk497 writes "While it's definitely time to start thinking about IPv6, it's not time for most to move up to it, argues Steve Cassidy, saying most can turn it off in Windows 7 without causing any trouble. Many network experts argue we're nearing network armageddon, but they've been saying that for years.'This all started when Tony Blair was elected. The first time. Yep, that's how long IPv6 has been around, and it's quite a few weeks ago now.' He says smart engineering has avoided many of the problems. 'Is there an IPv6 "killer app" yet for smaller networks? No. Is there any reason based on security or ease of management — unless you're running a 100,000-seat network or a national-level ISP — for you to move up to it? No. Should you start to do a bit of reading about it? That's about the stage we're truly at, and the answer to that one is: yes,' he says."
Anonymity is lost pretty quickly with IPv6
RFC 3041 dated January freaking 2001, assuming you're talking about using MAC addresses in the ipv6 address. Frankly I feel this is paranoia combined with ignorance of current ISP logging technology, in other words you don't have anonymity with ipv4 either.
along with ISPs seeing how many systems you have running on their network
Rates somewhere between 1) who cares 2) See RFC 3041 3) News to me that proxy servers are impossible on ipv6
exposes systems to OS flaws.
I suppose there are / will be bugs in v6 that would not happen in v4.
The logic in fact seems to be nothing but a really big switched network.
Thank god. Die NAT die! Can't happen soon enough. Some people will still want stateful "one way" firewalls. No problemo.
In short, I don't like what IPv6 gives us over what we lose with IPv4.
Given your list of misconceptions and misinformation, I'm not surprised.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
For three big reasons.
a: Its actually ubiquitous in the LAN these days. Both Apple and Microsoft use IPv6 link local operations very heavily, because it Just Works with nice stateless autoconfiguration and multicast.
b: You can have things screw it up if you don't have V6 deployed, and you have to worry about V6 even if you don't 'have' V6: EG, a Windows box with connection sharing and 6to4 enabled will happily try to "share" the 6to4 connection with everyone else on the LAN, so everyone else gets a V6 address that doesn't actually work. And with Apple prefering a 6to4 IPv6 address over a V4 address, the macs on the same network will now see horrible behavior going to any dual-stacked site, as it will try V6 first, take a timeout, then revert to V4.
c: Address space exhaustion is real, and IPv6 + DS-Lite (or even just IPv6 + IPv4 NAT) allows an ISP to get around address space exhaustion in a much cleaner way than the alternatives.
Test your net with Netalyzr
So if you want a NAT router to keep network wormable flaws away from the OS you can still do it.
you're confusing NAT address translation with stateful firewalling. Linux has been able to do that for ages on ipv4 or ipv6.
A side effect of ipv4 NAT is providing stateful firewalling, in that obviously the fw has no idea what to do with incoming traffic that doesn't belong to a flow you've already set up. All you need is one line to do this in v6.
You're looking for a line vaguely similar to this:
ip6tables -i eth0 -A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
And try not to forget to drop by default anything coming in thru eth0 that doesn't match the line above, of course.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I don't know what artificial reality you guys are living in, but IPv6 is running in many research universities worldwide, and on virtually every Linux box in the military and university community.
The fact that it's not being provided by your local residential networks is not our problem.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
they invented a fix for you
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Ignoring the technology incompatibilities between v6 and v4 for a second, and just taking connectivity at heart, let's examine the effect of "isolation": your community runs out of telephone numbers for its area code. Your state creates a new area code. NEW numbers are given out to new owners; all old phone line owners remain unaffected and able to reach old phone lines and continue with business as usual with their other giant companies also using the old phone lines
With IPv6, all new owners can talk to the old owners. The old ones already have websites that they can reach. Top sites like youtube, google, facebook and maybe even windows update with reserved IPv4 address isn't just going to magically lose it. They'll shuffle less important services to IPv6 the day they are forced to exceed their IPv4 allocation.
Nobody is forced to "switch" to IPv6 entirely. They create DNS subdomains like the little known ipv6.google.com (if it works for you, then you have ipv6, by the way.) In the US, the government forced digital / HDTV adoption last year, but old and new channels coexist in your digital-ready cable boxes through the simple use of different channel numbers. I have no idea how many years it will take for them to force the non-HDTV channel numbers off, but I suspect that this will take as many decades as it took to implement HDTV and force it on us.
The only people having reachability problems like you mentioned will be those in NEW address blocks from poorly developed countries. Large companies needing more IP's may have issues, but nothing their IT teams can't fix with more 10.x.x.x addresses (2^24 addresses for internal company addressing "oughta be enough for [er, OK, most companies]") Consider the address space sizes. Though IPv4 is only 16 bits smaller than the MAC address space, which is small compared to the IPv6 total of 128 bits, nobody I have every heard is saying that billions of computers out there are going to run out of MAC addresses to give out soon. Funny because wireless devices and network devices tend to have multiple macs a piece.
To be very, very clear, IPv6 will happen. There is no way around it. There is almost no IPv4 address space left. The folks who are at the top of the structure that assigns addresses will run out in the middle of next year. The next tier, call Regional Internet Registries may have addresses available for another year. By the end of 2012, there will be no address space available to assign. For the gory details, see the IPv4 Countdown Page. Especially, look at Figure 35. That is reality.
As an end users, you may not care. Comcast is already beta testing IPv6 to its customers. I assume others are or soon will be doing so soon, but this should be mostly transparent to users as their system will only require IPv4 and that will be NATed behind an IPv6 address. But it must happen or people will not be able to get new addresses. That is the bottom line. IPv4 will remain in use for many years, but the net will start getting smaller and smaller for those who don't implement IPv6.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
Hate to break it to ya but often in testing you don't want your host to have a name until it's ready for production.
They invented a fix for you, too
(horrors, actually using the hosts file for its intended purpose instead of using it to break DNS resolution for host names you don’t like?)
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Overloading outbound traffic from multiple machines onto a single IP address (what you call port address translation) *is* NAT, if only because most of the vendors appropriated the name from that other kind of address translator that was hardly ever used and few even remember (RFC 1631).
PAT was never really a correct name for it anyway; that was a cisco-ism. What we call NAT today derived primarily from the stateful transparent proxies of the mid-90's and as the word "stateful" implies, it remains as much a proxy as a translator.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.