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One Year After World IPv6 Launch — Are We There Yet?

Posted by samzenpus on from the state-of-things dept.

darthcamaro writes "One year ago today was the the official 'Launch Day' of IPv6. The idea was that IPv6 would get turned on and stay on at major carriers and website. So where are we now? Only 1.27% of Google traffic comes from IPv6 and barely 12 percent of the Alexa Top 1000 sites are even accessible via IPv6. In general though, the Internet Society is pleased with the progress over the last year. '"The good news is that almost everywhere we look, IPv6 is increasing," Phil Roberts,technology program manager at the Internet Society said. "It seems to be me that it's now at the groundswell stage and it all looks like everything is up and to the right."'"

31 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. But its still difficult by Chrisq · · Score: 4, Informative

    But its still difficult to get an ipv6 home connection in many areas. I can see that for years to come we will have an ipv6 backbone, ipv6 in amjor organisations but most people connected via NAT and an IPv4 isp

    1. Re:But its still difficult by Chrisq · · Score: 3

      your typical home router that is still being bundled by ISPs doesn't support IPv6, it seems only 'high end' or after-market routers tend to do that, probably because the amount of firmware memory in these cheap routers is limited.

      Is the firmware for IPv6 necessarily much larger than that for IPv4? I would have thought that the complexity would be similar. On the one hand you don't need NAT, but on the other you need more complex filtering.

    2. Re:But its still difficult by FireFury03 · · Score: 2

      But its still difficult to get an ipv6 home connection in many areas. I can see that for years to come we will have an ipv6 backbone, ipv6 in amjor organisations but most people connected via NAT and an IPv4 isp

      In the UK at least, it isn't difficult to get an IPv6 connection. However, you need to know you want one when you shop around, as the majority of ISPs still don't do it. If you're an "average user" and therefore know nothing of IPv6 or how the internet works, adoption is at rock bottom because:
      1. You need to be clued up enough to ask an ISP if they offer v6 (the "big 4" don't)
      2. You need to be clued up enough to know when the ISP is lieing
      3. You need to be clued up enough to buy an IPv6 capable router (most still don't, even the ones that are labelled "ipv6 ready", which actually means "no IPv6 support at all but we might issue a firmware upgrade at some point in the future if we can be arsed, which we probably can't)

      Given all of these factors, the chances of the clueless masses getting IPv6 connectivity are extremely slim.

      Things are quite bad with the ISP-side adoption - PlusNet seem to have decided not to roll out IPv6 at all (they pulled the plug on all the v6 trials, announced CGNAT and don't seem to have made any comment about IPv6 since). Virgin Media are going to roll out IPv6 in 2012! (yes, that didn't happen either, despite all their press about it, and like plusnet they've gone very quiet on the subject).

      ISP's telling porkies is a problem too; although that's more on the corporate connections side. I had a customer looking for a new 100Mbps leased line internet connection. We advised them that purchasing anything that doesn't do IPv6 would be silly, so they asked the prospective ISPs. Eclipse said they did IPv6, so they went with them, paid quite a lot up-front to get the line laid, etc. Then it transpired that Eclipse didn't offer v6 at all - Eclipse clarified that their network is IPv6 capable but they don't offer IPv6 connections to customers (i.e. they lied in order to get the contract). 2 years later and there's still no IPv6 on that connection.

      --
      http://blog.nexusuk.org
    3. Re:But its still difficult by __aaltlg1547 · · Score: 2

      Where is the advantage to home users if they use IPv6? If you buy a router that is interoperable with IPv6, what difference does it make to you if the network provides a IPv4 or IPv6 connection to your local network?

    4. Re:But its still difficult by julesh · · Score: 2

      The stuff at the ISP end (routers and the like) have supported IPv6 for years.

      Depends on where you are. Here in the UK, BT wholesale only started upgrading their network to support IPv6 some time last year. That's despite having rolled out a complete replacement "21st century" network only a few years previously -- somehow, they failed to realise that IPv6 support might be a useful feature.

  2. What groundswell? by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Not a single business partner, client, or home user that I've dealt with for the last 3 year has an active IPv6 DNS registration. _None_.

    The critical factor for IPv4 exhaustion was the lack of "/24" addres spaces for businesses and buildings. This has been impressively ameliorated by the use of NAT, which shares numerous intenral and protected IP addresses behind a single or pair of public addresses and should be the _default_ configuraiton in most businesses and organizaitons, simply to reduce the constant external vulnerability scanning of any host directly connected to the Internet.

    The growth of high capacity load balancers for web servers and other network services has also helped tremendously, allowing a wide set of behind the scenes hosts to be serviced by a single exposed device and reducing the IPv4 footprint of these services. Also, people have learned how to economize in the ir IPv4 use: They _do no tneed_ a different IP address for their email server, their FTP server, their web server, their phone server, their chat server, and their IRC server. The services are being easily funneled through a single exposed router or firewall, far more efficiently than before.

    The result has been that the great need for IPv6 simply has not yet occurred, and is unlikely to occur for another 10 years. The foundation of the need for IPv6 is basically that of ubiquitous comuputing: the idea that every single device scattered around the home or around the workplace will have its own IP address for remote communications, and they _should not have_ public IP addresses. Providing public, routable IP addresses puts them at risk of attack at all times: putting them in the unroutable, easily tracked and maintained IPv4 address space handles almost all internal network needs quie effectively and is a signigicant security advantage and eases scanning and tracking of local resources.

    1. Re:What groundswell? by Alioth · · Score: 4, Informative

      That's tremendously short sighted. Should we wait until IPv4 exhaustion is actually causing us lots of problems, or should we get things ready in advance, and make an orderly transition and avoid the problems (arguably the problems started already with all the issues NAT brings when you want to actually establish end to end connections - especially when you discover the guys at the far end happened to use exactly the same RFC1918 netblocks as you did and now someone has to renumber their internal network. We avoided that one by the skin of our teeth - we have a Very Expensive Piece Of Machinery that gets remote support from Siemens who made it. The netblocks they use for their internal networks are the same as ours - it was just blind luck our network addressing didn't end up overlapping, and their network was an adjacent /24 of RFC1918 space to one of our internal networks!)

      --
      Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
    2. Re:What groundswell? by divisionbyzero · · Score: 2

      Not a single business partner, client, or home user that I've dealt with for the last 3 year has an active IPv6 DNS registration. _None_.

      The critical factor for IPv4 exhaustion was the lack of "/24" addres spaces for businesses and buildings. This has been impressively ameliorated by the use of NAT, which shares numerous intenral and protected IP addresses behind a single or pair of public addresses and should be the _default_ configuraiton in most businesses and organizaitons, simply to reduce the constant external vulnerability scanning of any host directly connected to the Internet.

      The growth of high capacity load balancers for web servers and other network services has also helped tremendously, allowing a wide set of behind the scenes hosts to be serviced by a single exposed device and reducing the IPv4 footprint of these services. Also, people have learned how to economize in the ir IPv4 use: They _do no tneed_ a different IP address for their email server, their FTP server, their web server, their phone server, their chat server, and their IRC server. The services are being easily funneled through a single exposed router or firewall, far more efficiently than before.

      The result has been that the great need for IPv6 simply has not yet occurred, and is unlikely to occur for another 10 years. The foundation of the need for IPv6 is basically that of ubiquitous comuputing: the idea that every single device scattered around the home or around the workplace will have its own IP address for remote communications, and they _should not have_ public IP addresses. Providing public, routable IP addresses puts them at risk of attack at all times: putting them in the unroutable, easily tracked and maintained IPv4 address space handles almost all internal network needs quie effectively and is a signigicant security advantage and eases scanning and tracking of local resources.

      Um, yeah, creating a single bottleneck and point of attack to the internet seems like a great idea... It's not that your ideas don't have merit (although you do over state and misstate some of them) but that they only address the needs of a certain set of users. NAT is not an unmitigated good. NAT has significant shortcomings.

    3. Re:What groundswell? by dbIII · · Score: 4, Interesting
      This myth again - you should know better. Nobody is suggesting removing the firewalls that can prevent the constant external vulnerability scanning of any host directly connected to the Internet. They can do it quite well without the utter pain in the neck that is NAT. Yes, NAT saves newbies arses, but so now does the default configuration of even cheap and nasty ADSL routers so taking it away probably will make zero difference.

      They _do no tneed_ a different IP address for their email server, their FTP server, their web server, their phone server, their chat server, and their IRC server.

      Are you seriously making such a suggestion in 2013 when we are knee deep in virtual machines or are you joking? It doesn't take much complexity before you end up wanting to have two separate things running the same service and then you've got to do some arcane mucking about with non-standard ports and port forwarding if you've only got one real IP address. You've also got to be sure that the ports you've chosen are not being blocked at the other end and that can very seriously limit your choices, to the point where people connecting through mobile/cell networks have to be allowed all the way in to an almost unprotected network by VPN since you have run out of ports the telco allows. In such a case NAT becomes the security risk instead of the security solution you are trying to convince the gullible it is.

      The services are being easily funneled through a single exposed router or firewall

      Nobody is suggesting changing that. You still get all that filtering only without the constriction of NAT.

    4. Re:What groundswell? by FireFury03 · · Score: 2

      This has been impressively ameliorated by the use of NAT, which shares numerous intenral and protected IP addresses behind a single or pair of public addresses and should be the _default_ configuraiton in most businesses and organizaitons, simply to reduce the constant external vulnerability scanning of any host directly connected to the Internet.

      A simple stateful firewall will mitegate the dangers of scanners just as well as a NAT. In fact, the extensive address-space in IPv6 actually makes scanning much less effective since the vast majority of the addresses a scanner is going to try aren't even in use.

      The growth of high capacity load balancers for web servers and other network services has also helped tremendously

      And the growth of virtualisation has done the exact opposite.

      The result has been that the great need for IPv6 simply has not yet occurred, and is unlikely to occur for another 10 years.

      The great need on the consumer end has indeed not yet occurred, and probably won't for some time. On the ISP side too, most of the ISPs still have plenty of IPv4 addresses to go around, and can start reclaiming them off internal systems when they start feeling the pinch.

      On the datacentre side, things are a bit different though. The people who are going to feel the pinch are the people operating the servers - that is where running out of IP addresses is going to be a real problem that won't be solvable with NAT (in some cases you'll be able to use an ALG to reduce problems, in other cases you won't).

      On the consumer side, going forward the requirement for IPv6 will be twofold:
      1. Accessing services that are IPv6-only. This *will* happen simply by virtue of the server operators not having enough v4 addresses. We'll probably see "reduced services" on IPv4 with extra features available for IPv6 users. This is especially true where the services are only intended to serve the local area - for example, a recent analysis of Google's data showed that over 10% of users in switzerland have IPv6 access, whilst only 0.22% in the UK do. Given a naive linear extrapolation, we might say that at some point in the future switzerland could have 99% of users with IPv6 access whilst the UK has around 2%. This would mean launching an IPv6-only service aimed at the swiss would be viable (and probably common), but would be inaccessible to most people in the UK. Splitting the internet like that would certainly be a bad thing, and people feeling increasingly cut off from useful services is what will drive both the ISPs and the end users to implement IPv6.
      2. An increasing number of technologies just don't play well with NAT (and there are good reasons for this - this isn't just "short sighted designers of broken protocols"). And those technologies are becoming more popular. There is motivation there for people to eliminate the NAT problem by switching to v6.

      Providing public, routable IP addresses puts them at risk of attack at all times

      No; putting things on the internet with no firewall in front of them puts them at risk of attack. If you think your RFC1918 address is unroutable or that NAT is in any way protecting you, I suggest you go re-educate yourself. The *only* thing NAT does is place a requirement on people to run a stateful firewall (since that's required for NAT to work); running the firewall without NAT would give you exactly the same protection with none of the headaches that NAT causes.

      --
      http://blog.nexusuk.org
    5. Re:What groundswell? by mellon · · Score: 2

      Actually, your belief that NAT is a one-way check valve has caused many security problems, because it is widely shared, despite being completely wrong. Punching holes in NATs is dead easy. If you are relying on your NAT to protect you from attack, you are whistling past the graveyard.

    6. Re:What groundswell? by jrumney · · Score: 2

      This has been impressively ameliorated by the use of NAT, which shares numerous intenral and protected IP addresses behind a single or pair of public addresses and should be the _default_ configuraiton in most businesses and organizaitons, simply to reduce the constant external vulnerability scanning of any host directly connected to the Internet.

      How does having a single IPv4 address for an entire organization reduce the constant vulnerability scanning compared with having 100 IPv6 addresses somewhere within a block of 18 quintillion?

  3. Betteridge's Law of Headlines by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I can't think of a better place to cite it. I mean come on, I don't even have to click through and RTFA. It's right there in the summary that no, we aren't there yet.

  4. IPv6: Who gives a shit? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The Chinese government loves IPv6 because it provides extra granularity for surveillance of their citizens. Fuck that. They can kiss my shiny metal NAT.

  5. Just do it on the router by dbIII · · Score: 2

    If you don't have much stuff on the inside of your firewall it's not really any harder. Actually if you have a lot it's not really harder either since it's still all ports and addresses. The fuckup you've linked to is due to separate teams working on separate firewalls for IPv6 and v4 and is a management issue which only affects the endpoint. If you've got the network under the adult supervision of even a cheap and nasty ADSL IPv6 aware router the filtering should just work without having to care about problems due to internal empire building at Microsoft or Apple. "Block all except ports X,Y,Z" is not that hard to do on any sort of sane interface, and if you have to do it twice due to an unforgivable fault of UI design from office politics it's still not that bad.

  6. Re:I always thought... by Alioth · · Score: 4, Interesting

    IPv6 space won't run out in 20 years. "Well", you say, "It's inefficiently doled out - each user gets a /64 under how it's supposed to work even if their network has just one device!"

    However, the amount of /64 prefixes theoretically available is 2^32 (4 billion) times larger than the address space of the *entire* IPv4 address space. Four billion times larger. Even if only 48 bits of those were usable for whatever reason, that would still be 65536 times larger than the *entire global IPv4 space*. However, there's more than 48 bits usable.

    --
    Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
  7. Increasing by BlindRobin · · Score: 3, Funny

    '"The good news is that almost everywhere we look, IPv6 is increasing,"
    Every time we measure it the mean distance between the Earth and its moon is increasing. Wooooo Hoooooo.

  8. Re:I always thought... by Alioth · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Oops 2^64 times larger than the entire IPv4 address space. That'll teach me to preview....

    Incidentally, there are enough /48s that you can give every man, woman and child on the planet over 4000 /48 allocations each before IANA even has to think about releasing some of the currently undefined address space.

    --
    Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
  9. Re:I always thought... by Dins · · Score: 5, Informative

    But what do we do in 20 years when the IPv6 address space starts to run out? Think I'm kidding? I can remember when people thought they'd never fill a 20mb because it was so huge!

    There are enough IPv6 addresses available to give each and every of the 7+ Billion humans alive today 4.6 x 10^28 addresses

    Or as someone else put it, The earth's surface area is about 510 trillion square meters. If a typical computer has a footprint of about a tenth of a square meter, and we stacked computers 10 billion high blanketing the entire surface of the earth, that would use up one trillionth of the address space.

    I seriously doubt we're in danger of running out in the next millennium or two.

  10. Huh?! by bradgoodman · · Score: 2

    IPv6 has gone "live"? First I've heard of it! :-O

  11. Re:I feel like this is HDTV all over again by fearlezz · · Score: 2

    Publicly addressable does not always mean "reachable". Most routers will probably have a firewall by default to filter incoming connections.

    --
    .sig: No such file or directory
  12. And the root cause is... by stove · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Me: "Hello, big boss! I'd like to go to IPv6 soon!"

    BB: "What will that take?"

    Me: "Oh, probably a couple of months worth of completely dedicated work from your best network folks. If you don't exclusively task them, could take a year."

    BB: "Sounds complex. Is it risky?"

    Me: "Absolutely! We could totally drop off the internet or lose internal connectivity for quite a while if we mess it up."

    BB: "What, exactly, am I getting from this expensive and risky thing?"

    Me: "More or less what you have now. The features it does you don't really care about."

    BB: "So it's expensive and risky and I get nothing out of it."

    Me: "Yep! When can I start?"

    *doorslam*

    --
    Ack!
  13. I suspect it'll take a while. by applematt84 · · Score: 2

    IPv4 is the backbone of nearly all networked systems and applications; to expect EVERYONE to switch over to IPv6 immediately is a bit naive. It's not just the service providers (Quest, Lightbound, AT&T, Verizon, etc) that have to update their WHOLE infrastructure, but applications and operating systems have to natively support IPv6. Many home users cannot afford to upgrade their hardware and software on a whim and won't have a budget to do so for a few more years (mostly due to slow economy and unemployed consumers). I suspect it will take five to 10 years before we start seeing IPv6 make its way into mainstream services. I have a VM with Rackspace and it has a public IPv6 address, but the only service that I've found useful (or even readily available) are the primary Debian mirrors. Having worked as an IT Consultant for small businesses, a SysAdmin in the ISP vector (gaining insight from a vendor aspect) and now as a SysAdmin for a software company (consumer aspect), I have first hand experience at witnessing the readiness from two different ends of the spectrum. The insight I've gained tells me that NO ONE is ready to simply flip a switch; it's going to be a painful, multi-year migration.

  14. Re:I always thought... by complete+loony · · Score: 2
    I prefer this visualisation;

    I wanted to make a cool graphic to show the relative sizes of the IPv4 and IPv6 address spaces. You know, where I’d show the IPv6 address space as a big box and the IPv4 address space as a tiny one. The problem is that the IPv6 address space is so much larger than the IPv4 space that there is no way to show it to scale! To make this diagram to scale, imagine the IPv4 address space is the 1.6-inch square above. In that case, the IPv6 address space would be represented by a square the size of the solar system.

    --
    09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
  15. Hardware limitations by rcoxdav · · Score: 2

    I have been looking at the IP v6 specs for enterprise level hardware, top of the line products from Cisco and the likes. The last I check, a few months ago, the accelerated routing on their top of the line Layer 3+ switch had about 1/2 the aggregate routing for IPv6 as it did IPv4, and older hardware is much worse.

    Until the hardware ASIC's are acellarated as much for IPv6, I think businesses will lag unless they need to use IPv6 due to contract requirements (military and the likes). Why would they pay more for modern hardware that is slower than what they have to adopt IPv6 when IPv4 is satisfying their needs, even if NAT is a gimped solution. It still works, and is pretty fast.

  16. not quite there yet by ei4anb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    $ nslookup -type=AAAA google.com
    Name: google.com
    Address: 2a00:1450:4007:80a::1001

    $ nslookup -type=AAAA slashdot.org
    Name: slashdot.org
    $

  17. Re:I always thought... by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 4, Funny

    Obligatory xkcd.

  18. IPv6? by ArcadeMan · · Score: 5, Funny

    Me and my 255 friends are still on IPv1, you insensitive clod!

    --
    Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
  19. Re:I always thought... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Note that, as with so many sites, the announcement that XKCD is now available over IPv6 is obsolete. At some point they broke something, couldn't figure out how to fix it easily and so they just removed IPv6 from the site.

  20. This is the Year by sexconker · · Score: 2

    Surely, this is the year of the Linux Desktop^W^W the really long and unwieldy IP addresses.

  21. Re:I always thought... by bbn · · Score: 2

    The DoD assignment does seem a bit excessive. But they are the exception not the rule. I also wonder what ARIN can really do when the government of the US tells them to jump. The only thing they can do is to ask "how high?".

    The RIRs always spreads the assignments so there is nothing strange in that. The idea is that if one of those /22 some day would need to be expanded, that is possible because there likely will be no adjacent assignment. This does not mean the space is reserved as such. If the world some day is lacking address space they will start allocating that space to somebody else.

    It is also quite possible that IANA will ask ARIN to use some more of that /13 before ARIN can get more space from IANA.