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Sale of IPv4 Addresses Hindering IPv6 Adoption
hal9000(jr) writes "While IPv6 day was a successful marketing campaign, is anyone really moving to IPv6? On World Launch Day, Arbor Networks noted a peak of only .2% of IPv6 network traffic. It appears that IPv4 addresses are still valuable and are driving hosting acquisitions. Windows 8 will actually prefer IPv6 over IPv4. If you want IPv6, here's what to do about it."
From the article:
"Transitioning to IPv6 will take much, much longer than anyone expects, mostly because there is no clear reason to move to IPv6 anytime soon."
Not everything works with IPv6 yet. Most stuff does, but most organizations still have some stuff that doesn't quite yet. It'd be great if it was all just transparent, but it's now.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
For sale, one barely used 127.0.0.1 ip address. $5000. First come first serve!
That last link doesn't have one spec of advice. It merely describes the problem again. FAIL.
Scan your network topology from anywhere in the world?
See also: stateful firewall. NAT is not a firewall.
As an individual user... why? This should be something that I shouldn't have to worry about and the change should be transparent.
Yes, I think worrying about someone scanning the 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses in your /64 is a valid concern.
On point 1 and 3, that is mainly not "NAT" but "routing".
You can put all your internal stuff in a Private IPv6 address range, then have one router in the network of the ISP that gives you your internet connection. Routing is a basic functionality of both IPv4 and IPv6, NAT is an ugly hack.
Not true. Linux has a NAT implementation for IPv6 already. There's nothing about IPv6 that inherently prevents NAT. It just isn't necessary in nearly as many places.
Probably because in practice, encapsulation is "good enough".
Only if you aren't using NAT. Besides, with service discovery and SLAAC, chances are you won't have to reconfigure anything anyway.
No more so than any other piece of OS-level code.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Each and every one of you reading this is a customer of service providers and equipment vendors. It's time to use your voice and demand an IPv6 migration strategy that you can plan on.
On my walk in to work, there is this beautiful historic stone fence with cobblestone walk way for about a 2 block stretch... and demanding an IPv6 migration strategy I can plan on from it would likely be a better use of my time...
The article does nail the obvious problem on the head... the fact that IPv6 offers no benefit anyone cares about (we've learned to work with nat and even come to love it) except a solution to a problem that hasn't actually hit yet. Thing is this is the easy part. We all _know_ why IPv6 isn't being adopted. The hard part is how do we change that.. and "call up your ISP" is a really silly answer.
1: No NAT, so an intruder can fire up a scan and find your network topology from anywhere in the world. Only way to deal with this is to tunnel to IPV4 then back again, which is a hack.
Maybe you should install FreeBSD then, it's pf has supported IPv6 NAT since 2010 (at least).
2: No support for packet level encryption. It is mentioned, but it is an option that vendors don't need to follow or bother with.
Which is how ipsec works now. In other words, you and your partner obtain compatible implementations and it works.
3: no address independence
See nat66 (or freebsd).
4: Unknown 0-day security holes. Just what we want... to relive the days of pings of death, land, teardrop, smurf, SYN flooding and other attacks.
Now it's true that there are probably buggy implementations, after all the implementations have only been around a decade or so and only 0.2% of the internet has used them. That's what, 10 people?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Businesses will switch when IPv4 addresses get so expensive that there is no other option, and the ugly hack on ugly hack to maximize the use for them gets to a point where it isn't worth doing.
Call me crazy, but NAT, ugly as it is, may still be a useful tool. It isolates the internal fabric, so that regardless of what the external routers are talking to, packets get out. Does it improve security? NAT by itself doesn't, but that is what SPF, a good IDS/IPS, and proper segmenting is for.
IPv6 has been around for a long time now. You can't buy an IPv4 only device pretty much, as almost anything that has Net capabilities has at least a dual stack.
It reminds me of the early-mid 90s where basically every connected computer had a public IP address. It was glorious.
Lots of people talk about IPv6 and how they are "ready" etc. But nobody I've seen gives exact instructions on how I would configure IPv6 for my SOHO setup. What equipment do I need? What configuration do I need to set exactly? And, after I do all of this, can I get to IPv4 places or am I in the 1% as they say?
I guess the easiest way to "support" IPv6 is by name alone...
ipv6.slashdot.org = 216.34.181.48
No IPv6 AAAA record for ipv6.slashdot.org
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Vista and Windows 7 "prefer" IPv6 too... Heck even Windows XP with its crappy IPv6 stack turned on prefers IPv6.
If you read the whole cnet article what has changed is network awareness sending an IPv6 only HTTP request periodically to a Microsoft server using this to judge if IPv6 connectivity is actually available.
In other words the behavior of all windows 8 systems on the planet with regards to IPv6 usage is dictated by the availability by a single Microsoft URL. What could possibly go wrong with that? Is it not also wonderful MS having their system ping out to MS servers by default periodically without anyone knowing or providing a user choice to turn it off not involving registry hacks?
With regards to IPv6 usage I just checked the interface stats on my gateway with an HE tunnel configured. Very interesting...IPv6 Internet traffic is a full 25% of overall Internet usage over the last 145 day period. This predates the June 6th IPv6 go live day by several months.
IPv6 = 32GB
IPv4 = 129GB
ISPs are still dragging their feet lighting up IPv6.. I fear we will have to wait another two years before most large ISPs get their act together on full production deployment.
The most interesting thing seems to be the "long tail" effect reflected in my actual usage.
Given current environment where just a handful of megasites are responsible for the majority of all Internet traffic by volume huge changes in traffic patterns can tip the scales on IPv6 usage rapidly while the countless millions of other sites run by the rest take just as long to switch over as the IPv6 naysayers say it will.
so with a 1ms response time, it'll only take 584,942 years to scan the pathetically small /64 my ISP has given me. Go for it hackers.
Until some new technology that everyone wants comes along and requires IPv6, no one will care about it.
The killer app for IPv6 is maintaining a global network of PEERS. It's what you or others don't have to worry about loosing which makes a transition more appealing than accepting status quo for eternity.
Content extracts value by reaching everyone directly without having to worry about degregation through additional hops/congested CGNs.
Service providers extract value by not having to operate expensive CGN.
Governments and LEA extract value by not having to deal with multiple devices cloaked behind a CGN.
Even partial deployment provides some value to all stakeholders.
It makes no sense for businesses to pay thousands on larbor to reconfigure their entire network for IPv6, and see no beneficial gain.
Nobody is suggesting they do. All they need to do is make their *external* presence accessible via IPv6. They can keep IPv4 internally forever for all anyone cares.
Not to mention a lot of legacy hardware still don't support IPv6, like network printers/copiers, camera systems, security systems, etc.
IPv4 is not going away anytime soon. IPv6 is being added. Noone is taking away your toys. You don't have to go out and buy new stuff.
Even if the global IPv4 network went away IPv4 private networks would still be avaliable. You could still tunnel your IPv4 network over IPv6 with anyone you chose to have access to it.
It also complicates maters worse when you try to network across long distances
Having more globally unique addresses complicates matters? I won't pretend I understand how this complicates matters more than attempting to communicate with two peers both stuck behind CGNs.
An Arbor Networks graph shows less than .2% of the traffic the company measured was IPv6. That's up from a peak of .04%, which occurred on the first Worldwide IPv6 Day in 2011; hardly a blip in a year.
That's a 5-times increase in a year.
If we pretend that we're business math students, then next year we'll see 1% -- then 5% in 2 years and 25% in 3 years -- which would be easily enough to trigger further network effects.
It all breaks down in the 4th year with 125% of traffic, but I'll just take that to mean that the remaining IP4 traffic will be encapsulated in IP6 packets by then.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
We can either spend money and transition to IPv6 or spend more money managing the problem rather than solving it.
Unfortunately IPv6 has a massive chicken and egg problem. We can't really start deploying v6 only stuff until most of the internet has moved to dual stack but there is little financial motivation to move to dual stack while there is virtually no v6 only stuff out there.
So for the foreseeable future the choice for an ISP that is short on addresses (or one that has decided that the market value of their addresses is greater than the "use value") is between deploying some form of ISP level NAT and deploying IPv6 or deploying some form of ISP level NAT and ignoring IPv6.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Mobile devices don't act as hosts.
A company I've worked with has a deployed fleet of over 50,000 embedded commercial vehicle monitoring units that all allow back connections (ie. act as hosts) to request immediate status updates and send messages to the driver. Unfortunately, the majority of carriers don't have IPv6, so we're forced to play all sorts of games to handle dynamic IP address changes. And even more annoyingly, most of the carriers dynamically assign 10.x.x.x addresses to the units, so we have to jump through even more routing hoops to connect with various units.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Perhaps somebody has an (expert) answer here to this question: Why was IPv4 even allowed or implemented in the first place? Did this have to do with computing and/or memory limitations back in the day (1974 to 1981) that nobody every thought could be overcome or even required? I know hindsight is 20/20.
I find it hard to understand how the researchers developing the IP protocol could think that 4.29 billion address would be sufficient given the scale of possible adoption in the future.
First things first: due to all of the reserved address ranges, particularly (what were once called) Class D and E addresses, there are fewer publicly routable internet addresses than ~4.29 billion. The number is ~3.70 billion addresses once you take the various reserved address ranges out.
With that out of the way, the world was a vastly different place back in the 1970's when IPv4 was first defined. The idea of everyone carrying a telephone with them everywhere was science fiction, and the notion that such devices would feature processing functionality that would be able to take advantage of being network-enabled probably wasn't even conceived. The personal computer revolution hadn't happened yet either. As you said, hindsight is 20/20. It's easier to see how we got to now from there than the other way around.
It's also worth keeping in mind that when IPv4 was standardized in 1981 ([RFC 791]), computers were not particularly powerful; a state of the art desktop machine of the era would have little RAM, an 8 bit processor, and would run at less than 5Mhz. A device with an 8 bit processor would require at least 4 LOAD instructions to load an address from memory into registers, plus whatever processing would be required against the address (particularly for routing). Newer 16 bit processors (such as the 8088 and 8086) could do the same sort of processing with only two MOV instructions, but using a 128 bit address like in IPv6 would have required 8 bit systems to do a lot of processing just to handle the addresses -- you'd have to run 16 LOAD instructions just to read every part of the address into registers. This would be very significant processing wise for the time; I'd venture to say you'd need a supercomputer just to act as an IPv6 router back in 1981 (even with the limited number of hosts actually on the network). Memory would be a consideration as well -- 16KB fills up pretty quickly, so squeezing every byte out that you can would have been advantageous.
I'm also not particularly sure that the designers of IPv4 had a public Internet in mind. It wasn't until the early 1990's that the Internet was generally opened to commercial use; prior to that it was limited to government and research use. I don't think in the mid 1970's when Robert E. Kahn and Vint Cerf started work on trying to unify the various networks then in operation, that they considered that people would have a dozen or more Internet enabled devices in their homes (at current count there are 24 IP enabled devices in my home, although I certainly don't claim to be typical). That is, the "purpose" of the protocol at the time wasn't to provide a pervasive network that covered the globe, and the idea of 2^32 hosts was probably completely inconceivable. IPv4 has since invention been shoehorned into uses and purposes that were never conceived at the time of its invention. Indeed, considering how many protocols were being invented, and how quickly new iterations were being introduced, it probably wasn't expected that the world would still be using IPv4 over thirty years after it had been first defined.
IPv4 is getting to be a creaky, old technology with all sort of band-aids applied to it over the years. It is time for replacement -- the research and development community has been saying so for fifteen years or more. Unfortunately, the momentum behind IPv4 is massive, and entrenched inte
Instead of properly standartizing NAT they removed it, with the argument that there are enought adresses now.
Well, if you used Nat for anything else than adress space expansion, like multihoming, topology hiding, ... you are f**d with ipv6.
To understand why this is not true requires us to parse what is meant by "NAT". Not all "NATs" are created equally.
1. NAT where 1 IP is being used by a boatload of hosts. (1:many)
2. NAT where each host has a corrosponding mapped address. (1:1)
With IPv6 only the first case is dead. The second case is still very much possible.. for example via snat target in ip6tables.
From systems perspective there is a big difference between deterministically rewriting IP headers (#2) which is quite trivial vs fancy ALG codes needed to multiplex shit and maintain state charts so that everything appears to work behind a single IP Address. (#1)
Besides there are other ways to accomplish things you cite in IPv6 without using any NAT however those knobs are still there should you need them.
How is it a bad thing?
You firewall it just the same, so the only change in traffic flow is the lack of NAT, and NAT is not security despite what some people will try and claim.
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */