Slashdot Mirror
UK Organization Set Up To Encourage IPv6 Adoption Closes
New submitter Sesostris III writes "In April 2010, with £20,000 of government money, 6uk was set up to encourage the adoption of the IPv6 protocol in the UK. In December 2012 the board resigned en-masse in protest at official indifference to its work. 'The biggest organization we needed to join 6UK was the government,' the former director, Philip Sheldrake, is quoted as saying. Without government support, 'there's no material incentive for any organization to go for IPv6.' Government interest can be gauged by the fact that no government website currently sat on an IPv6 address. The UK is among the nations that have done the least to move to IPv6, and lags behind other nations in adopting the new protocol. In contrast, governments like that in the U.S. are encouraging adoption of the new protocol by mandating IPv6 compliance in contracts."
I come from an Asian country with mostly shared ip address space. The divitation was never honest. It was first-come-first-serve. Both US and UK have lots of ip addresses to use, and it's wrong. Asia has much larger population too! I don't expect any new change to it, but just stating the facts.
Perhaps it's best when government money isn't wasted on ineptitude. Heck, if more people thought like that in the USA we could eliminate the national debt in three years.
Sadly, most of the idiots out there still equate throwing government shekels at a problem with 'doing something.'
Bloody yanks!
Have gnu, will travel.
I've been using IPv6 for 8 years or so and I really don't care what other people do. The main value for me is that all boxen on the LAN have their own IPv6 IPs so I can ssh to them and scp stuff around. My websites all have IPv6 availability, but nobody uses that, so I see why people don't bother. But I personally think the benefits of having IPv6 on your own stuff makes learning and using it worth while.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
I hate to say it, but I think IPv6 is at the bottom of the priority queue of David Cameron. Anything that drive up the cost should be avoided. This includes the cost of equipment upgrade, and the cost of hiring sensible contractor...
I think the government is a bit too thick to see that mandating IPv6 is a business opportunity for the private sectors...
"Why evacuate now? The hurricane is still 10 miles away."
The UK is currently in the process of developing & deploying a network for government agencies to use called the PSN (public services network). It's sort of a replacement for the GSI. It runs on IPv4, most likely using the DWP address space discussed here.
Pretty much all the UK telcos & several global network manufacturers are involved with the PSN so it's a real missed opportunity that they didn't go with IPv6 for it.
It's not that hard to read a product's description to determine if it has IPv6 support before you buy it.
Exactly, the incentive is icing on the cake, the cake however is switch to IPv6 or get off the internet grid. It does cost business man-hours and carries a potential of downtime, but every business IT team is competent enough to do this right? :)
OK, no more IPv4 addresses for the UK.
(I've been at this too long. I remember when the ARPANET went from 8-bit to 16-bit IMP addresses. I ordered one of the first class B networks in the early 1980s, [128.5.xxx.xxx]. I considered ordering a class C, but there was no charge for a class B, and we thought we might exceed 256 hosts some day.)
They lasted a lot longer than I expected. £20,000 is a really small amount of money so for it to last over two years is impressive.
£20,000 isn't a "really" small amount of money. £20,000 is an absurdly small amount of money. :-O
I notice that the website describes it as "seed funding". Realistically, I'd have thought that £20,000 was very low even for that purpose. That would about cover the pay of a *single* person for *one* year at less than average UK wages. And that wouldn't leave anything over for expenses.
At any rate, I was going to comment something along the lines of...
April 2010 - Labour gives government support to new body 6uk.
May 2010 - Labour kicked out of power, David Cameron and his Etonian chums, er... the Conservatives come in to power. Somewhat indifferent to Labour-supported project. Hmm.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I like to observe the ineptitude of governments around the world in driving IPv6 adoption and compare it with their similarly inept response to Global Warming.
In both cases, a slow but steady change is going to cause inevitable disaster. Foresight and planning is required, and government incentives or lawmaking is basically a must, because in both cases no individual benefits from saving the world, so why spend the money?
The difference is that the IP address shortage is a trivial problem to foresee and solve. It's like a toy version of Global Warming. A mock disaster to test the government's mettle. For example, unlike Global Warming, the IP address shortage is trivially predicted. We knew what month the last block was going to run out something like two years ahead of time! It's simple maths. There's no theory. There's no complex feedback cycles. There's no doubt. We have a fixed, unchangeable amount of something, we're using it faster and faster, there's still a huge number of potential users. It's going to run out.
Similarly, the fix is also trivial compared to Global Warming. Had, say, the EU made a new law that all imported electronics that can be connected to the Internet have mandatory IPv6 support enabled by default, that alone would have been sufficient. That's it. A piece of legislation, requiring some talking and a few pieces of paper. The cost of some electronics might have gone up an average of 50c or somesuch, but the problem would have been solved practically overnight! No manufacturer with a global market could afford to neglect IPv6 support. Common software platforms would have resulted in IPv6 everywhere, for everyone, because of one change in one law in one place.
Instead, what do we get? Half-solutions like NAT. Various groups with no teeth that can "encourage" and "assist" the adoption of IPv6. Piecemeal adoption that means that nobody can go IPv6-only any time soon. Meetings with "industry experts", half of which work for corporations that still have an IPv4-only Internet presence. Conferences. Studies. Wastes of time and money.
I bet 90% of legislators around the world haven't even heard of IPv6, or still don't know what it's all about.
Meanwhile, think about it: in the Western world and increasingly everywhere else, Internet access is now basically an "essential human right", much like clean drinking water, transport, electricity, or health care. I mean seriously, would YOU buy a house in a location where you could get water and electricity, but not the Internet? Exactly.
Now go back to the legislators. This -- now essential -- service is breaking in a trivially predictable way, and they haven't even fucking bothered to do the simplest things to actually fix the problem.
Instead what we're going to see is parasitic rent-seeking: the value of IPv4 addresses will skyrocket. Full, bi-directional Internet access will become a privilege, concentrated into the hands of corporations. Their investments in addresses will appreciate over time, hence predictably they will have a vested interest in maintaining and growing this wealth. Expect to see dirty tactics and corruption used to block IPv6 adoption to prevent a devaluation of IPv4 address "property". This might get bad enough that IPv6 will never be adopted, because there will be significant pressure against it!
Now think about how much worse Global Warming is going to be! It's far off into the future. Decades at least until serious effects are felt anywhere. The science is complex, and difficult for laymen to understand. There are already vested interests to deny it, to the tune of trillions of dollars. The fix -- if any -- wouldn't be 50c per purchase, it might be more like 50%!
Why the fuck do we keep voting these people into power?
Additional; for non-UK readers, at today's exchange rates £20,000 = US $32,078.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love IPv6
I can say from having worked in both private and public sectors that government is predictably not a first adopter of emerging technology. There may be occasional small bursts of innovation here and there, but overnment culture is highly conservative by nature.
You don't get points for taking risk with taxpayers' money. You do, however, get points for showing an abundance of caution which typically leads to endless meetings, signoffs, prototypes that nobody can be bothered to evaluate and reams of documentation that nobody will ever read. And so, taxpayers' money is still wasted, but you see, it's being wasted accountably. And in some sense this is preferable to simply going off the rails because of insufficient oversight.
But you can see why something like IPv6 is not getting fast-tracked by government. Hey, I was the only one among some thirty Network Administrators in my group to have actually done any actual network engineering. Most of my colleagues wouldn't be able to tell you the difference between an IPv4 and an IPv6 address. That's no exaggeration, I assure you. It's not that they're not earnest and hard-working. They're pretty good people. But not given to pushing the envelope, I'd have to say.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
Is there a DD-WRT replacement for my WRT-54GL?
Every once in a while I go looking. I know I can type some arcane commands into Linux, and make the router route IPv6. However, for any of my customers, I need either a GUI or a webpage based tool. The ease of configuration, the ability to set up a wireless bridge, and the configuration options on DNSMasq, keeps me coming back to DD-WRT.
Is there a more modern device with a Linux based kernel, at a reasonable price, that does IPv6 and is set up with a GUI and webpages?
Of course Governments are indifferent, every large organisation resists change. You have to be like a wasp in their pocket, constantly giving them little stings. Blaming the UK Government for lack of IPv6 adoption is the lazy way out.
In contract the Irish IPv6 Task Force, devoid of any Government funding, frequently had Cabinet-level Ministers at its conferences and gave them an absolute grilling. Did you know that Irish procurement regulations require all IT equipment to be dual-stack capable out-of-the-box? That didn't happen as a result of a Board whining about inertia.
comon - all of the U.K. is still on imperial and no plan to switch to metric - come to think of it - they still have a monarchy smack dab in the middle of their democracy - the british dont like change - and i dont think that'll change anytime soon..
2cents from toronto island
jp
comon - all of the U.K. is still on imperial and no plan to switch to metric
Err, no, you're thinking of the U.S, which not only uses arcane units like Fahrenheit in every day life, but actually use imperial figures in science and industry!
While I strongly advocate for IPv6 adoption/support at the ISP, large scale network, and datacenter levels, I believe you're totally correct on your basic premise. Until having native IPv6 connectivity for your LAN devices represents a value add in terms of functionality, IPv4 only capabilities are fine for them. IPv6 and IPv4 can and do comfortably coexist; in fact, this is how the Internet will look for many, many years to come.
Write failed: Broken pipe
Usually, I'm using DD-WRT in a small application. For instance, on a remote computer node that needs to connect to the office wirelessly. A small business or home network (less than 5 computers.) The home network of a business person that needs to connect to the office. etc.
How many of them are general use, as opposed to entire blocks locked up by companies who received them early? I'll bet you that the overwhelming majority of them belong to a handful of companies, which are not ISPs, and so that number for US is really bloated once one looks at the internals.
For a printer, IPv4 could well be adequate, except that computers are not gonna support 2 protocols forever - sooner or later, they'll drop IPv4. Rule of thumb - if a device is external facing, IPv6 ought to be mandatory, but that doesn't reduce the importance of the other things, be it camera resolution, packet switching speed, MAC table capacity and pricing.
comon - all of the U.K. is still on imperial and no plan to switch to metric
I don't know why you state this so confidently when you are almost completely wrong.
Nearly all units in the UK are officially metric, with the official change having taken place many years ago (pre 1980) apart from a few very specific exceptions like road signs (miles/mph) beer (pints) milk (mostly pints, sometimes litres).
Informally, most people use a mishmash of imperial and metric, often switching between the two for convenience.
Some imperial measures have effectively died out completely (e.g. imperial spirit measures like the gill); others will die soon as older folks die (Fahrenheit use); a few are still used as the prime units and show no signs of dying.
This wikipedia article seems to give a very accurate version of the actual current state of UK units:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Kingdom