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No IPv6 Doomsday In 2012
itwbennett writes "Yes, IPv4 addresses are running out, but a Y2K-style disaster/frenzy won't be coming in 2012. Instead, businesses are likely to spend the coming year preparing to upgrade to IPv6, experts say. Of course there's a chance that panic will ensue when Europe's RIPE hands out its last IPv4 addresses this summer, but 'most [businesses] understand that they can live without having to make any major investments immediately,' said IDC analyst Nav Chander. Plus, it won't be until 2013 that North America will run out of IPv4 addresses and there's no sense getting worked up before then."
ISP's and hosting companies will not run out of IPs. This only means that the price per IP will start to slowly grow. Hell, every time I order server the companies still happily hand me over 5 IPs without me even asking for them. With a simple request I can also buy 256 ips for the price of $300 a year.
Well, anyone looking to make some big bucks in the next 1-3 year should start learning IPv6. Nothing major needed, just setup a IPv6 network at home, if you can rent an external server with IPv6 in any of the many data centers that already offer it, and play with it.
It's not a lot of effort and there will be many highly paid job offers soon.
Only the regional NICs have run out of blocks to distribute. No one has actually run out of IPv4 addresses. Moreover, there is a lot that still can be done to reclaim addresses. Lastly, the huge swathes of multicast and class E addresses haven't even been tapped.
This is just more attempts for the shill media to try to herd people into replacing their gear. It'll fail like the rest.
The USG was scheduled to go to IPv6 in 2006. It hasn't even begun yet.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
You assume everyone with an IP is using it to host a website. And what about people that have a redundant data link that only comes up when their main link goes down? "Well, we haven't had any downtime in the past year, guess we don't need any backups! Go ahead, take my IP!"
Couple of A blocks won't give you 10 years with the way things are expanding in Asia and Africa.
I have an idea, why don't we separate the African Internet from our Internet. We could have two Internet's! They would be separate but equal..
No, I'm not a drama queen. I'm a paranoid bastard who makes Mad-Eye Moody look positively naively trusting. Which is another way of saying I've been through major infrastructure deployments before. I don't believe in Murphy, I'm on a first-name basis with the little toerag.
Making an IPv6 tunnel work, that's easy. The hard part's making it not work in the spots that need to not work without breaking what's supposed to work. If everything goes smoothly it'll be a piece of cake, and if I do it now it'll probably go smoothly. But if I wait until the last minute, 99 times out of a hundred it won't go smoothly. So I'll be paranoid and get it done now and be pleasantly surprised at the lack of problems, then kick back and relax with a bowl of popcorn while Murphy visits all the people who waited and zany hijinks ensue.
For cheap consumer devices that do everything in software, sure a firmware update is all it would take, at least in theory (IPv6 can take more memory and CPU so on limited devices there might not be enough). However enterprise networking devices? They usually have to have parts replaced.
Reason is that to get the kind of speeds and latencies we want, you need ASICs, Application Specific Integrated Circuits. Those are just what they sound like: Devices designed to do a specific thing. That also means they aren't programmable. ASICs allow us to do stuff cheaper and faster than we could do in software.
A simple example is a gigabit switch. Crack one open and you see a very small little chip that handles all the switching. Now try it with a PC, stick in 8 gigabit cards and have it bridge between them. It'll overwhelm it, despite having a powerful CPU. Reason the switch can handle it is that little chip does nothing but switch packets. It is designed for only one task and does it well.
So enterprise stuff has this too, but some more complex ones. You get ASICs to speed up routing. Problem is if the ASIC was made for IPv4, it cannot be expanded to IPv6. You need a new one.
On the campus where I work they upgraded all the big routers to do IPv6 and it was pricey, seven figures even with our discounts. All the supervisor modules had to be replaced. Now yes, before that they could have technically turned it on, there was IPv6 for IOS on the older stuff. However it was all done in CPU, which is pretty limited on those routers. So if a couple people used it, it'd be fine. However if lots of people did, it'd crash the routers. The only way to give them the capacity to support it for everyone was to get new IPv6 hardware.
It isn't a matter of being greedy. As I said, Cisco would let you turn IPv6 on for many devices, like the 6500/7600s we use. It just couldn't accelerate it because it lacked the hardware. No magic fix for that.
Remember high end networking equipment isn't replaced often. You can leave it in place for over a decade. They aren't going to replace it all just for fun.
what scares me is the lack of a "real" private address range (with nat) like we do now with ipv4.
Dunno what your threshold for "real" is, but Wikipedia mentions this... perhaps that would do.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
... what you don't seem to get is that the problem is not when ARIN runs out, but when your business partners get IPv6 addresses you can't reach because you didn't do your f@ckin' homework and upgrade to dual-stacked ... So go ahead, stick to IPv4, and once your boss comes in and asks why you can't exchange data with your possibly largest customer, tell him: "why would we want IPv4? Arin hasn't run out yet" ... good luck on finding a new job afterwards ... ...
And if you believe "Hey, no problem, it's just the Chinese and Japanese and Australians, who needs them" - think again, Europe's RIPE will run out of IPv4 addresses next
they have 65 + million ipv4 addresses....
Registrations are publicly visible in the WHOIS database, so please elaborate which address blocks you refer to?
Took the words right out of my mouth.. 'The people' in those countries have been shown time and time again that they can't be trusted. We've been letting them get away with raping and stealing from our servers for long enough. My oldest server got raped just last month and I'm still worried that some root-kit or other may still be inside of her. They deserve to be segregated from the rest of us upstanding types...
No it is the Evangelical Christians who are believing a Pagan calendar designed to help worship many gods. Sometimes I don't think most of these people actually read the bible.
Maybe they know their own religion is full of shit.
You can mod me down but you can't mod down the coming Mayan Apocalypse. Ah Pukuh shall call fourth Ah Muzencab to smite thee all.
NAT doesn't provide any security. Never has, never will. No, I'm not wrong. No, I'm still not wrong.
If you have a firewall between your private network and the public Internet, then you'll have all the security you want, whether using IPv4 or IPv6, with or without NAT. If you don't, then it's trivial for bad guys to reach services you don't want them to get to. If there's NAT in-between, it'll take a couple extra specially-crafted packets, but it's pretty trivial to get around.
IPv6 addresses with a firewall? Bad guys can know the IPv6 address of your valuable systems all they want, but if your firewall is blocking incoming connections by default, they can't get a single bit through to the destination.
I don't understand why people's brains turn to jello when talking about IPv6.
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