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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
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.
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