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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.
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
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.
To be honest the whole "addresses are running out" thing is just a way to sell IPv6 to laypeople, because "we have 4 billion addresses and over 6 billion people" is so easy to understand.
In reality it's about getting rid of the restrictions of needing network address translation, allowing devices to be accessible by one address anywhere, unifying different forms of addressing like phone numbers, IPv4 addresses, multicast/anycast addresses, etc all into one address space, making routing more efficient, making autoconfiguration more seamless, getting built-in cryptography, etc, etc, etc.
Addresses running out is, for the reasons you give and more, really not what it's about, but it is a bit heart-wrenching to see tech-savvy people say we shouldn't go for IPv6 because we're not really running out; we aren't, but we still need to go for IPv6, and if tech-savvy people don't have one mind on this issue it'll take far longer than it should.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
how does delusional hoping for the rapture do for leadership?
Where's Jon Postel when you need him...
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.
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.
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?