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IPv6 Traffic Remains Minuscule
judgecorp writes "Even though we are running out of IPv4 addresses, IPv6 traffic is still not taking off. In fact it is less than one percent and falling, according to a report from Arbor Networks."
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How many home routers support IPv6?
NAT and other hacks I imagine.
Truth is, I don't expect IPv6 to be widespread for about 10 years. The reasoning being that:
- while we are technically out of IPs ... this is not the world ending problem it's been hyped to be.. as evidenced by the world not ending .. these will all need to be replaced. In a decade, there will probably be a noticable "IPv6 transition period" layer in all landfills.
- the stuff we should have been doing 10 years ago at the consumer level we are just starting to do now (how many _new_ home routers still don't do IPv6
- carrier grade NAT "solves" everything
ISPs en-masse should have been giving people IPv6 addresses to play with _years_ ago. I have experimented with IPv6 locally and via tunnel, but it's just not worth it when I don't know how my ISP will allocate addresses. It also concerns me to think how they will roll this out to the masses... because they are going to have to make it user friendly and seemless to the large consumer base... which means it's probably going to be primitive, locked down, and very frustrating for anyone with technical savvy. I _hope_ they don't require everyone to use some half baked custom hardware with some propriatary switchover software that you _have_ to use.
In that case, the transition from NTSC to ATSC might be a better analogy. It needed an act of Congress to make it happen.
Maybe it will on IPv6 day
Yeah, but you're not factoring in the cost to move to an area where Verizon offers FiOS.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
There is no such requirement!
One of the many possibilities for choosing the local part of the network is using the MAC address of the network interface. There are several other choices available, like choosing one manually or generating a random one (you can in fact generate random ones rather frequently, see "privacy extensions").
Depending on your OS vendor, one of these will be the default behavior, but you don't have to do it that way if you don't like it.
This is actually a really good example of what they should be doing.
Make the tech available first.. let people develop a desire for it. ISPs should be handing out IPv6 addresses to anyone who wants them. Let people play with them optionally... eventually more and more people will... and demand for it will increase. It would be a slow, gradual adoption devoide of excessive headaches...
way too rational to actually happen given the current track record though.
Totally agreed.
Another component of the problem is that IPv6 is quite different from IPv4. Arguably better... but people don't like different.
I understand why it happened, the internet _is_ the legacy problem. You can't just roll out a patch to the internet every few years... once it's running it has to work for a long time. I think a lot of people saw this as a good opportunity to fix some other problems ... and the result is people are going to have to change the way they think about certain things, which is going to lead to resistance.
Even myself, who enjoys change. I am comfortable with how NAT works. It makes sense to me. I hear things like "every device gets a public IP" and freak out. Now that I understand how it works (read: gateways suddenly became a lot more important) it's not so bad... but I can see why a lot of people, especially who don't work with networks as a career... are just saying "screw that, I'll deal when something actually happens to cause _me_ grief".
And there is no benifit to the ISP either. They can't charge more money to upgrade people to IPv6 because as you said, there is no benifit to the consumer. It just costs them money.. _and_ is going to generate more user issues which is more money and maybe some lost business.
Ultimately, until shit actually starts failing in a big way.. nothing is going to happen.
That is the key reason we will never see IPv6: the entities that have to do something to make it happen have no incentive to do it, and a significant disincentive. IPv4 can be controlled by a few large organizations -- large telcos, governments, large technology corporations. IPv4 addresses are scarce and it is impossible for any new entity to come along and start challenging Verizon or Bell. Things like RFC 1918 addresses, NAT and tunneling make is possible for users to get stuff done in the face of IPv4 limits, so there is little subscriber-driven requirement to upgrade. End subscribers -- even very large ones -- essentially depend on the connectivity providers to lead the way in this sort of upgrade transition, and the large telcos have nothing to gain by giving up their de-facto oligopoly power in the market. Why should any guy with a couple of microwave dishes be able to go into business up against AT&T? That would be bad for business. As long as he does all that with RFC 1918 addresses, that's fine. But if IPv6 came to town, a guy like that would be selling fully routable connectivity, and that's no good at all.
End to end connectivity is the main selling point, but apps like Skype use hacky work arounds that the end user doesn't need to know anything about. The tipping point is going to come when there start being some services only available via IPv6. APNIC has now run out of IPv4 addresses, so I imagine that some services in the Asia-Pacific region will start to be v6-only in the near futures. Not a huge problem, since most ISPs in the region are already providing dual-stack, so their customers probably won't notice, but people trying to connect from the USA will.
I wonder what would happen if Google decided to make HD videos on YouTube v6-only. I imagine some interesting conversations with tech support:
"Hi, I'm trying to watch some kittens on YouTube and it says I only have Internet 4 not Internet 6. I'm running Microsoft Internet 9, but it still doesn't work"
"Sorry, we don't provide IPv6 access, and Google requires that for HD videos on YouTube."
"You pee vee six? Don't confuse me with jargon I just want to watch the video. I paid for an Internet from you, but Google says it's an old Internet. How do I use the new Internet?"
"I'm sorry, but we don't support IPv6, there's no demand for it."
"Well, how do I upgrade to Internet 6? I pay you for Internet and I want to use Internet."
How this conversation ends depends largely on whether the ISP in question has any competition...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yup, the modem/router my ISP just "upgraded" me to is a _complete_ piece of junk (speedstream is anyone is curious) that they've made even worse by overlaying custom firmware.
Put the thing in bridge mode, get an old machine from a few years ago and run ipcop or pfsense on it.
When put under load most consumer modems fail, especially with nat and anything like that. best leave it be a dumb modem and let decent hardware handle everything else further down the line.
> Truth is, I don't expect IPv6 to be widespread for about 10 years.
I don't know, 10 years are a long time. But the obstacles are clearly commercial in nature: all the big players have lots of IPv4 address, and these can become valuable capital. The transition to IPv6 would lower it in value. Therefore all existing players have a vested interest in delaying or even sabotaging IPv6. Plus the shortage of IPv4 creates a perfect market entry barrier for new competitors.
So I have come to the conclusion that the solution is legislation. We have left the transition so late that it is bound to be very very painful already. Any further delay and it may kill the internet as we know it, or at least parts of it.
It depends some on the type of server involved. For example, with a webserver and a non-encrypted connection, the URI is contained in the request, so the DNS entry can point to a proxy server (such as Squid). The proxy handles the gateway onto IPv6 transparently, giving the illusion that the web request went directly to the destination. The fact that DNS didn't resolve to the webserver would never be visible to the user.
For other types of connection, you can only pull that specific trick if you are prepared to hide portions of the Internet. It also requires dynamic DNS and some of the trickery used for reverse NAT. A request comes in for an A record but only an AAAA record exists. The proxy has a pool of IPv4 addresses it can use and a map that associates an IPv4 address to an IPv6 address - your standard address-based (as opposed to port-based) DNAT but across protocols. The proxy creates a DDNS entry for the IPv6 server using an IPv4 address that's unique for that server. The proxy now knows exactly what IPv6 server to forward the requests to, so doesn't need to do any kind of packet inspection.
In this second case, all you're doing is ripping the payload out of one container and shoving it into an equal-sized container of the other protocol. TCP and UDP payloads don't change at all between containers and hardly any of the container information will be of any interest on the other side of the gateway.
This does limit you, though. If an ISP were to install a proxy of this kind, it would be limited to 16,711,680 simultaneous IPv4/IPv6 gateways if it wanted to avoid clashes with the existing IPv4 backbone. That's not the same as 16 million users, since 16 million users all accessing YouTube would still equal one gateway. It would have to be 16 million distinct IPv6 destinations and all at the same time (since an unused gateway can be closed and the DNS entry recycled).
Such proxies exist. In fact, the Naval Research Laboratory once wrote a really neat library back in the mid 90s that made it a cinch to not only write them but make them bi-directional (ie: an IPv6-only machine could access an IPv4-only machine behind such a proxy as easily the other way round). They're also not hard to write, since all the mechanisms you need are widely deployed.
A third solution does exist. IPv6 supports a format for embedded IPv4 addresses. (::127.0.0.1, for example, is perfectly legit IPv6.) So long as the IPv6 destination has a unique embedded IPv4 address as a valid record, a DNS server can return the embedded portion as an A record that uniquely identifies that machine in IPv4-space. Then all you need is payload copying between containers and no fancy address translation or DDNS support. This requires that only a fixed subset of all IPv6 machines are reachable, as opposed to the second solution which merely requires that a subset of IPv6 machines that is fixed for any given moment in time are reachable, so it's less flexible but can be installed as a module directly into a customer's router.
IPv6 proponents haven't been keen on these kinds of solution because cross-protocol NAT can only support those features that exist on both protocols, whereas the preferred dual-stack solution gives you the best of both worlds. I've always found that argument to be dubious, however, because it was obvious to me that transparent migration would be less likely to meet resistance since there would be zero impact on end-users. Now, fifteen years on, I'm more convinced than ever that the 6Bone working group made a disastrous mistake in pressing for dual-stack rather than transparent solutions. Sure, if they'd just handed me control I'd have botched it up somewhere else and probably far worse. Nonetheless, I'm torn between gloating evilly and screaming in disgust that an astonishingly stupid attempt at power-play has held back IPv6 progress for one and a half friggin' decades.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)