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June 6 Is World IPv6 Day 2012: This Time For Keeps
An anonymous reader writes "On 8 June 2011 many companies (big and small) enabled IPv6 to their main web sites by published AAAA records; 24 hours later, almost all of them disabled it after the test was done. This year, on June 6th, many of those same companies (Google, Bing, Facebook) will be enabling IPv6 again, but this time there won't be any going back. In addition to content providers, several ISPs are also participating: Comcast, AT&T, XS4ALL, KDDI, and others. CDNs Akamai and Limelight are on board, as well as network equipment manufacturers Cisco and D-Link. Is the chicken-and-egg problem of IPv6 finally, slowly coming to an end?"
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The major operating systems support IPv6 Privacy Extensions. This means they generate and use multiple temporary IPv6 addresses, making them less identifiable than most IPv4 systems.
Also, there's no requirement for IPv6 addresses to be fixed. Just as some ISPs offer dynamic IPv4 addresses now, some ISPs will offer dynamic IPv6 blocks in the future.
Really, *really* what's IPv6 going to do for me now or even in the next 4 years that my IPv4 and 192.168.x.x home network don't do for me?
For starters it will allow you to host a bunch of services on different machines without having to put them all on weird ass ports because you only have a single ip. Peer to peer software will work as intended without nasty hacks to poke holes through the nat.
It essentially stops the internet from becoming broken into a one-way thing, which is one of the side effects of nat.
One obvious one to me is workplace desktops accessable from your iPad or whatever of choice from anywhere. People will understand why all us *nix guys got excited about shells, X and VNC so long ago. If it wasn't for NAT we'd have seen a lot more of it already, but NAT changes it from being trivial to implement to a pain in the arse for more than a handful of people per site. Having unique numbers adressable from anywhere for everybody's desktop machines make it trivial again.
For those that think NAT is some kind of security feature I suggest learning what it actually is instead of throwing three letters around as some sort of incantation. The features actually come from the firewall that just happens to be on the same physical device that gives you NAT and you still need something like that device anyway to get the net into the office with IPv6. The firewall isn't going to go away, just NAT (network address translation).
There are billions of addresses - entire A blocks - locked up in early-adopter organizations that could be made available.
Given that 2^32=4.3 billion, you're wrong. There are a few million addresses locked up in old class A networks. If you bother to look at the consumption rate you'd realise that even if all of these addresses were returned to the pool they would buy a few weeks and then we'd be right back where we started. In short, recovering those addresses is going to be a lot of effort, will not solve the problem and will only postpone it for a very short length of time.
We're years away from ipv4 exhaustion.
IANA ran out of addresses at the start of last year. APNIC also ran out of addresses in the first half of last year. RIPE is going to run out of addresses this summer. We are *not* a significant number of years away from exhaustion. We've got maybe 3 years until there are no more IPv4 addresses left to allocate by any RIR. Reclaiming the legacy blocks to buy a few more weeks doesn't make sense.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
ISPs use 10.x addresses to manage their end user devices. Comcast has already exceeded 16 million users. They already have to kludge together a solution just to manage their devices.
Sorry, but your thinking is outdated and shows a lack of understanding of the true infrastructure of the Internet as a whole. As you have already been told, there are parts of the world today who turn on their devices and don't get a public IPv4 address. Not to mention, this entire article is about key services and websites turning on IPv6 in recognition of the future.
I'm guessing you never lived in a flat Internet. I have. This bullshit we've had to suffer with for a couple decades is actually pretty horrible. When we return to a flat internet, we will be able to video conference from one PC directly to another, anywhere in the world.
It's the future, and in a sense, returning to the past.
If all your computers on the internal network have IPv6 capability then all you need to do is turn it on. They will automatically assign themselves a link local IPv6 address and will be able to talk to each other. After that it is simply a matter of having services that support IPv6. As for name resolution you can either use something like Bonjour (aka mDNS) or have an IPv6 capable router with DHCPv6.
I have been running IPv6 on my home network, using an Apple airport, for the past year and there is really not much setup to do. It would be nice if my ISP supported IPv6, but until then there is 6to4.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
It doesn't need to be 18 million devices - each subnet is already dropped by two to have a gateway and broadcast address. It's also unlikely that every /24 will have all 254 remaining devices on it. At work I have a /22 and only have about 700 IP addresses assigned, but the rest are unusable to anyone outside my group.
This is one of the core problems with IPv4 (which CIDR) skirted around. IPv6 has this problem as well, but having more IP addresses available than number of atoms in the sun (or something like that) means even with a ridiculous amount of waste there's still plenty of addresses to go around. Heck, Hurricane Electric assigned me a /64 IPv6 subnet (2^64 addresses available)
You're also forgetting worldwide organizations that need to do a site-to-site VPN. Each site now needs to coordinate its internal addressing so there's no overlap. Going with IPv6 completely eliminates this need.