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One Year After World IPv6 Launch — Are We There Yet?
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."'"
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.
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.
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!
Me and my 255 friends are still on IPv1, you insensitive clod!
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