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Contiki 2.6: IPv6 For Everything, Everywhere
An anonymous reader writes "The Contiki project just released version 2.6 of its open source operating system for the Internet of Things, used to track city sound pollution, control street lights, read power meters, monitor radiation, among other things. The technology behind it? A really tiny IPv6 stack that fits in a few kilobytes of memory, allowing everything, everywhere to have an IPv6 address."
Is it bad that the first thing I thought of when I read the "your-footstool-is-broadcasting-an-IP-address dept" was that IPv6 doesn't support broadcast?
Back in 2008, the same project was quoting "a code size of 11 kilobytes and a dynamic memory usage of less than 2 kilobytes" http://tech.slashdot.org/story/08/10/15/1839209/worlds-smallest-ipv6-stack-by-cisco-atmel-sics
Now we have "fits in a few kilobytes of memory" ...
So this seems to be a nice incremental improvement?
Any experts on embedded systems able to give insight into the importance of (lets say) 16kB in the old version versus (lets again say) 4-6kB including dynamic stack ??
I see, this is about providing an embedded platform for things that want to get on some local Internet drop. It isn't really about creating an Internet from things.
I.e., "the Internet of things" is the same damn Internet as "the Internet of people posting captioned cat pictures to icanhascheezburger.com" - it's not a special Internet for "things", it's just putting a lot more things on the plain old Internet, such as thermostats and smart cards and refrigerators and washing machines and strain gauges and....
The tech which we're really talking about here is 6LoWPAN, which is IPV6 for these low-power wireless sensor networks. It's a pretty simple software solution, but it's built on some cool stuff. I'm partial to TinyOS over Contiki, but I guess that's just my exposure to it (plus it uses the superb nesC language).
Precisely - just do a multicast transmission to address ff02::fb to get to all DNS servers on the local link, or to ff02::1:3 for all DHCP6 servers on the local link. In fact, that's how router advertizements would work.
Should have gone with at least four times as big.
But that's enough about your penis, just think yourself lucky that the enlarger worked at all.
Yes you'd like to think there would firewalls installed on things like traffic lights. However as the fairly recent SCADA attacks demonstrate ...
Rain is probably a bigger problem. Not sure about in the states but the topical storms we get over here in monsoon season ruin all signals.
Once IPv6 becomes common, administrators of Wikimedia sites and other sites based on user contributions will start blocking sockpuppets by their /64, /56, or even /48, depending on what home ISPs hand out at various service levels.
Most current IPv6 networking gear, from what I understand, recognize boundaries @ the half-way mark. So if someone is using such a router, which is pre-configured to accept Global prefixes that ultimately go to that spot, there's no way they can use part of the interface ID for other purposes. It'd be similar to how in IPv4, there is older equipment that don't recognize CIDR. So if on a global basis, the demarcation boundaries do change, it would be a good idea to rev up the revision# in the IP header, even though the other fields may remain unchanged. So that equipment universally doesn't get confused b/w /64 links, and say /80 links.