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IPv6 Traffic Volumes Are Low, But Nobody Knows How Low
netbuzz writes "As the June 8 World IPv6 Day experiment draws near, there is universal agreement that little IPv6 traffic is traversing the Internet at the moment. The event is designed in part to increase that volume. However, it will be difficult for Internet policymakers, engineers and the user community at large to tell how the upgrade to IPv6 is progressing because no one has accurate or comprehensive statistics about how much Internet traffic is IPv6 versus IPv4."
And in case you don't know much about IPv6 and why it matters, dave.io has kindly provided "a primer on the IPv6 transition: why it's cool, how to get started with it and what's changed."
Since the ISP:s don't want to offer IPv6 to their customers the traffic is a lot lower than it could have been.
Right now it's necessary to do tunneling to an access point for IPv6 and that's not convenient for the majority of the internet users.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
... but my university network, which was touted as 'modern' doesn't even offer it. Of course, it does offer some rather obnoxious censoring since last September: what the FUCK did Google Labs ever do to Corvinus?
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
I finally upgraded my home equipment to at least support IPV6 the problem though is that my provider doesn't support it.
So I have the boat now I'm just waiting for the sea to fill up around me.
crazy dynamite monkey
IPV6, Now with 50% more V!
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
A timely article - I just got full native IPv6 running for my home internet connection last week (dual stack, of course).
Works well - the DSL modem connects like usual and the ISP assigns you a dynamic IPv6 /64 for the PPP session (ie. the modem's public IPv6 address), a static /60 for your LAN (your router then dishes out IPs within this subnet to the machines on the network via prefix delegation), and of course your good old standard single IPv4 address.
My Linux, Win 7, Mac OSX machines, iPad and iPhone all had no issue correctly picking up their IPv6 address and using it. The only things on the home network that are still IPv4 only are my old D-link NAS and the Wii. Attempting to access something, IPv6 is tried first, and it that fails it'll fall back to IPv4. Most Google sites are IPv6 enabled it seems, though other than that, the vast majority of stuff I access is still IPv4 only at this stage.
It really is weird having every machine in the house with a unique, globally addressable IP again after all these years behind a single public address using NAT. No more port forwarding.
Fire all the useless incompetent IT clowns who keep prolonging the problem.
Consumer Routers don't oar barely offer IPv6 support. My router supposedly does IPv6, except it doesn't. There are no upgrades to the firmware to support it. Comcast (my ISP) supposedly offers IPv6 support. I suspect the consumer router companies are selling IPv4 routers now when we run out of IPV4 addresses, in hopes of selling the "upgrade" to IPv6 in a year or two, as that can be the only reason why IPv6 support isn't offered.
Sad
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
IPv6 is necessary. Most everyone agrees on that.
The trouble is, nobody wants to pay the cost of switching until enough of everybody else switches to make it worthwhile. So long as there's no significant IPv6 traffic to a website, there's no reason for the servers to make the effort to support IPv6. So long as there's no significant number of websites that support IPv6, there's no reason for ISPs to make the effort to support connecting to IPv6 websites and converting their users over to IPv6. In both cases, there's no short-term return on investment, so each organization separately decides it's a bad idea and tells their tech team to stop bugging them about it.
There are only 2 solutions I can think of to actually force the transition to occur:
1. Government mandate. Not my first choice on this, but one of the few things that would work.
2. Let the crisis happen. They'll be a long period where the ISPs try to cobble something together using NAT, but eventually that won't work either, and then they will scramble to try to make something with IPv6 work spending about 10 times the cash they really needed and having their tech teams working 80-hour work weeks for months.
Based on what I've seen, my money's on option 2.
I am officially gone from
I'll be moving to the Aomori prefecture on Honshu (the main island) in a few weeks, and I'm curious if I'll be able to get an proper IPv6 connection there. I'll probably have to request it, but I was planning on getting a business class connection anyway.
I have ipv6 in my pants.
(and available for all your ipv6 dns needs at dnshat.com)
There isn't enough porn. What ever happened to the free IPv6 Porn project? :)
Right now there is no market for ipv6 because no one is on it. But, no one is on it because there is no market for it, so dominant ISPs don't offer it.
It's a chicken-and-egg syndrome. The IPV4 crunch should move things along, you would think, but does your cable, DSL, or fibre "broadband" provider offer IPV6? Does your consumer router even support it? I've seen a lot of hasbro routers and even entry-level "enterprise" routers which still today do not offer IPV6 functionality. Plus, there is probably a lot of entrenched legacy systems in place quietly passing packets along, forgotten long ago by system administrators as personnel has overturned, so cutting over to ipv6 overnight could potentially introduce lengthy outages as old networks are traced and old equipment replaced - or very expensive firmware updates+service plans are purchased.
Plus, ipv4 is easy to manage; your average network engineer has IPs memorized for when things break, or at least a somewhat logical addressing scheme so it's super-easy to guess the IP of a specific component when DNS breaks or is inaccessible, to be able to log into the device and fix it. the dot-quads make things really easy, four integers with a max of three digits (people memorize numbers and spelling most easily when broken down into chunks of three or less) per integer. It's going to require a lot of training, documenting, and large financial cost. It should have been done up front in 1998-1999 when the ipv6 spec was largely finalized, prototyped and tested, before broadband became truly mainstream. It would have been much cheaper to do the work as much of the Internet infrastructure was still being built, but it wasn't deemed profitable then because even right up to the dot-com bubble business analysts still insisted the Internet was just a fad. Now it's quite necessary, but ISPs don't want to do it because the expense could be immense.
There are reasons the cutover hasn't even been attempted yet. It's going to be costly in many ways.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Why bother switching to ipv6? ipv4 only has to last until October 21st 2011.
I bought a new wireless router earlier this year. I didn't even consider checking for IPv6 support. I just assumed no networking component today would be shipping without it. I mean, we've been reading "running out of IPv4 - switch to v6!" for what, a decade now? And we've been messing about with NAT and port forwarding due to limited IPs for even longer. It's not like they didn't know this was coming.
Needless to say, mentioned router did not include IPv6. But at least there's unofficial firmware for it that does. And, one never knows, the manufacturer might by some miracle decide to support the product even...
How the hell are you supposed to be able to send IPv6 traffic when your ISP can't be arsed to provide it. We pay BT £1,079 pcm for a leased line at work and they can't provide it. Whereas at home I use Andrews & Arnold who provide native IPv6. So far I've been mightily impressed by them.
Sure there's tunneling, but it means my IPv6 traffic ends up coming out of a PoP in Holland. Then there's the issue with routers - I'm currently using a 7 year old WRT54g with OpenWRT on it, though it's far more stable than any ISP router I've had.
Yeah, we're gonna have to do it eventually.
Yeah, it literally takes 10 minutes for anyone with a brain.
Yeah, there are ways for ISP's to even automate it and shield users from it (e.g. transparent tunnels so they carry on using IPv4 but IPV6 is the actual carrier).
Yeah, it lets you get rid of NAT (which was never really much of a problem).
But:
I did it. I went to the IPv6 test sites. They told me I was enabled. Ten minutes later, after not finding another IPv6 accessible website, I turned it off to save me having yet-another-avenue where someone could get onto my network if I'd made a mistake in the configuration, or forgotten to include ip6tables rules as wall as iptables rules, etc.
There was literally NO reason to have it enabled. The only "problem" I had was that ntpq seemed to think all my usual NTP peers were offline but that was probably just me.
YET AGAIN: When Slashdot posts AAAA records, we can start the push, otherwise we're just geeks pushing an agenda that we don't follow ourselves. When the BBC posts them, we're getting there. When every website I normally visit is IPv6 accessible, it's a success. Only THEN can we think about turning "off" IPv4. Until then, it's like someone 40 years ago with a video phone showing "how cool" it is. Fabulous. But not much point until everyone else gets them too.
The problem is that ISPs and router makers have been dragging their feet over IPv6 for years - there was just no ROI in the short term for them. Rolling your own solution is doable, but doing it properly without ISP or router support is still quite tricky.
Now of course, as IPv4 running out becomes a concrete problem, it's cheaper and simpler to focus on deploying carrier grade NAT - i.e. multiple end-users sharing a single globally routable IPv4 address.
I do have IPv6 on my home network; I've got a dlink 825 flashed with openWRT as my primary router (linked to cheapie DSL modem with PPPoE) specifically so I could run the AICCU client for sixxs.net for my IPv6 tunnel on it. RADVD handles advertising the tunnel prefix to the home LAN, so all my PCs, VMs, laptops etc have IPv6 addresses using one /64 out of my allocated /48. I had to do it this way as I have a dynamic IPv4 address, and the handful of expensive routers that do support proper 6in4 tunnels generally only work if you have a fixed real IPv4 address.
I have a similar setup at work, but there it's just a linux box with the main fixed IP router forwarding the 6in4 packets to it.
The main use for this for me is to be able to connect direct over IPv6 to any of my machines at home (mostly my NAS or VMs), using SSH or RDP etc - I've just put the static IPv6 addresses into my external DNS for my own domain. Very handy if I want to test how one of our hosted services looks from outside the work network, or to queue up a download so it's ready when I get home. I even use it at home to connect to work; since the IPv6 takes a different (shorter) route, it's quite a bit lower latency than connecting to the same machine via IPv4 and VPN (my firewall allows such connections from and to work, but not the general outside world)
So it has its uses for a techie like me; but for the average home user? It's way way beyond their ability to setup. Even setting up a single machine with a dynamic IPv6 tunnel is too complex, and certainly using 6to4 or toredo or the like relies too much on having a nearby translation gateway, and they're still pretty thin on the ground leading to a pretty rubbish IPv6 connection.
I honestly think we're going to see a lot more carrier-grade NAT from ISPs - it's already happening for mobile devices - than we see major IPv6 rollouts in the near future. Of course, that will break even more than it already is P2P apps like skype, bittorrent, IM file transfer etc etc, and of course running your own IPv6 tunnel will be that much harder behind a double NAT firewall.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
http://isoc.org/wp/worldipv6day/ gives me a nice error message:
Catchable fatal error: Object of class stdClass could not be converted to string in /home/isoc/www.isoc.org/htdocs/wp/wp-content/themes/inc/functions.php on line 69
Does anyone else see that too?
...The embarrassing thing is that Facebook, a site for doing social things that isn't about tech is available over IPv6, but Slashdot, which is all about tech still is not available over IPv6.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Comcast is actually doing something right with IPv6. They've already started to roll out dual stack.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Really... they suck.
Last time I called them about ipv6 availability, the guy at the other end of the phone proceeded to claim that the stories about ipv4 exhaustion are just 'the sky is falling' hype... that there is no shortage of ipv4 addresses, and there is no need to begin a transition to ipv6 imminently. He compared it to Y2K, saying how everybody was all panicked before it happened and how it turned out that it wasn't anything to be all concerned about (never mind the fact that the only real reason it wasn't anything to be concerned about after the fact is because there were people were pulling 16 hour days, 7 days a week, in the months preceeding Y2K to mitigate the potential problems).
So I asked him when IPv6 migration would begin. He said that they didn't know... and he refused to transfer me to a supervisor when I asked him if he could transfer me to someone who might know.
He also told me that when switchover to ipv6 happened, it would be instantaneous as far as the end user is concerned, there would be absolutely no need for any end user configuration adjustment, as long as one was running a currently patched OS, beyond a possible reboot.
If I could find another ISP in my area that would allow me to utilize two globally visible dynamic IPv4 addresses, I'd be switching in a heartbeat.
Oh, how I wish I had taken note of that person's name.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm currently a student at a tech school. I'm working on a web development degree, but I joined the Network Security Club for some cross-field experience. I'll see if I can convince the club to convert our test LAN (five old servers, a dozen desktops, several switches and a router) to IPv6. Hopefully the antique Cisco router can handle that - these guys will hate me if I swap that out for a cheap home router running DD-WRT.
How can the average homeowner tell if their cable modem/router is IPv6 capable? Or, is this a non-issue?
I can ping6 the various computers on my home network that support v6, but currently cannot ping6 outside addresses. Hence, my question for those with the expertise to answer.
Whew! This water sure is cold!
Macs have had KAME since at least X.2 and I believe before. I don't know if it was in the GUI setup, but it definitely was in the file system. I set it up because I was trying to get my mac to talk to my work VPN, which used an IPsec protocol (and gee, IPv6 comes with IPsec!). I'm guessing it was there before X.2, possibly X.0, but I'm not going to pull out my X.0 disk to check. I left my previous ISP and was running IPv6 before Tiger was released and will support it again if my current ISP ever does support it (my domain is registered with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and IPv6 is running on my server - waiting on Qwest)
IPv6 is the Microsoft Bob of the new Millennium. So, like Bob, let's drop it, keep Clippy and the Dog, and move on to IPv2000, to be followed by IPvXP, IPvVISTA (which we will all have to install, but downgrade to IPvXP), and IPv7.
That's a hell of a path from IPv6 to IPv7, but hey, what are you going to do? Install IPvBuntu?
I8-D
I'd have to buy a new router, my ISP just hasn't come up with a good plan to roll it out, and I haven't even used it at work for my entire 17 year Systems Engineering career.
Also, to all those who tout DNS as the savior for remembering complex IP(v6) addresses, consider this, router & firewall rules don't use DNS, logs record IPs not names, and when you roll out large amounts of servers or workstations and have to enter in the IPs manually, who wants to enter in a 128-bit hex address? I find it much easier to remember what 192.168.0.x stands for than 3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf. I can even recall my Internet IP address from memory without relying on DNS (which I've had to do a few times).
I'll make the switch on the Internet when my ISP mandates it and I get a new router. But, as for my LAN, I really have no desire to use it.
I have IPv6 through my ISP, Sonic.net. Whenever I use BitTorrent, I see plenty of IPv6 hosts. The reason is pretty obvious to me: if you're passing IPv6 through your home router, you have an externally-reachable IPv6 address ... but you may not have an externally-reachable IPv4 address thanks to your home router's NAT.
Presumably, this means that one incentive for home users getting IPv6 is to get a better-connected BitTorrent network. BitTorrent is pretty popular, but ISPs are never going to tell you "Get IPv6 so you can download movies ... er, I mean, Ubuntu Live CDs! ... faster."
...unlike digital broadcast TV, which was a bit painful, but I got through it...after a few thousand dollars in equipment upgrades over the years.
Give me a good reason to use, or make me use it, or I will continue blissfully using the Internet without it. So far, that's worked for me.
I'm sorry, but that's utterly wrong. There are people who are watching this stuff. One of them is Craig Labovitz, Chief Scientist at Arbor Networks. He authored a paper six months ago called Six Months, Six Providers, and IPv6. In it, he says that tunneled IPv6 accounts for between 0.01% and 0.05% of all Internet traffic while IPv6 on providers which support it natively accounts for about 0.1% of all traffic. I'm willing to bet that he and/or Arbor will have some news about IPv6 traffic levels on IPv6 day.
If you scroll down a bit, you'll also see that P2P amounts to the majority (61%) of v6 traffic. I also find it fascinating that SSH and Web traffic both account for 4.6% of v6 right now.
Lookup of AAAA records is abysmally slow right now for some reason. Maybe DNS servers are not caching the replies? Anyway, I disabled all IPv6 requests in my local DNS cache daemon (by immediately returning NXDOMAIN for all of them), and browsing became WAY faster. It's amazing how much time is wasted on IPv6 queries, even when you have no IPv6 connection, since glibc prefers IPv6 results whether you have one or not.
a star network will perform consistently at the same speed whereas a loop will tend to be slower at peak hours.
A star network with one upstream connection is limited by the speed of its upstream. As I understand it, DSL is just as shared as cable, just at a different point.
One of the reasons I left Comcast years ago (aside from no static IPs and their overpriced cable packages compared to DISH, especially for non-sports fans)
If you're not a sports fan, have you considered dropping DISH in favor of an Internet VOD service such as Hulu Plus or Netflix? How good are DISH's loyalty rewards that you speak of?
I might stay with a tunnel semi-permanently.
Until IPv6 gets so widespread that people use tunnels more as anonymizers than as essential gateways. Then tunnels will likely become paid services instead of free services.
I would like to see a solution that gave me an entire IPv4 address space on my side of my Internet modem/router and transparent IPv6 out the other end. Every router could have their own IPv4 network as big as they could possible build it, and they all connected together quite nicely through the Internet. I'm sure that there is some incredibly obscure reason why this can never happen, but it is a nice thought since everybody speaks IPv4.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Also, why don't they just deallocate some of the reserved areas like 192.168 and 10.x except for maybe the most commonly used, say, 65536 addresses in each one? That would free up millions right there.
Sooooo you can get to your data cap even earlier in the month. What a deal.
At this point the speeds we have now can exceed your cap, so why bother with faster?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You should expect that avoiding IPv6 will mean paying extra in the not too distant future.
jhw
and ya blah blah... @ISP's please take care of this..
Its not my headache as long as I can get an IP to access the internet with..
The last person to mod me down is a rotten egg..... there.. that should do it..
My ISP (Internode - Australia) has had a long-running IPv6 dual-stack trial, and is due to take it to production later this year.
http://ipv6.internode.on.net/
They are still working out a few quirks before declaring it production ready - for example, they do not yet have unmetered data working (for this reason, they do not publish an IPv4 address for the internode download mirror and other similar sites).
I use a Billion 7800N ADSL router. The only quirk I've found is that it doesn't publish its own link-local address as the IPv6 DNS server - it publishes my ISP's DNS servers. This means that I need to manually configure the DNSv6 settings on each of my local machines to lookup IPv4 clients on my LAN. I'm hoping this will be fixed in a future firmware update.
How many of you have statically allocated IP addresses, or would you notice or care?
[pre-comment disclaimer: I am a pfSense developer]
I am running the IPv6 branch of pfSense 2.0 on my home router and I have v6 connectivity via he.net's tunnelbroker service. It works nicely, most devices on my LAN are happily preferring v6 over v4 for connections where it's possible, though it is rather limited at the moment. While the IPv6 code won't be included in the 2.0 release when it ships, it's easy to overlay on top and run it now. It will make it into the 2.1 release for sure. It's making great progress but it's not yet 100%.
Checking my RRD graphs I see that on one graph it showed a total of around 2GB of IPv4 transferred and for the same period, 30MB of IPv6, so somewhere near 1.5% of my traffic is ipv6 for that period.
Check the pfSense IPv6 board for more info and a howto.
The whole point of DNS is that you set it up and then you don't have to remember addresses.
But in order to set up DNS, as I understand it, one still has to memorize the addresses of two recursive DNS resolvers, or if you run your own recursive resolver, the root servers. For example, Google Public DNS is two recursive DNS resolvers at static IPv4 addresses 8.8.4.4 and 8.8.8.8. Or what am I missing?
Linux Supports IPv6 Windows Supports IPv6 ISP Support IPv6 Data Centers (Some) Support IPv6 Basically comes down too is 'Software' that doesn't support IPv6. Hosting Field: cPanel doesn't support IPv6 Maybe few other control panels. Most Registrars don't support IPv6 (Godaddy is the only I know that does for the sole purpose of registering nameservers with an IPv6 IP. Basically, comes down too is we're not ready for IPv6. We're still stuck on IPv4 ans since this all has been allocated but one 'Class' of IPs nobody is going to be able to setup new services eventually. With a Class E IP Block - we would have a lot of ips and good for a few years until IPv6 can be fully supported.
You're missing the fact that your laptop, server, or ISP can remember the DNS resolver addresses.
But if I forget the DNS resolver addresses, and I'm on a system that has never remembered the addresses in the first place, how do I look them up without already having working DNS? At least under IPv4, it's easier to remember the IPv4 addresses of Google Public DNS or OpenDNS in my head than to remember to carry a USB flash drive containing a text file of the addresses. And it's a lot cheaper to remember the IPv4 addresses in my head than to subscribe to smartphone service, which according to Sprint and T-Mobile costs $65 per month more than my current cell phone service through Virgin Mobile USA.
You might assume that I am unlikely to run into a system that has never remembered the addresses in the first place. But I often troubleshoot problems with Internet access for family members, and many of these problems come from problems with the DNS server whose IPv4 address the ISP has provided through DHCP. For example, not only does Comcast hijack NXDOMAIN responses to its own "Comcast Domain Helper service" advertising pages, but in a lot of cases, Comcast's DNS servers intermittently forget that a subscriber's account is still subscribed and acts as a captive portal to the "self-install" setup page where the user can download a Windows executable file to configure the modem for a first-time installation. Hardcoding Google Public DNS solves this problem every time.