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Last Days For Central IPv4 Address Pool
jibjibjib writes "According to projections by APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston, IANA's central IPv4 address pool is expected to run out any day now, leaving the internet with a very limited remaining supply of addresses. APNIC will probably request two /8s (33 million addresses) within the next few weeks. This will leave five /8s available, which will be immediately distributed to the five Regional Internet Registries in accordance with IANA policy. It's expected that APNIC's own address pool will run low during 2011, making ISPs and businesses in the Asia-Pacific region the first to feel the effects of IPv4 exhaustion. The long-term solution to IP address exhaustion is provided by IPv6, the next version of the Internet Protocol. IPv6 has been an internet standard for over a decade, but is still unsupported on many networks and makes up an almost negligible fraction of Internet traffic. Unless ISPs dramatically accelerate the pace of IPv6 deployment, users in some regions will be stuck on IPv4-only connections while ISPs in other regions run out of public IPv4 addresses, leading to a fragmented Internet without the universal connectivity we've previously taken for granted."
I'm running IPv6 via tunnels since 2001. I'm running native IPv6 since my ISP did their first try-out via ADSL.
Come on guys, it is not that difficult. Why is slashdot.org still not accessible via IPv6?
bash$
Business organizations, like politicians, are usually extraordinarily risk-averse. This touches both in many ways, across many countries. As a result, there won't be any serious pushes into IPv6 until organizations can clearly quantify the damages that will be done from dragging their feet further. Only a small percentage of organizations will fully commit to IPv6 until the guaranteed costs of waiting exceeds the projected costs of moving forward.
Nobody should have expected anything different once the internet became controlled predominantly by public political and private business interests.
It's called "tunneling." If you're playing those on a modern system capable of IPv6, the system can make the game see an IPv4 connection. It doesn't have to know the IPv4 connection is wrapped inside a v6 connection.
People never do things en-masse because they thought it's a good idea. They do them because they're out of other options. No surprise there.
Experiments and other stuff
Most isp's don't give out ip6 addresses
Most home routers don't handle ip6 (apple is a notable exception here)
This is going to be a bit ugly for a while.
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
That's a nice idea, of course when the game expects to resolve (or get) an IPv4 address, it'll balk at seeing an IPV6 address string.
Experiments and other stuff
I keep seeing this fear of the IPv4 address pool disappearing, but I thought there was no such things as shortages in a free market? So then what's going on here? Clearly the IANA is refusing to allow the prices (and therefore costs) of IPv4 addresses to rise to reflect the true scarcity of them. I think the ANIPC goes as far to say you don't own your IP address to sell. Prices aren't just arbitrary things, they reflect information about scarcity, and if IPv6 addresses were cheaper to adopt than IPv4 addresses, certainly it could only help spread adoption, while still letting the people who most urgently demand IPv4 addresses get one.
The last blocks ought to be auctioned or raffled off right now, and traded between the owners, with the regional registries only registering who owns an IP address range, no different than what happens on a stock exchange floor.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
We know already. Just about everyone on slashdot has setup IPv6 at home, and most likely given up on it later as there is little to access on it.
Until we pressure the ISP's to give everyone native IPv6 this thing isn't going to go anywhere. If the ISP's lead the big retailers will follow, other sites will follow them. The very last thing anyone wants is ISP level NAT but that is exactly what we are going to see if we don't fix the current mess.
*points above*
That was the entire point of my post. You can give the game its own little network world. It sees IPv4, and the host does the translation to and from. When configured correctly, as with any app that no longer conforms to current technology standards, the app has its own little bubble where everything works as expected even though the rest of the world has moved on.
"... leading to a fragmented Internet without the universal connectivity we've previously taken for granted."
Does the existing 'net suddenly start to rot away or what?
And just how would IPv4 clients reply to packets sent that way?
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
It's the apocalypse! Aaaaaaaah! We're doooooooomed! Now I've got that out of my system, get your arses in gear, ISPs and site owners. We're counting on you. We know you can do it.
There's a very simple solution to this. We should be renting IP addresses, not handing them out. Make publicly routable IP addresses cost $1 a month. Many class A owners would be dying to give back address space that they aren't using. Isn't that the answer to a limited supply of anything? Set a value to them so they aren't wasted.
it won't see an IPv6 address 'string'. That's the whole point.
NAT has been a solved problem for over a decade. an IPv4 network NATted behind an IPv6 network is not hard.
You do realize that the ISPs would be the ones doing the prioritizing, right?
So, when everything's on IPv6, and you want to play an IPv4-only game, you'll first have to establish an IPv4 VPN between the players? I suppose that sounds feasible, but someone will have to write the software to make it easy.
You are what is wrong with this world.
Thanks to you we still have ipv4 everywhere.
People like you stop the innovation.
i c,... nap
rewriting history since 2109
check out hamachi. it's sorta like that. 5 bucks say they're gonna develop a ipv6 version. considering it's already doing NAT translation, it's just a matter of doing a extra step of tunneling.
WÌÌfÍ--ÍSÌÒÍ...Í...ÌHÌÍfÍÍÍ--ÍÍÍ
Are they still using the block within 5/8? They better get off it.. before actual hosts get addresses from it within the next few months.
Is there such a thing? (there must be) Where can one look to plan a conversion at home? At work?
Like just about everyone else, I have been pushing this off hoping for a "just push this button" solution to emerge. I haven't seen one yet.
Wrapping IPV4 ain't the problem, it is the elephants in the room that have been allowed to grow too massive and are gonna be hell to deal with, if they even can on a timely basis.
One elephant in the room is the MASSIVE amount of eWaste that is gonna be generated. Hell a good 90% of the under $100 routers being sold right now don't support IPV6, and that don't count all of the routers, switches, cable and DSL modems, etc that are simply not gonna work with IPV6 and gonna have to be shitcanned. Imagine a good 85% of all the home routers thrown in the garbage at the same time, along with probably 50% or more of the cable and DSL modems. That is a serious amount of garbage that is gonna be hitting the landfills all at once.
The other elephant is thanks to corps lowballing IT for years there has been a SERIOUS brain drain with very few going into IT so you have a ton of older workers who aren't up to speed and are gonna be expected to get fluent with a totally new way of networking in...oh right about now. Thanks to the shitty hours and constantly being expected to do ever more with ever less resources many of the good IT guys I knew have already left or are looking to get out, so what you have left in many of the flyover states is the bottom of the IT barrel and problems that would take an hour or two at most with IPV4 will end up taking days or weeks with IPV6 simply because the guys you have left are old, don't have the skills, haven't kept up, and have based their troubleshooting steps on tools and techniques that simply don't work anymore.
So anyway you look at it IPV6 is gonna be a serious clusterfuck. The idiot that made IPV6 without designing backwards compatibility really needs to be shot because instead of a slow ramp up we are gonna end up in a "ZOMG we are fucked! SWITCH IT NOW!" kind of situation and we simply don't have the manpower or skillsets required to do a countrywide or even a regional switchover ATM. All the years of corporations lowballing their IT and the ISPs paying crappy money for managers and IT staff is gonna come back and bite them in the ass, and bite them HARD. Between the eWaste, the lack of manpower with the relevant skillsets, the massive understaffing at most ISPs compared to the job at hand, it is just gonna be a giant fucking mess.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Hairyfeet, let me introduce you to Pigeonhole Principle. I'm sure you'll get along fabulously.
At least a good amount of them can be refitted for IPv6 due to installing OpenWRT or DD-WRT or any of the other distributions out there. Maybe it's a business opportunity, flashing home routers to use one of those and reconfigure them to the initial settings afterwards?
http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/vigor120.html
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
If you think NAT and DHCP solve the myriad problems associated with IPv4, you're not qualified to be speaking on the subject.
Yeah. Angelica Huston's career isn't doing too well.
Periodically they announce "Oh Noes! We are about to run out of IPv4 space any minute now!
No they don't. What has been said over and over again is that we will run out of IPv4 address space and the "when" hasn't really moved much, it's just that every time the warning come up the "32 bits is just fine besides I don't understand this new-fangled eye-pee-vee-SIX thing and new things scare me, also, we locked ourselves into IPv4-only network gear because we're idiots who don't really know what we're doing"-crowd start screaming that those trying to get IPv6 adoption going are just alarmists.
Unless you have no understanding of networking (or you're an ISP) you really really really don't want ISP-wide NAT.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
We've been hearing about this for a long time because it's going to be a difficult transition requiring some coordination, and we'd all be better off if people had started years ago so we could actually have a connected IPv6 net now, instead of waiting until things start breaking. The problem is, the countermeasures require that everyone cooperate, not just those that are hit first by the exhaustion.
Your toaster may be fine, but both developing countries and mobile networks are facing the prospect of country-wide NATs, which is not a "perfectly good solution" by any definition except "well, I've got my IP address, it doesn't affect me".
Forget "flogging IPv6", the real scam artists are the ones still selling IPv4 only equipment.
That ISPs are still sending out home routers that doesn't support IPv6 at all is nothing less than shameful.
You can't own an IPv4 address. That's been the policy for over a decade.
The policy of the organization that OWNS them.
The problem is that the central orgs that assign IP address spaces reserve the right to revoke them at any time, for any reason (or no reason). So unless you're IANA or APNIC or RIPE or one of the other regional authorities, forget it.
Also, even they don't "own" the numbers - they just administer them. Nobody "owns" them. You can't "own" a number.
There's nothing to stop you from creating your own network, and using the same set of 4 billion numbers.
There's nothing to stop me from setting up a lilypad of wireless networked machines using the same set of numbers, running my own DNS server, and serving up my own domain system to whoever adds those servers to their /etc/resolv.conf file. Since it wouldn't be "The" Internet, just an "internet", it would be a good way for municipalities to neatly sidestep the incumbents attacks on municipal free access. Let individuals provide the gateways to the "real" internet.
I note that at no stage did you offer any counter-argument to any of my points, instead you just mouthed off anonymously - that tells everyone all they need to know about your position...
While I am not him, it speaks nothing of his position and moreso just a general "*sigh* not another misguided one" and lazyness of explanation.
First of all, carrier grade nat causes it's own problems and does _not_ scale, you can still only put so many active devices behind a nat before things start getting nasty (they kind of already are if you have to resort to it anyway though).
The primary problem though is in effect NAT turns the internet into a one-way affair, it destroys any service where you would want to be the one receiving an incoming message (say for instance VOIP or clicking 'host game' on your favourite game of choice).
While port forwarding is acceptable to those who only need one device doing a service when you have multiple that need to do the same service you are screwed.
ipv6 is the _proper_ solution, and the matter of fact is if you go with carrier grade nat you will _still_ wind up running out of addresses and hit the limits of what nat can do. At which point you would have seriously broken most if not all two-way internet connectivity.
Nat is quite evil.
The only reason we keep getting these chicken-licken pronouncements of impending doom is because those with a vested interest in trying to flog IPv6 gear find their sales are down. Nothing more.
Could it be because we are actually *gasp* running out of addresses? The moment we run out won't be complete doom and gloom but it will destroy and separate part of the architecture of the internet if everyone doesn't jump on the ipv6 bandwagon. Most people here don't want there to be two separate portions of the net inaccessible to each other.
>>Again, you're factually wrong. As I pointed out, you cannot, contrary to your original assertion, own an IP address. Ditto with a domain name. You only lease/license them.
By that argument, you don't actually own your house, because if you stop paying property taxes, the government will take it away from you.
It's true that home users would not have to replace routers for IPv4+NAT. As a lot of these run Linux, though, these should be flash-upgradable to IPv6 too with little effort. I doubt any manufacturers will provide the updates for this, though, and DD-WRT etc. just aren't easy or reliable enough for general users in my experience.
On the ISP side, I can't see much difference either way, since they'll have to buy new IPv6-capable routers (with IPv4 NAT?) or carrier-grade NAT routers if they want to add any new customers to their networks. The router manufacturers (Cisco, Juniper etc.) get paid regardless!
NAT per household is definitively not enough. There are billions of families that will want to be connected in the future.
Carrier level NAT is evil, and for someone who says 'Governments should be afraid of their people', it's quite against it. Carrier level NAT destroys censorship protecting services like Tor and Freenet, any possible hope for P2P DNS, and makes the 'net much more controlled by government/big business.
Dilbert RSS feed
IPv6 is great, but they could have solved the problem far more elegantly 10 years ago.
Add two octets to the front of v4. Solved after a firmware flash.
Any existing IP becomes 1.0.x.x.x.x
If a router encounters a x.x.x.x address, it just appends 1.0 to the front.
The old internet and the new internet would have run side by side - for the most part working fine until everyone had updated their firmware.
Sure, it's not the engineering solution v6 is, but it would have been in use long ago.
They did this. Except they added 12 octets in front of v4 and mapped existing v4 addresses to 0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.x.x.x.x.
And the old and new internet runs side by side currently and we are just waiting for everyone to update their firmware.
OK. We run out of IPv4 addresses. So what? It's not like the 4 billion existing addresses are going to suddenly evaporate. Everything will continue to work just fine, and if you're late to the party, well, it sucks to be you.
Just put up a sign "The Internet is full, go home."
Thing is, people (usually those with a vested interest in IPv6) have been saying this for at least the past 10 years.
And they were right. We have been running out of IPv4 addresses since basically the Internet got into consumer hands. Guess why you never, not even 10 years ago, got multiple IPs from your ISP without paying extra. There simply weren't enough of them, it always was a strictly limited resource and thus NAT and other crude workarounds had to be invented. The difference now is that we are no longer in a phase where IPv4 are a limited resource, but in a phase where IPv4 addresses simply have run out.
IPv4 plus NAT (and DHCP) is a perfectly good solution,
There are more people in the world then IPv4 addresses. Thus it is not an issue about putting your toaster behind NAT, which might be an acceptable workaround, but putting *everything* of your home network behind an ISP provided NAT. Have fun in that setup trying to get two hosts communicating with each other when both are behind a NAT that you don't even have control over.
While IPv6 has been known about for over a decade, the problem is that in order for an ISP to get a block of IPv6 addresses, they would need to give up their block of IPv4 addresses. Now, back in 2000, what ISP would be willing to give up their static block of IP addresses for something virtually no one else was using, and which would cause customer outages for MONTHS while the IPv6 stuff was tested and people figured out how to work with it?
This was the reason for not going to IPv6 early on, and it was a stupid policy. If ISPs were given a full year to migrate to IPv6 before having to give up their IPv4 addresses, then there wouldn't have been an issue. Instead, it was a "you get IPv6 addresses, you must give up your IPv4 address block NOW" type of situation.
Please back that statement up with some sort of evidence. I have worked for ISPs and have never heard of any such policy.
.. that didn't planned ipv6 to be backward compatible?
The one that did not think of making v4 extensible to make that a possibility.
An easy way to promote IPv6 would be if it were know or assumed that Google assigns higher pagerank to sites using IPv6 addresses. Then it would be something that customers of hosting companies would insist on, at least.
see a Text Widget
People thought CS people looked stupid when they found out dates were represented using two digits in computer programs. But those same people did not have to personally do anything; they just had to cross their fingers and hope that the programs got rewritten in time. This is going to effect a LOT of people directly. They are going to have to struggle with technological issues related to updating their equipment. Stuff that they barely got working the first time they set it up (TVs, wireless routers, game boxes). Its going to go on and on and on. And some stuff they are going to have to throw out because the company that built them wont offer upgrades or went out of business.
Computer science is going to look like mud for a half a century after this transition starts breaking -every- toy they have.
There's a number of protocols that don't sit terribly well with NAT - SIP is a good example, but there are others. FTP, for example, and IPSec.
Generally speaking, there have been solutions to these problems - proxies which overcome the issue, firewall and router software that can understand the underlying protocol and deal with NAT or additions to the protocol to make usage over NAT practical. But every single one of these solutions is fundamentally a bodge to a problem that wouldn't exist in the first place were it not for the delay in rolling out IPv6, and inevitably introduce problems of their own.
Interoperability issues are usually the most obvious - a particular issue with IPSec, for instance, is you find specific routers which deal with IPSec over NAT but break horribly if you enable NAT/T on the other end of the tunnel. Which you can't disable because that breaks IPSec for the other 90% of your road warriors.
Right now, what we feel is relatively mild pain occasioned by IPv4. The odd person complains that their VPN doesn't work from a particular location, for instance. But that pain is getting worse, and for the most part it wouldn't exist were it not for the bodges made to account for NAT. Which itself is a bodge to account for the slow rollout of IPv6.
...by making OS X 10.8 IP6 only and banish the evil of IP4, just as the holy Jobs freed us from the tyranny of RS232 ports, floppy drives, keyboards and Philips screwdrivers :-)
But seriously, it will take a Google or Apple to pull a stunt and offer some unique service only available via IP6 to move people.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Just let all those numbers between the dots in IP addresses go up to 999 instead of 256. Problem solved. How hard was that?
Thing is, people (usually those with a vested interest in IPv6) have been saying this for at least the past 10 years.
Periodically they announce "Oh Noes! We are about to run out of IPv4 space any minute now! Change to IPv6 immediately or we are all doomed!"
Only, as we have seen every single time, it's been nonsense.
Are there enough IPv4 addresses for everything? Clearly not.
Is this a problem?
Again, clearly not.
IPv4 plus NAT (and DHCP) is a perfectly good solution, it requires not changes in hardware, we don't have to rush out and buy new gear from those touting the IPv4-mageddon, we just carry on as we are with more than enough address space for everyone and everything.
Why does my internet-enabled toaster NEED a publicly accessible globally unique IP address, when it is more than happy sitting in my kitchen using my house's private NAT pool which combined uses but 1 single public IP address?
It doesn't.
IPv6 is an overly complexed solution to a problem which was eliminated yonks ago.
The only reason we keep getting these chicken-licken pronouncements of impending doom is because those with a vested interest in trying to flog IPv6 gear find their sales are down.
Nothing more.
Crap
No one has been saying IPv4 was going to run out immediately until recently. Those who have been pushing IPv6 know that it can take years to make stable products and that it can also take years to update everything that needs to be updated to run with IPv6 so we kept saying you need to start moving sooner rather than later. Turning IPv6 on at the network layer is the easy thing to do. It the billing systems and everything else where you need to find the source code or it it is lost find someone to write a whole new system for you.
As for your toaster, it can continue to run on IPv4 until it burns itself out. Turning on IPv6 has never ment turning off IPv4. You can continue to run IPv4 until the heat death of the universe if you want.
And as for your one public IPv4 address it will go away soon to be a shared address. The world has run out of IPv4 addresses to allow you to have one all to yourself and anything that required you to have at least one IPv4 address for yourself will break soon.
P.S. We give our software away for free. I actually like IPv6 because it makes the network less complicated in the end.
Even ISP don't want LSN's. It more equipment and more expense. The want to have to deploy as little of it as possible. The more IPv6 traffic the less traffic that has to go through the LSN and the greater number of customers that can be supported on a single LSN.
The guy who invented IP disagrees with you. I think you're on shakey ground.
It is actually mapped to both ::/96 and ::ffff:0/96 with the first option being depricated now, se historical notes on the ipv6 address page on wikipedia.
In practice neither is very useful except in a program that wants to use one data structure to store both v4 and v6 addresses.
ISPs won't have to give up any IPv4 addresses, they simply won't be able to get any new ones. Going forward only IPv6 address blocks will be available for assignment.
ISPs should be upgrading their networks already to support IPv6, but the problem is them dragging their feet and network equipment providers also dragging their feet. No matter how much feet dragging may be happening, their is cleat evidence that there are solution to getting IPv6 in place. For that we just need to look to Europe, so ISPs such as Free.fr which are already providing IPv6 subnets to their customers. I believe there is also an ISP in the Czech Republic doing so too.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I imagine a future version of Hamachi could be reworked to use a block within 10.200.x.x network, or something of the sorts. Sure it would mean that you aren't already using that for your own local subnet, but it is workable. Then again, if you get yourself a router with VPN support, then your friends could simply connect to your network.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
90% of users wouldnt notice if they were on NAT. It would be fine for home users who only want web and email, most smartphone users and people who are already stuck behind corporate/university firewalls and proxies. I work in a university and every desktop PC has a full IP address, but the firewall blocks virtually everything (even http has to go through a local proxy) which pretty much negates the advantage of having an IP - I have to tunnel out to do anything interesting. That is wasteful. End-user software that might be affected (skype, dropbox, flash video) often already supports tunneling/proxying via HTTP(S) to get around firewalls. ...and if you cant live with NAT then you have a great incentive to sign up to an IPv6 tunnel service, or seek out an ISP that offers IPv6.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
There is a list here of IPv6 capable routers:
http://www.sixxs.net/wiki/Routers
The list is by no means complete, so if you are aware of others then be sure to add it the list (you will need to register for a Sixxs account).
BTW At this point, if your ISP does not provide IPv6 support then you can try out 6to4 or Teredo. Myself I am currently using 6to4, since this is support by the Apple Airport Extreme, and all the devices on my network have an IPv6 address this way.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I've been trying to find how to do the following, but I can't find even what it's called. I want to have an IPv4 network, without IPv6 anywhere in it, but be able to access IPv6 hosts. This is possible because the number of hosts I wish to reach is very small, and it is very feasible to have a kind of a proxy that would intercept DNS and IP requests (is this tunneling?) and map IPv6 addresses to some IPv4 addresses. DNS requests returning IPv6 content would be rewritten to contain these IPv4 values and all incoming and outgoing IP packets would be translated 6-4 through the table of these previously looked up hosts. I'm guessing the table will have a couple of hundred entries, at the most, so performance should not be a problem. This way I could not care if anything out there is IPv6 and just keep going, pretending that it does not exist. Now, this is all pretty obvious to me, so I am sure somebody has though of this before. What is it called? And where can I get the software to do it?
Have you tried playing any old DOS games that require a serial cable for multiplayer recently? I don't even have serial ports anymore, but I can pretty easily use DOSBox to emulate a serial connection between two networked computers.
Or what about IPX? Recent versions of Windows don't support it at all, but a lot of early(ish) Windows games and DOS games require it for multiplayer. Fortunately, there are IPX emulators available, which run a simple IPX stack on each endpoint but tunnel the packets over the Internet (you need something like this to play IPX games over the Internet anyway, even if you have native IPX support).
From a technical standpoint, it's actually easier to for two IPv4-only games to communicate with each other via IPv6 than via IPv4, if both computers are behind a NAT. From their perspective, they will appear to be on the same private network and can do things like use broadcast packets to announce themselves. The only problem is the UI for setting up the VPN, but I'd expect that to be pretty trivial to build into an IM client (for example).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This gives me lot of hope for global warming!
I know you are off topic, but I will respond in saying that in many cases people don't react until they can visualise the impending doom. Present them with something that is difficult to visualise and they won't care about it, because they can't appreciate it. Its simply a case of human psychology. Now you know the problem you are dealing with, you can at least know what you need to consider when looking for a solution.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I really hope you're just trolling, but somehow I suspect that you are dangerously misinformed.
Adding two octets on the front of IPv4 would not be a trivial firmware flash. It would mean that the entire structure of an IPv4 packet header would change. This would mean that everything that handles IPv4 packets (operating system network stacks, routers, and so on) would need to be modified. None of the hardware-assisted routers would work correctly with 48-bit addresses and routing tables would become huge and unwieldy (this is less of a problem with IPv6, because the address space is relatively sparse, making routing much easier)
Given that you'd be breaking every single existing IPv4 device, you may as well replace it with something better, rather than an ugly hack on top of the existing protocol.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
One of the most common routers in the world is capable of IPv6.
I'm a layman at the logistics of what this means, but this guy's talk at DEFCON made sense to me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2clTKh2vFAE
Great! I'm gonna start my own Internet... with Blackjack... and hookers....
... in fact, forget the Internet
can i get disability for this condition? :-)
seriously though: a number of years ago Vint Cerf gave a presentation to our LUG on IP addressing and inter-planetary networking... would IPv6 be able to accommodate those needs 100 or more years from now? (i had some notes from the presentation and Q&A but lost them, and the memory fades...)
At least a good amount of them can be refitted for IPv6 due to installing OpenWRT or DD-WRT or any of the other distributions out there.
I checked, and my Netgear WGR614 v6 appears to run VxWorks and not to have enough RAM and flash for OpenWRT.
Things keep working fine because we keep falling back on solutions which are anything but.
The internet *used* to not be an entanglement of NATs, but that's been the case so long now that it's accepted as the norm and considered to be a "feature" - the concept of a firewall has been polluted to be "isn't that just my router?"
The next stage of this situation though is double NAT - which a lot of applications are NOT going to work seamlessly once ISP's stop letting us have a global IP address to use for logical units (i.e. a business or a home currently has a globally accessible IP address). Instead thousands of unrelated users are going to get to share 65536 TCP and UDP ports. Suddenly, you are going to lose control of port forwarding out of your own subnet and pass that up to your ISP, who's simply not going to let you do things like direct port 22 to your public IP for remote SSH. Do you have a solution for getting through double NAT on both sides of the connection for any type of peer-to-peer application? Can you get SIP through that, or a VPN tunnel, without needing a mediating server in the middle - and how happy will you be to pay for that privilege?
The current NAT situation was bearable. The double NAT situation is going to be a whole new kettle of things generally ceasing to function properly. But yeah fine, let's keep that up since give it a couple of years and the perception will be that it's "working fine".
Good luck getting everyone to whip out a credit card and replace a paid-for, working router with a new WRT54GL.
The ever increasing amount of 'stuff' only available on IPv6 would be the carrot (compelling reason even) for folks to upgrade.
If neither the local cable company nor the local DSL company offers native IPv6 connectivity, and the free public Teredo relay providers have become overloaded due to everyone else accessing IPv6-only 'stuff', what is a home user to do?
In fact, the opposite will become true soon (once a RIR gets close to exhaustion, i.e. only one /8 block left) in a number of regions: You only get IPv4 addresses if you also take IPv6 addresses.
That is to say, selling at a price that causes a shortage has an opportunity cost for both the buyers and the seller.
Then please explain why video game consoles are invariably sold at a price that causes a shortage for the first few months, leading to lucrative business opportunities for arbitrageurs on eBay.
But all those routers that don't support IPv6 aren't physically incapable of doing so. They just aren't programmed to do it. A firmware upgrade adding IPv6 support should solve that issue. The router I currently have at home didn't support IPv6 initially, but they added it in a firmware patch some time last year.
I own my IPv4 address.
As I understand it, IPv4 addresses can't be bought and sold in the way that land can.
Personally, I will yawn at the story this time, too...
Maybe your toaster doesn't need a public IP address, but mine does.
Are you saying that everyone is only allowed one IP, and everything should just be behind a NAT?
So now instead of running out of IPv4 addresses we run out of ports to use for NAT.
"John" is the most common name in the US, thus the population not named John is negligible. :)
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
These reports are that we've reached or passed the "peak addresses" point, where 50% of the addresses have been used up. These reports by communists are overstated- addresses are never going to run out due to market forces preventing this. /sarcasm
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Lets just hope ISP's don't get lazy and start NAT'ing their customers.
They will, but it won't be from laziness because it'll be a lot of work and a lot of expense, and it won't last long because NAT doesn't scale that well.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
One of the most common routers in the world can be loaded with third party firmware that is capable of IPv6. And 99% of the people who ever use it will never have any clue that such a thing even exists.
Don't think you'll get many customers to pay to update their free or $20 routers unless the government pays the bill with "stimulus" funding. But why do that when it can give out vouchers new Chinese-made routers.
The cost to switch to IPv6 is not flipping a switch. It will cost trillions upon trillions of dollars globally to migrate. Selling investments like that in the middle of a global recession is not small potatoes
People on slahsdot talk about IPv6 migration like it is simple - it is NOT. There are a lot more devices than your local router, and a lot more pieces of software then your desktop OS, that have to support IPv6 before it can be migrated. Companies have decades worth of software with hundreds upon hundreds of millions of lines of code, all assuming an IP is 4 bytes.
The IPv6 switchover makes the Y2k thing look like small potatoes, namely because the IP stack is a much more integral piece of functionality in a lot of software than the absolute date ever was - that and you have a lot more to switch over today than you did in 1999.
So anyway you look at it IPV6 is gonna be a serious clusterfuck. The idiot that made IPV6 without designing backwards compatibility really needs to be shot
Am I reading this right? You want to murder someone because others are too stupid to implement a standard half a decade ago?
How about just stating the obvious? Massive overreaction over Y2K so people learn and now don't react at all to EOL of IPv4 allocations. And frankly, you are the second idiot. Why IPv6 needs to be backwards compatible with IPv4? They are different protocols. If you actually look at it, there are improvements to the protocol that could NOT be backward compatible with IPv4, aside from address change.
An easy way to promote IPv6 would be if it were know or assumed that Google assigns higher pagerank to sites using IPv6 addresses. Then it would be something that customers of hosting companies would insist on, at least.
The first to the party would be the made-for-adsense websites, etc.
There would be 6 months of horrible search results. Medium and large companies take time to move to IPv6, crap sites would put it to the top of their to-do list.
Seems to me any and all router manufacturers would see it as a great business opportunity to sell new hardware, instead of giving free firmware updates.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
That's one of several reasons why you should go to dual stack rather than doing a hard cut. Most of the software that is hard wired to 4 byte IP addresses should be on the LAN using private addresses anyway and wouldn't be affected in the least by going to dual stack.
So, yes, it actually IS easy once you stop making it over complicated for yourself.
Besides that, there is no real choice. IPv4 exhaustion WILL happen. That means it's either IPv6 or give up on the internet. As for any software that actually needs to be updated, given that it must happen one way or another, what is cheaper, a carefully considered project to update that takes place in advance of need or an emergency crash project done when your hair is on fire? Those trillions of extra dollars can be billed to the piss on fires school of management.
....simply because the guys you have left are old, don't have the skills, haven't kept up, and have based their troubleshooting steps on tools and techniques that simply don't work anymore....
You know something, kid? I look forward to the time when you're 'old.'
Oh, and by the way? I don't care if you're smart enough to give Robert Metcalfe a run for his money and young enough to still be sucking on your thumb: With an attitude like yours, don't come around here looking for a job.
Regards;
In playing with IPv6 at home, the the biggest problem has been firewalling. Vista and windows 7 assume you are either on a public IP (aka in a coffee shop) or some kind of NAT'd or external fire walled environment (aka on a slightly more trusted IP).
At home, my little LAN is fully trusted. I like to keep all my gear open, full sharing, no passwords. Anything more is a hassle.
The problem is, with IPv6 you open your LAN to the outside world. That is okay *if* you have a firewall on your router. My router (d-link DIR-825) doesnt support firewalls for IPv6. neither does OpenWRT, which can run on that box too.
Until they make low-cost consumer routers that support comprehensive IPv6 firewalling, I can't really justify running IPv6 at home.
First, Google would have to index IPv6 websites. They do not. Google presently only indexes IPv4 websites. Of course Google would need to maintain two tables of indexes: the current index which doesn't include IPv6 and a new index which did include IPv6-only websites. The IPv6-only website index would need to be presented only to IPv6-enabled clients who are searching.
To test that Google doesn't index IPv6 webites (unless they have IPv4, which doesn't count), search for my made-up word "gorberakinNAY" and you will find it on an IPv4-only page. Search for "gorberakin" plus the word "YAY" (I don't want to say it as I don't want Google to index this page). The results are on an IPv6-only page (linked to by the first page and others) and you will not find it when you search for it on non-IPv6--searching search engines.
Further, I have yet another keyword like this which can only be accessed if you have IPv6 connectivity and your DNS servers have IPv6 connectivity.
If you can pass with a 10/10 score at this IPv6 Test then you can get to all 3 of my websites.
OK supergenius, just exactly what is your cunning plan for a backward compatible protocol that both expands the address space and is backward compatible?
Other than dual stack that is. I'm running dual stack right now. I have perfectly good access to v4 only services through v4 and I have access to v6 only services through v6. Where's the problem? We've had over a decade to switch gracefully and a zillion piss on fires managers are all busy waiting for it to become an emergency before they allow anyone to even consider doing anything about it.
Perhaps we're better off if the corps that have been killing the field of IT for years finally sink into the slime never to be seen again.
Hairyfeet, let me introduce you to Pigeonhole Principle. I'm sure you'll get along fabulously.
Unless I understand things wrong, the Pigeonhole Principle doesn't apply, as the number of IPV6 addresses are > IPV4 addresses. Every IPV4 address could have a fixed IPV6 address assigned - perhaps as leading zeros of the existing IPV4 address - and still leave an enormous number of IPV6 addresses assigned.
The pigeonhole principle is for fitting m objects into n spaces, where m > n. In this case, m is IPV6 addresses and n is IPV4 addresses, and m < n.
Or free porn. It already exists by way of free NNTP servers, but most people don't know NNTP= free porn.
If the IETF bought Playboy and made the back catalog available for free over IPv6 only, we'd all have IPv6 by next Wednesday.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
They seem to index some IPv6 sites. I Google searched for "site:ipv6.beijing2008.cn" which you can verify to be an IPv6 only site. The result seems very sparse though.
I once had a signature.
Evidence....I worked for Netcom in their operations group, and that was one of the reasons for not getting an IPv6 block from what I heard at the time.
My information is probably a bit outdated, since it has been over 10 years since I worked in that side of the industry.
They don't OWN them either. They are granted control over them by everyone who configures a router on the net because (and only because) we agree that some sort of administration is necessary and so far they've done at least a good enough job that it's better to stay with them than it is to invent a new organization.
The moment they step too far over a line, the people running the routers could decide to recognize a different authority and there's nothing at all they could do about it.
The only reason that has all been able to hold together for so many decades is exactly because it all stays out of the sort of turf wars that inevitably happen once you let "the market" get involved.
The cost to switch to IPv6 is not flipping a switch. It will cost trillions upon trillions of dollars globally to migrate. Selling investments like that in the middle of a global recession is not small potatoes
People on slahsdot talk about IPv6 migration like it is simple - it is NOT. There are a lot more devices than your local router, and a lot more pieces of software then your desktop OS, that have to support IPv6 before it can be migrated. Companies have decades worth of software with hundreds upon hundreds of millions of lines of code, all assuming an IP is 4 bytes.
The IPv6 switchover makes the Y2k thing look like small potatoes, namely because the IP stack is a much more integral piece of functionality in a lot of software than the absolute date ever was - that and you have a lot more to switch over today than you did in 1999
Companies can keep IPv4 in their internal networks until the end of time for all that anyone cares. Just make your Internet facing corporate web site, email..etc accessible via IPv6. No rocket science required.
Trillions? I need to see those numbers.
While I agree it's much harder than many people here seem to let on I think you might be too far on the other side.
Not every single device in the world must be switched to IPv6. Only devices that require they be publicly routable might be affected. And even among those. it's not like IPv4 addresses will disappear over night so there's no reason for existing users to necessarily migrate over. This significantly reduces the problem. There's no reason that companies that have vast internal networks on 10.0.0.0/8 need to switch to IPv6. That would be a giant waste of money for them.
It's not like carriers are any stranger to sudden, forced updates - it was only a few years ago that half the internet broke for a few days because some Cisco router models had a hard limit of 2**18 IPv4 routing prefixes. Half of IPv6 - the first half of the address to be exact - is designed in such a way that this particular problem doesn't have to happen.
Regarding the binning of all those home routers... You know it occurs to me that if you accept the following two statements, there's a disturbing conclusion:
Statement #1: IPv6 was too obscure to be a selling point for routers for the past decade.
Statement #2: Routers typically last for ages, so large-scale re-buying of routers in a mostly saturated market, is a rare event for the manufacturers that would make fortunes from it.
Conclusion: It has been in the router manufacturers' best financial interests to deploy IPv6 support at the last possible minute in order to maximise profits from selling replacement models.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I was on the phone the other day with my ISP (Shaw), asking if, or at least when I could get a block of IPv6 addresses.
I was told, quite plainly, that they will not begin deploying any IPv6 addresses until they run out of IPv4 addresses.
That's a little like waiting until you are are using the bathroom and discover you are fresh out of toilet paper before you go and buy more, isn't it?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
While I'm all for carrots to those who migrate (and sticks for those who don't) this would compromise google's function, which is to find the most relevant results. If google started promoting or demoting sites based on an agenda, no matter how important that agenda is, I would start using a different search engine.
Some ISP's are giving only private IPv4 addresses to customers right now, NATting it at the ISP level. The games most people play are back to a central server, not direct to each other. The only shortcoming I can see is that getting your (externally visible) IP banned no longer just affects you.
While IPv6 has been known about for over a decade, the problem is that in order for an ISP to get a block of IPv6 addresses, they would need to give up their block of IPv4 addresses.
Comcast has been setting up customers with IPv6 for over a year now and they are still running their IPv4 network for everyone else.
Wrapping IPV4 ain't the problem
It's the problem being discussed in this thread. All the other crap you are sprouting belongs in a different thread.
Didn't HP and DEC each have a /8 allocation? Far more than either could ever have used. And didn't HP get DEC's /8 when they purchased them, giving HP 2*/8 allocations - doubly more than they could ever use?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Is this technically feasible on a large scale? If so, then does it really matter if we have '2 Internets' for the foreseeable future?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The cost to switch to IPv6 is not flipping a switch. It will cost trillions upon trillions of dollars globally to migrate. Selling investments like that in the middle of a global recession is not small potatoes
Wait.. when would you prefer doing it? Wait until the labor market is tight again? If it's going to take the efforts of thousands of people to make it happen, wouldn't it be best to do it when labor is cheap?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Linksys WRT600 and E3000 have IPv6. It seems manufacturers are starting to implement it.
Your math is.. off.
A /8 means that 24 bits are available for addressing, as in 16777216 (rougly 16 million) IP-addresses. 5 of those is 83886080 (or ~8 million).
If we indeed had 8 BILLION addresses left, the shortage of IP-addresses wouldn't be causing Betelguese to blow up the Interweb as we know if by 2012, as top scientists are leading us to believe.
Guess it depends on what you want to call common. The WRT54G is actually a bunch of different routers, with different hardware with differing capabilities, running different OSes, all sold under the same model name.
The cost to switch to IPv6 is not flipping a switch. It will cost trillions upon trillions of dollars globally to migrate.
Whoah there Sally! I can accept the idea that upgrading to IPv6 would be expensive, but.... Trillions? Upon Trillions? That's, eh, 4 Trillion dollars at the minimum.... really? (cough) To give you some idea, the global economy is right now hovering around $74 Trillion per year.
Switching to IPv6 is mostly annoyance factor; Operating Systems have been IPv6 capable for a LONG time. Most routers have also been IPv6 capable for a LONG time. Mostly it's about the human cost of "turning in on" and working out the kinks. It's just a change in protocol. No wires need to be re-run, no servers need to be replaced, and most routers won't even need to be replaced. Even a cheap Cisco 2600 series router can handle IPv6 with an O/S upgrade and sufficient RAM! Mostly, it's the owners of cheap-ass consumer routers that will have to actually replace any hardware, and hardware in this market space usually costs less than $100.
I'm in the industry; as a hosting provider this speaks very directly to my needs. And our estimated material cost of switching to IPv6 is something less, probably considerably less, than $500. For a small niche hosting company doing about 1.5 million annually. So why haven't we turned it on? Haven't needed to. The benefit of turning it on is currently negligible. It's not a matter of "dragging our feet", it's more a matter of deciding to go through the annoyance of doing so and getting nothing out of it.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
They did this. Except they added 12 octets in front of v4 and mapped existing v4 addresses to 0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.x.x.x.x.
A clean transition would have to support a conformal mapping of the current IPv4 address space forever. IPv6 isn't designed to do that, so the IPv4 mapping is useless.
If you wanted to do something easier to transition to, you would change each x in an x.x.x.x existing IPv4 address to 16 or 32 bits, so that every IPv4 address would _be_ a IP next generation address, so far as it appeared from a user or administrator perspective. Call it tuple based addressing - every address is internally a tuple of four integers (x,y,z,w), size of each component limited for convenience only.
Of course everyone would still have to upgrade all their routers and networking stacks to support a new header format before the plan would become fully effective. The difference is that existing addresses would be forward compatible _forever_. The numbering plan of the Internet would not need to be re-done from scratch. Instead of making everybody get two, incompatible "phone numbers" on two incompatible phone networks, everyone with an existing "phone number" could keep it indefinitely. That would make the transition go much smoother. Dual stack stinks - net admins have to maintain two independent numbering plans and there are always problems associated with choosing which stack to use to reach any given host. No way to know much of the time whether the other stack is functional or not.
Whereas once you were part of the next generation Internet with a scheme like this, you could reach _any_ host using a single, upgraded stack. Not just 198.55.55.55 (which could keep that address forever), but also 423.48.17.4 or 12.4.6.868.
The IPv6 transition will probably happen someday after immense pain and torment, but it could have been done years ago if the designers picked a transparent addressing plan compatible scheme instead of worrying about how many prefixes core routers could handle. With the scheme just outlined, the number of prefixes would be _identical_ to a comparable IPv4 network. The same prefixes we have now, just represented somewhat differently internally. Every core router on the planet would only need one routing database, not the one we have plus a new one in addition to that.
With the cost of home routers these days, that means that any router not owned by a slashdot member will likely go in the garbage. It's both cheaper and easier to buy a new one then to pay someone to flash it and reconfigure.
Additionally, buying a new one may mean upgrades like 802.11n and gigabit ethernet which aren't on their current router.
As for ISP devices (ADSL or Cable "modems"), I would suspect most devices being deployed at this point could do IPv6 with a firmware update. (though they also suffer from the same lifecycle advantages of replacement as seen above, for example upgrading ADSL2+ devices to VDSL, or upgrading the wireless to 802.11n, etc)
A big reason though that ISPs are dragging their feet is that they just don't see any reason to spend that amount of time and money, not to mention the support costs of the people calling in with old unsupported consumer routers, or an ancient version of windows, etc. As with most technologies, they'll do it only when absolutely forced to do so, and not a moment before.
Please clarify what you mean by forever. The IPv4 to IPv6 mapping is forever. Nobody is going to come and steal away that little 32 bit slice of the v6 address space.
Incidentally a v6 address is four 32 bit values (=128 bit).
You can reach any v4 host from v6 using this mapping using NAT64. And you will be able to do that as for as long anyone cares to keep the v4 net alive together with a NAT64 gateway.
Choosing stack? You go with the v4 stack if you want to talk to a v4 address. And the v6 stack if your peer has a v6 address. Doh. There is no choice here. If you have a single stack v6 system, the NAT64 will have translated all v4 address to v6 address for you, so you only know about v6 addresses and again no choice.
No, there is not actually any way v6 could have been constructed in a different way that would have made the ISPs of the world adopt it sooner. They will adopt when forced to, no sooner, no matter how it works.
There is no problem of v6 accessing the v4 network. Only the problem of non-upgraded stack accessing the new network. Your way has exactly the same problem. Old machines do not understand addresses outside the original 32 bit range and can not access them. In fact, your way is worse since it prevents any communication between old and new, which is a common error for people trying to propose their own v6 protocol.
Which is very different to double NAT where one of the NAT's is NOT being controlled by you.
You're not going to be configuring anything on your ISPs NAT to be forwarded specifically to you.
Interesting. First I'd see of an IPv6-only site being indexed. I wonder if it was manually seeded into their index the first time or something.
People on slahsdot talk about IPv6 migration like it is simple - it is NOT. There are a lot more devices than your local router, and a lot more pieces of software then your desktop OS, that have to support IPv6 before it can be migrated. Companies have decades worth of software with hundreds upon hundreds of millions of lines of code, all assuming an IP is 4 bytes.
And we've known since 1988 ish that we had to migrate to IPv6, and that the migration will get more expensive the longer we put it off. If knowledge of the need for IPv6 migration was a person, it would be old enough to buy lottery tickets.
A lot of software is already IPv6 compatible. All major operating systems, for example, have been IPv6 compatible for some time. And if you presume a normal 5-year lifespan for routing hardware, that could be entirely upgraded by 2015. Retail software should be easy to switch over, with much of it already having done so. The most recent DOCSIS is IPv6 compatible, and will just naturally rotate in with the atrociously short lifespan of modern DSL routers.
And "trillions and trillions of dollars?" Please. If you're talking about custom in-house software that presume IPv4, you're talking about a routing stack that can have localized changes to it. You could probably also create virtual networking components that help interface between the IPv6 world and the IPv4 application.
It's a problem. There is an obvious best solution. This obvious best solution is just going to get more and more expensive as time goes on. Stop whining about the costs, and plan your software and hardware acquisitions with IPv6 compatibility in mind, or deal with having to shell out a hell of a lot more when the IPv6 switch finally gets flipped.
The ______ Agenda
99% of them will have to throw away.
Setting up tunneling behind those AP/Gateway router without explicit support is not easy. 6in4 tunneling - have to setup the WAN IP correctly, rinse and repeat for every computer behind.
6to4 would instantly work (maybe slow at start..but if ISP setup 192.0.2.42 gateway nearby) but also requires router (those who had WAN IP participation.
Last but not least - native IPv6 routing, also involve those little boxes...
Just hopes more IPv6 capable AP router show up on the market sooner. Then the data
It applies when going the other way—128-bit IPv6 addresses cannot be uniquely encoded into 32-bit IPv4 headers. There are actually at least two ways to represent any IPv4 address as an IPv6 address: ::a.b.c.d (deprecated) and ::ffff:0:a.b.c.d. However, these encodings aren't used much; even though an IPv6-only peer could technically craft an IPv6 packet with an IPv4 destination address, the IPv4-only recipient wouldn't know what to do with that packet. They're mainly intended to allow applications to store both kinds of addresses in a common structure, not for routing. Alternately, the IPv6 system could try to send an IPv4 packet, but then it wouldn't be able to uniquely encode it's own address for the reply, which is where the Pigeonhole Principle comes in. Any system with extended addresses would run into the same problem regarding bidirectional communication.
IPv6 is backward-compatible with IPv4 in the sense that a host can support both, and thus communicate with both IPv4-only and IPv6-aware peers. Naturally this requires a valid IPv4 address to which IPv4-only peers can reply, which will generally be a private address behind a NAT gateway. Only hosts which need to accept incoming connections from IPv4-only peers will be allocated publicly-routable IPv4 addresses; everyone else can communicate freely over IPv6.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
So, pray tell, how will your legacy software that "knows" an IP address is 4 bytes (32 bits) address the server at 12.193.231.3.162?
Why is adding 1 octet perfectly compatible (according to you) but adding 12 breaks everything?
Methink you have it totally backwards when it comes to "old guys". How do you think that internet and intranet networking that you count on came to be. You think it was always this smooth? The reality is the older guys handled a dozen switches: from token ring to hubs and hubs to switches; from vendor LANs to IPX to NBF to NetBios over TCP/IP to our TCP/IP, and that's assuming you don't have to throw stuff like DecNet in there.
The older guys are a huge asset in doing this because unlike the younger guys this isn't their first time at the dance.
You know what you just did with a 64 bit kernel? You cut your on-chip cache in HALF.
This is complete rubbish. 64-bit code does *not* take twice the space of 32-bit code. It varies from instruction to instruction, depending on whether the instruction involves direct reference to a 64 bit value or not. The overall size of typical 64-bit code is not much larger than its 32-bit equivalent (maybe 20%ish).
This is much easier than Y2K. Y2K involved a huge percentage of the code. We already know how to create simple IPV4 networks for applications and NAT them so we don't have a legacy problem. The only place we are missing is at the hardware level. This will cost billions but it is not going to be a a substantial percentage of the entire IT workforce for 18 months.
How are you getting to trillions? There are 130m households in the USA assume 100m home routers replace everyone of them at $50 ea you are at $5b. Lets say that globally its 5x as big a job so $25b. Lets say that business doubles the cost, $50b. Lets double once more for safety $100b. Now how do I get to one trillion.
And frankly I doubt its this much. I think you end flashing most home routers I think most business can do this fairly easily as everything they bought in the last 10 years supports it...
No, it's a minimum of 10's of thousands of man-hours of deployment and probably collectively north of a few hundred million in deployment costs (mostly in terms of man-hours of engineering). The hardware isn't a significant cost centre here since it mostly already has support, as does firmware. While IPv6 rollouts are merely an annoyance for small/medium businesses or providers it's a massive project at massive cost for the big providers and also for any organization with more than a few sites. By and large for any multi-site non-provider organization their internal networks need to be re-engineered entirely. They'll need to redesign their network (it's not just flip a switch, update some DNS records and change a few IP's) and with the changes to DHCP and the functional elimination of NAT support the redesigns become complex. Plus they likely have legacy hardware without IPv6 support running in various non-core uses which will need to get replaced (you'd be surprised how much old hardware soldiers on running internal stub networks or as local servers for support or admin groups, there's a lot of this in large organizations as it's often easier to just deploy retired hardware than to write a business case to get your regional support centre a shell server or similar). And frankly, IPv6 has architectural issues, especially with regards to IP allocation and DHCP. It's core design is at odds with standard practices today (NAT and portable IP space being the big stumbling blocks) and there's going to be a fair amount of speedbumps in rolling it out globally as large multi-site organizations run into issues, especially with their original IP allocation. IPv6 isn't broken by any means but it does change the rules in ways which will cause deployment problems. There's good reasons why the large providers have been avoiding deploying it for as long as possible and they come down to a lot more than just cost.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
No, the bulk of changes are in network engineering. Lots of man-hours but low hardware costs. The biggest stumbling block is probably the DHCP issue, two mostly-incompatible specs for IPv6 and neither works as well as plain old IPv4 DHCP. But those issues won't be visible to consumers (large-scale DHCP issues are going to be a big stumbling block for IPv6 uptake in large multi-site organizations, not residential providers who will likely just use IP Autoconfig instead). The other issue is that the lack of IP portability is going to cause some serious re-engineering requirements for multi-nationals (but ISP's are going to LOVE it, it's government-issue spec-level vendor lockin via IP allocation).
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
It depends on what level we talk about. As far as I can see in SOHO level it's terrible. Over here it is like this:
ISP #1 - offers and supports 7 types of routers. Count of routers supporting IPv6 is ... 0. ... 0.
ISP #2 - offers and supports 15 types of routers. Count of routers supporting IPv6 is
In other words, your suggestion isn't better than v6 in any way. That is, you CAN'T come up with anything more compatible.
Please clarify what you mean by forever. The IPv4 to IPv6 mapping is forever. Nobody is going to come and steal away that little 32 bit slice of the v6 address space.
No, the addresses will simply be useless as soon as the IPv4 net either ceases to exist or ceases to be routed to the location of the addressee. Strictly a stop gap measure. The IPv4 numbering plan is going away, and that means that every public facing server on the planet will have to be dual stacked (with two completely independent addresses) for at least a decade.
You can reach any v4 host from v6 using this mapping using NAT64. And you will be able to do that as for as long anyone cares to keep the v4 net alive together with a NAT64 gateway.
Aye, that's the rub.
No, there is not actually any way v6 could have been constructed in a different way that would have made the ISPs of the world adopt it sooner. They will adopt when forced to, no sooner, no matter how it works.
Not true. The scheme I described, would allow existing networks to keep their IP addresses and network numbering plan forever, because the new numbering plan would be a transparent expansion of the old numbering plan. Every existing IP address, network, and subnet would be an IP next generation address, so far as the user could tell. No need renumber anything. No new DNS entries, no dual stack, etc. Over five or ten years, everyone would have IP next generation hardware and software and not even know it, or need to do anything to put it into effect. That includes ISPs and network administrators of all stripes.
An ISP could literally transition to IP next generation without knowing the transition took place, because they would not have to allocate replacement addresses for anyone. There wouldn't be two parallel networks, two parallel backbones, two sets of DNS entries for everything and everything.
Instead the natural upgrade cycle would have brought everyone everywhere into IP next generation compliance in less than a decade without them even knowing about it. And then as old style IP addresses were depleted, the few stragglers remaining would actually become aware they needed some sort of router upgrade. Not new IP addresses, not a new numbering plan, not new DNS entries, just a router upgrade. Done.
The entire transition would mostly be visible only to programmers and hardware engineers. Network administrators would hardly have to care. The transition, instead of being a world wide ten year headache, would pass with hardly anyone knowing about it. That is what a conservative addressing expansion plan would look like. No attempt to reboot the world from scratch.
Of those three popular brands you've mentioned, I've never heard of two of them, and the last (Linksys) isn't particularly popular here (Australia).
Here the most popular brands are Billion, Netgear, D-Link. I know you can download IPv6 firmware for most Billions (I have one) and I'm sure the others will follow suit. Also unlike in the US, it is very uncommon for your ISP to loan or give you the modem/router. You buy your own ... any standard ADSL2+ modem/router will work with any ISP. They also tend to cost considerably more than $50. Mine was over $300, but it's a high-end model (Gigabit LAN, SIP VoIP, VPN endpoints etc).
Guess it goes to show you that YMMV depending on where you live. But here, I don't see the shift to IPv6 being a particularly expensive or problematic thing for most people.
When universities around the globe move to IPv6, a LOT of IPv4-addresses will be freed.
This can create a problem for IPv6 progress, as when large B-nets is freed other companies might resell them and thus you have IPv4 as a forever pain-in-the-ass.
Mod parent up.
> IPv6 has no upgrade path from IPv4...
More accurately, IPv4 has no clean upgrade to path to anything with more address space. The flag-day was baked into the cake when we had the first round of panic attacks about address depletion, back when we deployed ubiquitous IPv4/NAT for address amplification purposes and broke the IPv4 option mechanism forever.
jhw
Egypt just quit the Internet, those addresses could be reassigned!
Kevin
Irrational Diversions
Well, if it's going to cost your organization a lot to move to IP6, then I guess it sucks to be you. Anyone even remotely involved in IT has known, for a decade or so, that this was coming sooner or later, and if you're so far behind that it's going to cost you a ton of money to make the switch, then CLEARLY, your organization has had it's head in the sand, and has been willfully ignoring what everyone else knew was coming. If the expense of switching is going to ruin your business, then good riddance, I say. That's not "survival of the fittest", it's just "survival of the not completely brain dead".
In addition, your figure of trillions is ridiculous. You're off by many orders of magnitude. There is absolutely no way in hell it's going to cost everyone on the planet $1000 or more to switch to IP6. I don't know where you're getting that figure, but please put it back wherever it came from.
Everyone needs to decide on an IP6 go live date, and an IP4 shutoff date, that's VERY soon afterward. If we let people get by with IP4 for too long, they'll just bitch and whine, and insist there's no money to make the switch, etc., and drag their feet, and complain about not being able to get to IP6 only addresses. Bite the bullet and switchover, please. Let's get this done and get back to work.