Slashdot Mirror
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?"
For those of you who don't know anything about IPv6, here's the Wikipedia page for it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6/
Happy reading!
Especially at home. Who's with me?
Pretty much everyone.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I've been waiting a long time for this.
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1487194&cid=30529330
Just disable javascript
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.
Me too! Instead, I did it on a random day where I was bored, about 4 years ago. Took about 2 hours and I haven't thought about it since.
Oh, did you mean "I'm not going to use IPv6"?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I hope that some of the network/systems analysis companies out there are taking accurate notes about the state of what's accessible via IPv6 and IPv4. I think we'll see an interesting sort of "avalanche" graph when we reach the tipping point. Or not -- perhaps there will be enough dual-stack that we'll just have a slow deathmarch of sites available by IPv4, with a few less year after year?
But to step back and wax lyrical about the whole problem, the reason that IPv6 hasn't taken hold yet is because it just hasn't gotten enough of an IPv6-only install base clamouring for support on their popular websites.
Having major websites and hardware manufacturers on board is an important piece of the puzzle, but it's nothing compared to money. Get enough people inconvenienced that they will take their eyes and their money elsewere (directly, or through advertising revenue on sites, etc...), and every site that cares about their viewership will hop on the IPv6 train. Of course, this means that Bob's website that features his personal Banana Sticker Collection might not get IPv6 support until his ISP drags him to an IPv6 address, kicking and screaming all the way.
That whole idea a year or two ago about putting out a big zip file of porn, but only available on IPv6, was kind of a hoot. AFAIK it never came to fruition, but I liked the creative thinking there. Has anyone else had any crazy good (or just crazy) suggestions about how to spur IPv6 adoption?
coding is life
It would be more constructive to use whatever energy needed to pressure legacy IPv4 holders to give-up their space to start planning a move to v6 or at least a dual-stack architecture. This is like people complaining there's still momentum left in the cassette tape when CDs have been around for years. Postponing the inevitable doesn't stop the inevitable from happening.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
Hell Yes!
If enough of us do it, those profiteering assholes at Big Internet$ will be forced to deal with us on our terms and open up all that extra space they're holding out on.
What extra space you say? Ever heard of a number greater than 255?
It's a conspiracy I tell you. They're all in it! Google, Micro$oft, IBM, The Queen, the Vatican, the Getty's, the Rothchild's and Colonel Sanders before he went tits up! They're trying to keep our eyes shut to the truth!
Wake up! We have all the IPv4 addresses we need! Why at home all my machiens in the 478.921.357.* range!
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.
First Duke Nukem Forever in 2011, and now this in 2012? What's up for 2013, Hurd??
I see you missed the Freemasons. Your oversight is why they will continue to screw you over.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Did you know that for the past three year Google has actually published AAAA RRs for its online properties? However, the catch is that they won't serve you those as a response unless your /32 is on the list of vetted ISPs.
Even if you query one of their public IPv6 resolvers ( e.g. 2001:4860:4860::8888 ) you'll not see a AAAA for YouTube or Google+ unless you're on the list.
To pass the vetting an ISP has to demonstrate various technical aspects such as redundant, othogonally-routed global routes to Google's servers. For small ISPs such as mine, who have worked to implement native IPv6 connectivity, this is simply a step too far. So a proportion of the IPv6-connected world has to fall-back to v4 to talk to Google.
Read more about the frustrating policy here: Google over IPv6.
Sure, it *sounds* easy, but it's not.
My wireless router does not support IPV6, and it wasn't created in the stone age, a Linksys WRT54G2. (3ish years old) Sure, it was cheap, but it's also hard to justify spending more to replace reliably working equipment. A "nice" router that supports IPV6 with grace will probably cost $50 or more.
My Comcast modem is my own. I bought it for $20 because I didn't want to pay $7/month for the DOCSIS 3.0 modem. But because it's a DOCSIS 2.0 Modem, IPV6 support is limited. A DOCSIS 3.0 modem that supports IPV6 better costs around $100.
So the real cost for me of IPV6 is already floating somewhere between $150 to $200, about what I pay for 2 YEARS of Netflix. That is only for getting the ability to have an IPV6 address to my home. That's without setting up the Xbox, Wii, or PS3 with IPV6. (Can you do it?) Let alone the Mac, the several PC laptops, my Linux workstation, or the MagicJack Plus that I use for my home phone "land line".
What about our smart phones? Will Android 2.3.x use IPV6? 'what about Android 2.2 on my wife's phone, or 2.1? What about the $90 android tablet my wife bought at Rite aid? For all of these, I have no idea, which means likely not.
What about the (awesome!) SIP app I use on my smartphone to call into the corporate phone server from my home network? Will it work with low latency over IPV6 to my corporate SIP server running IPV4, with traffic shaping that works as well as it does now with my cheap IPV4 modem? Somehow, I have my doubts...
Switching to IPV6 is easy, as long as you don't actually do it for real. As soon as you start trying to live it, use it everyday, make it part of your everyday life, well, things get complicated quickly. This is going to take a while to sort out, you know?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
There are no IPv6-ONLY services
This is incorrect. There are a number of IPv6-only services, especially in the asian markets, where IPv6 has been available to clients for a goodly number of years.
The alternative to IPv6 to work around the problem with NAT.
This isn't an alternative. NAT expands tha number of clients that can use the internet, but is largely useless on the server side. APNIC has run out of addresses, RIPE is going to run out this summer, at some point its going to become impossible for datacentres to get new IPv4 addresses, and at that point anyone runing servers is going to start having problems. They will start by shoving services behind proxy servers, etc. to reduce the number of IPv4 addresses that need to be exposed, but this only goes so far. Some services can't be placed behind proxies, running services on non-standard ports is almost as problematic as running them on IPv6 (a large proportion of customers are behind restrictive firewalls). At some point, IPv4-only clients are going to become second class citizens - they will be able to access the internet, but some services will be unavailable to them. Yes, it will take many years, but it will slowly happen.
Oh, and on a private network, which is behind a NAT anyway, there is even less reason for IPv6 - Yes, I do have enough 10.0.0.0 addresses for my home network.
For a *home network* you're correct. For the generic case of a *private network* you're wrong. I'm informed that Virgin Media are actually very interested in rolling out IPv6 because there aren't enough RFC1918 addresses for device management. I'm sure that they *could* bodge their network to make it work with the restricted number of addresses, but its probably easier in the long run to just bite the bullet and roll out IPv6 (and on a truely private network this is easier because everything is under your control).
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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
So the real cost for me of IPV6 is already floating somewhere between $150 to $200
But in 10 years' time, after the magic smoke has escaped from all that hardware, you'll have upgraded to kit that supports IPv6.
People saying "I'm never going to upgrade to IPv6" come across the same as people saying "I'm never going to upgrade from IE6" - in short, idiots. And in a few years time, like IE6 users now, they will probably be idiots who can't use some big services.
Let alone the Mac, the several PC laptops, my Linux workstation
IPv6 in OS X, Linux and any Windows newer than XP pretty much Just Works with no configuration needed. You'd have to go out of your way to disable it.
MagicJack Plus that I use for my home phone "land line".
There will be legacy hardware that doesn't supprt IPv6 for some time, but in this restricted case is it a problem? I presume the MagicJack is basically an FXSSIP gateway, so whether you need IPv6 here depends on whether the SIP gateway it is connecting to has a v4 address. No one is saying you need to remove IPv4 from your network entirely.
What about our smart phones? Will Android 2.3.x use IPV6? 'what about Android 2.2 on my wife's phone, or 2.1? What about the $90 android tablet my wife bought at Rite aid? For all of these, I have no idea, which means likely not.
Android has supported IPv6 since Android 2.0.
What about the (awesome!) SIP app I use on my smartphone to call into the corporate phone server from my home network? Will it work with low latency over IPV6 to my corporate SIP server running IPV4
No, an IPv6-only device isn't going to be able to talk to an IPv4-only server (unless it uses a NAT64 gateway to do so). IPv4 is not going to suddenly disappear, dual-stacked clients are the norm, and as IPv4 addresses become harder to get hold of, ISPs will use carrier grade NAT to provision IPv4 to their clients. Talking to IPv4-only servers will still happen over IPv4.
Address exhaustion is largely a problem for servers, where NAT isn't really feasible. For many years to come, clients will have (NATted) IPv4 and (unNATted) IPv6 concurrently. Which is why it makes no sense when ISPs say "we don't need IPv6 because *we* have plenty of spare IPv4 addresses" - it doesn't matter if you have a big stack of spare IPv4 addresses if the people who operate the servers that your customers connect to don't.
What *should* have happened, is the telecoms regulators should have mandated that ISPs implement IPv6 support and sell IPv6 capable routers a good number of years ago since it was clear they were going to wait until crunch-time before bothering to do so without regulatory pressure. If that had happened, most end users would already have IPv6 capable internet connections and hardware.
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.
Exactly. Granted, on my own internal network I might not bother with setting up IPV6, and instead do the equivalent of a NAT for my internal servers to give them an IPV4 address and only have my border router deal with IPV6.
Why? One of the really big benefits of IPv6 is the lack of address translation. This means stuff like peer to peer services (e.g. VoIP) can work without having to use unreliable nat traversal technologies such as STUN (peer to peer systems have to exchange addressing information. If there is no NAT then they just look at the local machine's address. If there is NAT then they have to use various techniques to probe the NAT and then make an educated guess as to what IP address and port their traffic will be translated to). If you try to perform some non-standard NAT at the border, you're going to reintroduce a lot of problems that IPv6 was built to avoid, and you also introduce an overhead of having to manage the NAT.
Eventually -- which probably means "the next version of Windows" given how IT seems to work these days -- IPV6 will be phased in even internally.
Why wait for the next version of Windows? Windows newer than XP has supported IPv6 out of the box (XP just involves a driver install), Linux has supported v6 out of the box for over 10 years, OS X supports it out of the box, Android supports it out of the box, lots of Apple hardware Just Works with v6, etc. Just setting the router to send RAs should see most of the clients on an average network automatically start to use v6, no need to upgrade the OS or reconfigure it.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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.