Slashdot Mirror
After IPv4, How Will the Internet Function?
An anonymous reader writes "36 countries in the world have over 100% per-capita usage of mobile phones, and this is driving a real crunch on IPv4 addresses as more and more of these devices are data-capable. The mobile network operators are acting fast to deploy IPv6, and T-Mobile USA has had an IPv6-only trial going on for over 9 months now using NAT64 to bridge to IPv4 Internet content. It is interesting to note that the original plan for IPv6 transition, dual-stack, has failed since IPv4 addresses are effectively already exhausted for many people who want them. Dual-stack also causes many other issues and has forced the IETF to generate workarounds for end users called happy eyeballs (implying that eyeballs are not happy with dual-stack), and a big stink around DNS white-listing. How will you ensure that your network, users, and services continue to work in the address-fractured world of the future where some users have only IPv4 (AT&T ), some users have only IPv6 (mobile and machine-to-machine as well as developing countries), and other Internet nodes have both?"
It seems ludicrous to claim that the dual stack idea has failed when more and more devices are suddenly finding themselves with IPv6 addresses and are putting them to use. My home and work LANs are dual stack and everything Just Works. For being a failed experiment, it works amazingly well in everyday usage.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2003/06/what_ever_happened_to_ipv5.html
It was assigned to an interesting, but ultimately not implemented, protocol.
Thanks to finally embracing NAT64, this becomes easy.
If you are providing 'server' access, you pretty much *have* to get an IPv4 address, and preferably an IPv6, but not absolutely required for now. Short term, don't sweat it, medium term go dual stack at first opportunity that presents itself, long term you may take down the IPv4 network one day, but don't explicitly plan when that day will come. The common strategy may continue to be ignore v6 entirely, however moving dual stack at your pace ensures that in the slim, but real possibility that your next-hop provider stops IPv4 routing or starts penalizing IPv4 use via unreasonable fees won't put you in a tight spot. The scenario of next-hop penalizing/dropping v4 is the only scenario I see as sufficient motivation to get servers to bother with v6 at all. I think even brand new servers will do what it takes to secure IPv4 space, which may free up some given the next point...
If you are setting up a network as 'clients', you can get by with either IPv6 or IPv4 for a while. Giving dual stack when available is nice, but whatever you have would be sufficient. ISPs without IPv4 addresses available for new clients should rapidly pursue IPv6 for residential customers and give them most internet via NAT64 on their end. Doing IPv4 private addresses would doom them to crappy service indefinitely, whilst IPv6 would only be semi-crappy for a more temporary interval. If you *really* want v6 to catch on, then start allowing v4 addresses to be carved up more free-market style. All technical experts agree that this would completely fubar the v4 network performance in aggregate, but you would entice adoption of v6+NAT64 with the profitable opportunity to reclaim addresses and sell them to places that *really* need them. The v6 network would be nice and cleanly routed, and getting on the v6 network just becomes that much more important.
Some would argue that any sort of NAT at the carrier plays right into the hands of those who hate P2P networks, including NAT64 as those behind NAT64 are unreachable by peers who are v4 only. However, the reality is there are two possible outcomes, residences getting 10/8, 172.16/12, or 192.168/16 which *completely* breaks P2P (and probably many wireless routers presuming those prefixes won't come from the WAN), or NAT64 where the P2P graph may not be as connected, but all v6 peers can reach each other. Since P2P designs are inherently tolerant of unreliable ability to reach peers, this should suffice for a while.
Major architects in v6 world advocated the dual-stack method as the way to theoretically move on with no thought to the practical motivations to move forward. They hated NAT in every way as it breaks the peering model they hold dear. They hated accepting the practical view that most of the internet are clients and few are servers. If they had embraced it from the beginning, then I suspect most residences would be v6 by now.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Geeks should know better. The way it is talked about, you'd think in a couple days someone will plug in a device and there'll be no more IPs. Not hardly. We are approaching the first milestone in an eventual crunch. That is that there will be no more addresses not assigned to a registrar. The remaining class-As will be handed out to the regional registrars. While that means at the highest level we are "out" that doesn't mean we are out on a user level.
I'm not saying that we don't need to move to IPv6 but people on /. keep talking like we are going to be out of every single IP address real soon. No, rather we will be starting a process of scarcity. So far there's been no real scarcity of IP addresses. That will change. However all that means is that costs will change.
That will actually probably be a good thing for IPv6 adoption. If you are a company and want some static IPs and your ISP says "Sure, you can have IPv4 addresses at $30/month each, or as many IPv6 addresses as you want for free," well maybe you decide there's good reason to go with IPv6 and upgrade your stuff.