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Obama Highlights IPv6 Issue
alphadogg writes "The Obama Administration bills itself as the most tech-savvy political team ever, but until now it has ignored one of the biggest issues facing the Internet: the rapid depletion of IPv4 Internet addresses and the imminent need for carriers and content providers to adopt IPv6. Today, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) will host a workshop on IPv6 that features high-profile executives from government, industry and Internet policymaking organizations. Some observers are hoping the Obama Administration will use the workshop to issue a deadline for all federal agencies to support IPv6 on their public-facing Web sites."
I heard he's going to mandate that all Federal agencies cut over to IPv6 by the time they close Gitmo.
-Peter
Can we at least all agree that NAT is evil, and destroys one of the nicest features of TCP/IP (and a free Internet): it creates a network of peers?
Coming up next ... our monthly reminder of ipv4's demise.
How many stories can you guys come up with that basically dance around the same issue?
We know its happening, now we're just waiting for everyone to catch up and get compliant.
This is not the penguin you're looking for.
Weren't all addresses supposed to be gone by now? That's problem with doomsday predictions IPv4, warming, God, it never happens as scheduled and then people just ignore you next time you start predicting. If we were more temperate about our predictions, people wouldn't dismiss them as more of the same "sky-is-falling" crapola.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Gee, I hope while they are at it, they can make sure they can track all the content, every citizen and device that get's "plugged" into the internet.
Hopefully, they are bringing in the vast collective knowledge of the **IA's to ensure that the rest of the world is represented as well.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
The Obama Administration plans to increase the amount of Hope and Change budgeted for federal agencies in the hope that it will spur IPv6 adoption.
I was gonna be first but my 6to4 layer adds too much latency.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
and you see this in all sorts of problems in life, from coworker's agendas, to politicians and their bombast:
you can win attention in the short term by describing a threat in worse language than it actually is
but by doing that, you pay the longterm cost of people just not trusting what you say anymore
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
IPv6 is Microsoft's latest internet operating system, which isn't selling well because Google doesn't like it.
Obama is the infamous terrorist hiding in Afghanistan, who may or may not have been born in America, but is our President, unless you're a republican.
tech-savvy != good leadership
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
The original article actually points out the real problem that the headline misrepresents. The real problem is that the Obama administration is almost comically clueless about Internet engineering issues related to governance.
jhw
Where's Jon Postel when you need him...
Join comcast then, they have high performance local 6to4 gateways.
www.v6.facebook.com (Yes, really. Look what it resolves to :)
Here's their motivation:
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Congratulations on the first post.
Very difficult to do these days.
First Post is easy. A GOOD first post is hard. This guy nailed it.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
It seems mostly ok as a protocol if you ignore the context of being in an IPv4 world.
That said, with the IPv4 world, what problems are glaringly obvious. One is that generally, the v6 people threw out a whole lot of babies with the bathwater when they went clean slate. Also, generally, those are coming back in. In the beginning they said 'DHCP is obsolete, mDNS and stateless addressing', now they have a DHCP that is approaching the capability of DHCPv4 almost. They still need to have an interface identifier to go with the host identifier to let the DHCPv4 people get comfortable and give them all the capability they had in DHCPv4.
The other completely botched thing was providing no way for an IPv6-only host to ever talk to an IPv4-only host. They'll say it's impractical as that is a many to fewer mapping of address space and clients cannot be uniquely identified while keeping the pure vision of peer-to-peer or nothing at all in mind. However, having IPv6 hosts that are clients and only clients getting to IPv4 only servers via designated NPT (Network Protocol Translation) gateways would have enabled a great great mass of clients to shuffle right over to IPv6 without a horrible experience. I propose that this is still quite possible if the right people drove it.
The first is a matter of general maturity, but currently things are good enough for most. The rest require adoption to really drive change. The second aspect I also don't view as unfixable, it can still be done today, if the IPv6 leaders extract their heads from their asses and compromise on 'vision' for praticality, comforted somewhat by the knowledge that IPv4 would eventually atrophy away in that scenario.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The real issue is that IPv6 was horribly badly misconceived and misdesigned right from the start, in such a way that it was doomed to become the epic fail we know and love today. I am very skeptical that ipv6 can be fixed.
I'd love to believe you but you give no evidence as to why I should. You could very well be right, but how do I know that? [citation needed]
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Actually, the article is trolling, too, I think. The issue here is not whether Obama is personally interested in IPv6. As someone above (who got modded troll) mentioned, Obama, himself, probably knows very little about TCP/IP, IPv4, NAT, and IPv6. It's the NTIA that's running this workshop. Printing a headline that says 'Obama' is highlighting IPv6 is just begging to turn the conversation into a bunch of partisan bullshit re: 'hope and change', Obama's personal technical competency, etc. Looking at the thread, this is exactly what happened. And that's trolling (or maybe flamebait).
Then again, it seems like we've pretty much run the whole 'IPv4 addresses running out ZOMG' topic into the ground, too. I guess it's nice to see that the feds are approaching the issue. But there's not really any controversy in 'Federal Government Explores Adopting Updated Technology'. So we make it into a partisan political issue in order to provoke responses? Bleagh.
FEW nations fall quickly; especially democracies and large empires don't fall that quickly either.
It'll be gradual and involve most the population being at fault beforehand.
Obama could be the straw that breaks the camel's back; however, that back was arguably broken already and we are have been seeing a mirage. Obama could be the messenger of doom who is falsely blamed as well. Repair takes a lot of strain, we also may not be up to the task of going the right direction... Lots is possible but what is not possible is for us to return to the previous decade in just 4 years.... if EVER (1 in a million shot at best. you have to be clueless to think it can return to those days.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I was visiting my father-in-law in Canada, and we were driving through northern Ontario. I'd gotten used to all the street signs in metric by then, and I was surprised to see an old highway sign with a distance in miles. My father-in-law pointed out that Canada had converted to the metric system in 1977, based upon the US plan to convert to the metric system in 1976.
I worked for a blueprint printing company for several years. One issue that often came up was difficulties in rescaling blueprints for different page sizes, as the arbitrary sheet sizes that were standard each had different ratios of length to width. As a political activist, I also often designed flyers; scaling flyers to half-size always came out ugly. One day, I happened to read up on ISO paper sizes, and how they were all based upon ratios of one to the square root of two, which meant that ratios were uniform and rescaling was easy. Apparently, ISO paper sizes are the standard used everywhere but in the US and a few countries in Latin America; Canada prints in US sizes because of the scale of the US market. The ratio of one to the square root of two was proposed early in the history of printing, centuries ago.
As I understand, all modern operating systems have native support for IPv6, and have had such support for years; part of the impetus is that the US Federal government had, at some point, announced a policy requiring any software it used to support IPv6. From what I can make out, it's the ISPs that are dragging their heels on implementing technology that's been tested and ready to deploy for years.
I can understand hesitancy to deploy radical new ideas. However, I don't understand the hesitancy to deploy ideas that have been tested exhaustively, deployed, and used widely.
If we really care about security, why not just switch all .mil over to IPv6 and deny all Chinese servers connection at root levels on the sats and trunk lines?
Wouldn't be hard.
Then tell China when they stop with the trade barriers and spying on our military, we'll let them onto the new IPv6 web.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Instead it's just another protocol with bad interoperability between V4 and V6. If I'm a V6 client I can't talk to a V4 server without some ugly "help". So how do they expect to move every one to V6 if it can't be done gradually ?
If only every OS sold in the last 5 years came out of the box with the capability of connecting to IPv4 and IPv6 networks at the same time so you could begin using IPv6 services as the DNS records for them became available. Boy, how convenient that would have been!
I'm sorry, but I have a hard time not being sarcastic when people keep trotting out that same dumb argument. Every host I use at home and work is dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 and I have none of the hypothetical problems that people keep inventing to panic over.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
You can have a border firewall without NAT.
Are you adequate?
Junta summarized it satisfactorily. I could elaborate, but what would be the point? Oh well. For example going to 128 bit addresses was in a word idiotic. It failed to ameliorate router loading issues as hoped, and in fact made things worse by imposing a bigger cache footprint than necessary. It also broke every network library to a much worse extent than necessary by exceeding the 16 bytes allowed from the dawn of time for socket addresses, which design point was chosen by people who knew what they were doing as opposed to the people who ended up on the IPv6 committee.
The big fail is that IPv6 and IPv4 hosts cannot communicate in any way that could remotely be described as natural. What commercial web site wants to cut over to an IPv6 address today, or any time in the foreseeable future?
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?