Slashdot Mirror
There Is No Plan B, the Ugly Transition To IPv6
An anonymous reader writes "The Internet is running out of IPv4 addresses — not at some point in the future, but right now. But the only solution to the problem, IPv6, is just now really starting to be deployed. That's why we're all in for some tough times ahead."
Running IPv6 on a webserver means cutting of a chunk of your users with broken IPv6 setups. That is why you see a lot of http:://ipv6.google.com style sites, but hardly anybody having a AAAA record on their main domain.
True, that is obligatory. Map of the Internet
I've wondered why this hasnt been done sooner. There are some relatively small groups out there with class A blocks (16.7m) still. Make those who own these blocks justify their use. I believe back when the internet was just a wee bub, IP addresses were handed out to anyone who wanted them. And some companies just took huge chunks.
Have a look at this list for starters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks or http://abhishek.nagar.me/content/class-ip-address-and-owners
Some organizations, such as Stanford University, formerly using 36.0.0.0/8, have returned their allocated block to assist in the delay of the exhaustion of addresses. Perhaps some others could follow in their steps.
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, sue.
ICANN considered this option, but decided that it didn't extend the deadline out far enough to be worth the costs.
http://blog.icann.org/2008/02/recovering-ipv4-address-space/
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
what limitations? my iphone is on NAT. what will IPV6 allow me to do on it that i can't do now
The original idea of the Internet was a network of peers. Every address was globally routable, and any machine could host content.
There are obvious security issues with this... Which is why we've got firewalls... But there wasn't really anything standing in the way of you hosting a game server, or website, or whatever on your home machine.
NAT now stands in the way of you doing this. NAT has destroyed the whole "network of peers" thing.
NAT is fine for simply consuming content. For your iPhone, for example, I doubt if it's an issue. And if you're just loading up random web pages at home, or connecting to WoW, or whatever - you'll be fine.
But if you want to host a web page at home you're going to have to not just open the ports in your firewall, but forward the traffic from your outside IP to the inside IP. And if you want a second box to serve up a web page too? Too bad. You only get one port 80 per IP address, and you've only got one globally routable IP address.
Again, if all you're doing is consuming, this isn't all that much of a problem. But then you aren't a peer, either.
Where this starts to be more of an issue is with various devices that we now want to be able to communicate with remotely. It's becoming more and more common for people to want to remote into home computers. Or maybe program a DVR remotely. Or maybe some utility company wants to be able to check your electric/water meter remotely.
Being able to host your own content is becoming more important, not less. And shoving everything behind NAT is becoming more of a problem, not less.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
heise.de, a major German tech news site ran a test for precicely that reason about two weeks ago: they added an AAAA to heise.de in addition the normal AA record. Out of the thousands of visitors they have each day less than 10 were unable to reach that site in that configuration and wrote in about their problems and only one turned out to be unfixable because of a router misconfiguration somewhere else in the network.
Counter-anecdote. I've been running v6 at home for about a year now with absolutely no problems (Hurricane Electric, seriously, you guys kick ass). But I decided I wanted to add a new private 802.11n router to my network, so I went and picked up a DIR-625, which is a lower-end, 2.4Ghz-only 802.11n-capable D-Link WAP.
Now, I have a *slightly* unusual setup, in that I have a dedicated firewall (m0n0wall, you guys also kick ass), and I wanted this private, WPA2-secured AP to sit on my internal network and basically bridge the wireless pool directly to my network (no, in an enterprise scenario, I wouldn't advise this, but at home, with a properly secured WAP, I think it's safe). Furthermore, the firewall sends out v6 router advertisements, and I use simple v6 auto-configuration, so that any device connected to my LAN or existing 802.11g WAP automatically gets v6 connectivity (the latter is open and sits in its own DMZ). All of this works perfectly.
So I plug in the WAP so that the LAN-side of the device is connected to my network (this bridging the networks), and then connect to it with my laptop... and my v6 connectivity is shot. Attempts to connect to any v6 hosts time out. Odd. So I check my routes, and lo and behold, inexplicably, I have a default v6 gateway route that corresponds to a *loopback* address. A little digging, and I discover this POS AP is sending out router advertisements, and advertising it's *loopback address* as the gateway address. Buh??
So naturally I log into the AP and make sure v6 is disabled. Except it is. And it's *still sending out radv messages for it's loopback address*. The solution? I had to reflash the blasted thing and replace D-Link's firmware with dd-wrt.
Now, this is an incredibly common piece of consumer-grade hardware. And their IPv6 implementation is, apparently, horribly broken. If I were a regular user, and, say, Google, advertised AAAA records for www.google.com, I would've been unable to hit their website. So can you really blame service providers for choosing to either a) not advertise AAAA records for their services, or b) only do so to whitelisted ISPs?
"which thanks to compression looks as fast as 500k DSL"
hahaha, no.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The problem with the approach is that it's very difficult to do in a way that doesn't break backwards compatibility, and if you're going to break compatibility then you may as well fix other things at the same time.
Didn't have to be that way. We could have had an IPv5 with all the addresses and none of the backwards compatibility issues if not for special interests in the IETF:
http://bill.herrin.us/network/ipxl.html
Gets my vote for IPv7...