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IPv6-Only Is Becoming Viable
An anonymous reader writes "With the success of world
IPv6 day in 2011, there is a lot of speculation
about IPv6 in 2012. But simply turning on IPv6 does not
make the problems of IPv4
exhaustion go away. It is only when services are usable
with IPv6-only that the internet can clip the ties to the IPv4 boat
anchor. That said, FreeBSD, Windows,
and Android
are working on IPv6-only capabilities. There are multiple
accounts of IPv6-only
network
deployments. From those, we we now know that
IPv6-only is viable in mobile, where over 80% (of
a sampling of the top 200 apps) work well with
IPv6-only. Mobile especially needs IPv6, since their are only
4 billion IPv4 address and approaching 50
billion mobile devices in the next 8 years. Ironically,
the Android test data shows that the apps most likely to fail are
peer-to-peer, like Skype.
Traversing NAT and relying on broken IPv4 is built into their method
of operating. P2P communications was supposed to be one of the
key improvements in IPv6."
Is it dual stack? FreeBSD developers have actually set it up in recent releases so you can compile with ONLY IPV6 (INET6), IPV4 (INET), or SCTP only. Then they came up with a bunch of tests to see how IPV6 only would work on the Internet and then they checked for compliance. It's rather amazing what they've accomplished so far and most of it within days of last year's world IPV6 day.
I expect a recent linux kernel to do well with IPV6. I'm not questioning that. Just wondered if it's still dual stack dependent and how much testing has happened with userland bits. Since it's a distro problem more than just the kernel. In FreeBSD, they have to make sure all the userland parts work too. The biggest missing piece is DHCPv6 in FreeBSD that I know of.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
The problem under discussion is a shortage of IPv4 addresses, not a shortage of domain names. A device needs an IP address to send and receive anything via TCP/IP, as on the Internet. Domain names are an optional convenience.
Given the fantastic growth in the number of Internet-enabled mobile devices, and that the infrastructure for such devices is still in rapid development, it makes sense that this is where you'd see IPv6 completely implemented first.
I get to test software on the Internet. In the grand scheme of things there are few servers out there talking IPv6 at the moment. There are relatively few Web servers talking IPv6, and there are relatively few DNS servers talking IPv6. If I configure a caching DNS server to be IPv6 only I can only talk to a few things today. Even if the DNS server is configured to talk IPv4 but I query for names on IPv6 (AAAA records) there are few to find. Many DNS servers don't even handle AAAA requests properly. A lot of infrastructure is yet to be deployed to make IPv6-only a viable way to access the Internet.
Those millions of mobile devices talking IPv6 today can only do that going through NAT64 gateways (read that as NAT 6 - 4, as in allowing IPv6 to access IPv4). Yes, having the devices that can talk IPv6 is part of the solution. Now the servers need to be there.
I suppose you could call the large number of IPv6 devices the "chicken". Now the chicken needs to lay the egg.
One thing that is not mentionned here is that the 4G specs actually mandate IPv6 and deprecate IPv4 support - something that should really push IPv6 adoption forward, especially with providers that offer both cell phone and traditionnal internet connectivity...
Good thing too. Getting those suckers in would have been difficult otherwise. With IPs running out in Europe this year, we are really starting to feel the pressure now...
Semantics is the gravity of abstraction
Is it now? How hard is it to remove the IPv4 assignments from your network interfaces and lo? Oh, that was pretty easy. Took seconds.
I'm happy for all the BSD guys who are doing the IPv6-only dance of joy but it's a political move rather than a useful one to remove the IPv4 stack from the kernel on anything but extremely limited devices. You don't actually gain anything by removing it on a desktop, laptop, server, or most consumer embedded devices.
At this point, it's a lot like buying an electric car when your power comes from a coal plant. It may make you feel better about yourself but nobody actually gains anything.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
You seem to be confused. Linux is a kernel, no more no less. A Linux distro is a Linux kernel with a 3rd party userland. The kernel itself really has very little to do with what protocols are ultimately offered to the userland as those all have the option of loading kernel modules if need be.
Honestly, it's not that complicated. Those userland programs are why Linux can't yet be IPv6 only yet. I believe that most of them can handle it, but there are still IPv4 only utilties left.
Because Ping is almost 30 years old and changing it that substantially would break functionality in a huge number of OSes. Not to mention the fact that as long as IPv4 is in common use it's going to be damn confusing figuring out when it's safe to use ping in IPv4 versus IPv6.
You have things totally backwards. The operating system figures out whether a host should be reached via ipv6 vs ipv4 based on your systems IPv6 connectivity and DNS. You can't know it in advance.
If I browse to www.slashdot.org and it has an AAAA record and my computer has IPv6 I get to slashdot via IPv6. Having ping being the only utility left on the fricking operating system that does not work this way is more broken than any nastalga.
Traceroute is 30 years old too and it works just fine with both protocols enabled at the same time.
Total nonsense. traceroute
internode already offer native IPv6, and have for a number of years now. In Australia...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
If I browse to www.slashdot.org and it has an AAAA record and my computer has IPv6 I get to slashdot via IPv6. Having ping being the only utility left on the fricking operating system that does not work this way is more broken than any nastalga.
Except that TCP hasn't changed. TCP still rides inside IP packets (v4 or v6), and thus apps based off TCP should work this way[0].
Ping doesn't run off TCP, it runs off ICMP, and there are two different versions of this protocol: one for IPv4 and one for IPv6. ICMPv4 and ICMPv6 are nearly identical, but not quite (different mechanisms for checksum calculation, different error message enumeration). This protocol is ICMPv6.
Now that isn't to say that the developers of the current ping tools couldn't create some uber-ping tool that can handle both ICMPv4 and ICMPv6 packets. The formats are indeed similar -- most of the difference is in how checksums are calculated based on the packet (pseudo)headers and in the error message identifiers. For whatever reason, they decided to have independent versions per protocol.
The point being, it's not correct to compare ping to a web browser. Your web browser will use the same TCP packets regardless of if they're encapsulated within IPv4 or IPv6 packets. The DNS resolving is identical as well. Ping however has to use a different protocol depending on the version of IP being used, which changes the game slightly. And for whatever reasons, the developers who maintain these tools decided by-and-large to leave ping for IPv4 alone, and release a separate version for IPv6. You can certainly question the wisdom of that decision, but it certainly isn't as easy as the case of a web browser.
Yaz
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[0] - Of course, "should" doesn't mean "will". The biggest problem often being apps that have only ever reserved 32 bits for storing resolved addresses, or who don't know how to parse IPv6 formatted addresses entered directly.
Seriously? Ping is a "serious piece of network diagnostic toolkit"?
Please allow me to rephrase: "Ping is the most basic part of a network diagnostic toolkit. If your grandmother learns one thing about IP networking and nothing else, it will be ping."
Kid-proof tablet..
What the IPv6-people just refuse to understand is that there is zero benefit for running IPv6 now.
What the IPv6 naysayers just refuse to understand is that we have no choice. NAT works great for you because you have at least one public IPv4 address that you control.
The problem with this thinking is there are real consequences to running out of IPv4 addresses.
When you push NAT out to the carrier and that IP address is serving hundreds of customers then what? If you think setting up DNS or using torrent software or skype that does not bounce content through strangers systems was hard just wait till you want to publish anything through said carrier NAT.
I think most IPv6 people are quite happy to move on without you. Comcast is deploying to millions. All major ISPs have active trials. Asia is going crazy you should see all the crap being pushed through softwires at the moment... IPv6 only content coming soon to a theatre near you...like it or not it is happening with or without you.
For now. But things like navigators could certainly use them, for example to get weather and traffick information or download maps when you're going to a new area. And what happens when self-driving cars move out of prototype stage - wouldn't it be nice to be able to send instructions remotely?
Contrary to the popular misconception, saying "period" does not actually prove anything, nor does saying "end of story" mean that the world will actually stop changing.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.