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Why the Journey To IPv6 Is Still the Road Less Traveled

alphadogg writes The writing's on the wall about the short supply of IPv4 addresses, and IPv6 has been around since 1999. Then why does the new protocol still make up just a fraction of the Internet? Though IPv6 is finished technology that works, rolling it out may be either a simple process or a complicated and risky one, depending on what role you play on the Internet. And the rewards for doing so aren't always obvious. For one thing, making your site or service available via IPv6 only helps the relatively small number of users who are already set up with the protocol, creating a nagging chicken-and-egg problem.

390 comments

  1. I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    My border router is more than IPv6 ready. It's already passing out IPv6 addresses internally to the few devices which are capable of them. Not that it matters to me though, my ISP doesn't support IPv6 so what's the point? Yea, I can touch my router from my laptop over IPv6, but what does that get me?

    Who is my ISP? Why Verizon FIOS of course. Until they decide to support IPv6 and give out addresses to people like me who are ready to use it, there won't be any mass adoption of IPv6 by their customers.

    Are their any ISP's out there which support residential IPv6?

    1. Re:I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by JohnVanVliet · · Score: 0

      Comcast is almost as bad
      they say they support ipv6
      but in reality .......... NO
      i get buffer overflows and major DNS issues on RHEL and SUSE

      --
      "I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
    2. Re:I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Contact the guys here about it. I helped them troubleshoot some IPv6 issues in my area and they are actually very very eager to get it right.

      In fact, much as I dislike Comcast in general, they're IPv6 rollout has been pretty well handled.

    3. Re: I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by Dr.+Manhattan · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Got ATT Uverse, and Youtube videos were a choppy, stuttering mess. Googled a bit, and sure enough, disabling IPv6 in the router cleared up the problems.

      --
      PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
    4. Re: I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Exactly. Existing isps have all the ipv4. Supply and demand, they can charge more if there is a shortage. And with dual stack ipv4 support required there is only risk. I am ipv6 enabled at home, but isp is not. I run some forums on the net. They are ipv6 enabled and looking at the logs clients are nearly entirely ipv4 but lots of notification emails go ipv6 to gmail every day with no problems. There needs to be some incentive for the isps to bring ipv6 clients online.

    5. Re: I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by PRMan · · Score: 1

      I had the same thing on Time Warner. I thought it was part of their dispute, but disabling IPv6 did the trick. Seems to work now, though.

      --
      Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
    6. Re:I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Comcast' residential IPv6 seems to be working very well, in my area... as long as you have a modem they say will support IPv6 and a home router that really knows how to handle/distribute it.

      I used to have an ostensibly IPv6-capable cable modem, but it wasn't on their approved/tested list... and I wasn't getting IPv6 addresses. I replaced it with an Arris 6121, and suddenly all my devices had addresses.

    7. Re: I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by grim4593 · · Score: 1

      I had the same problem with my Uverse service - Every time I have enabled IPV6 (or they replace our gateway) I get stuttering videos and unresponsive webpages.

    8. Re:I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by ralphsiegler · · Score: 1

      Comcast IPV6 working fine for me at home with Linux Mint 17.1 and OpenBSD 5.6

    9. Re:I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by itzly · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Are their any ISP's out there which support residential IPv6?

      My ISP (in Europe) has supported IPv6 for a few years now. A while ago I got a firmware update for my ADSL modem, and since then I've been automatically connected with an IPv6 address, as well as an IPv4 address. I didn't have to do anything on my side, and it just works. It's surprising that not more ISPs have taken the same route.

    10. Re: I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 1

      So we may end using Internet from a NATed ISP, itself NATed... and we may run out of private IPs as well!

      --
      Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
    11. Re: I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by oobayly · · Score: 1

      I'm pretty sure that all the people extolling the virtues of NAT have never had to deal with Carrier-Grade NAT.

    12. Re: I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 1

      How good is that?

      --
      Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
    13. Re: I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      T-mobile already ran out of private IP addresses. Which is why internally they run IPv6 everywhere, and do 6to4 to keep it compatible for the customers.

    14. Re: I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You mean "how bad is that".

      Imagine that your LAN has 192.168.1.*. This is then NAT'ed in your router to 192.168.235.7, which is NAT'ed on the upstream router to 192.168.35.243, which then gets NAT'ed at the ISP border router to 12.34.56.78.

      That's approximately how bad it is.

    15. Re:I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by gbjbaanb · · Score: 1

      Andrews and Arnold will give you IPv6... but you forgot to say which country you are in, so maybe this information is useless to you! (they're in the UK BTW)

      But we're making progress, a few years ago the routers weren't IPv6 compatible and everyone said why should they bother if there wasn't any ISP support, and the ISPs wouldn't add IPv6 support as the routers weren't compatible.

      Now this chick-and-egg situation is broken, they have no excuses.

    16. Re:I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      (in Europe)

      That's because you're in the magical fucking land of Europe where rainbows and unicorns live.

      I swear, how much bullshit can you come up with?

    17. Re: I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's not really IPv6, per se, It's more likely that there's infrastructure problems with the whole thing. Turning off IPv6 just simply end-ran around the problems which were more that there's not quite enough infrastructure in place in IPv6 mode. You're describing part of the problems this whole thing discusses.

    18. Re: I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by Mariner28 · · Score: 1

      I'd venture a guess that AT&T Uverse either hasn't IPv6-enabled their CDN, or they haven't executed any contracts with their CDN suppliers which demand IPv6 support. IOW - Stuttering videos aren't caused by IPv6, it's probably because AT&T may not yet allow Netflix or Google/Youtube to install 6-enabled caching servers in AT&T's network. I wonder how their own video streaming sources work over IPv6? I can't test that theory because right now my ISP is Verizon FIOS...

      --
      "A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
    19. Re: I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by Bacon+Bits · · Score: 1

      Pfft. Then you just add another layer of NAT! You can make 4 million two host networks with 10,0.0.0/24. Then you can put 4 million two host networks on each of those networks, too. Now you've got support for 17 trillion end user devices!

      Much like turtles, the Internet could be IPv4 NAT all the way down....

      Honestly, without regulation or legislation, I suspect that's how we'll end up.

      --
      The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
    20. Re:I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by Ksevio · · Score: 1

      I have IPv6 from Comcast that works pretty well. Used to have FiOS, but no IPv6 there.

    21. Re:I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by jbburks · · Score: 2

      Gee. Europe started with that GSM thingy. They were doing cellular much better than the US with TDMA and CDMA. Universal handsets. No subsidy lock. Maybe they have limited resources so they use them better.

    22. Re:I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by Streetlight · · Score: 1

      Comcast subscriber here, IPv6 works fine and I think Comcast has rolled out IPv6 throughout it's footprint. One problem some folks, including me, have had with Comcast is setting up a router to recognize IPv6. One may need to log in to a router's home page and enable IPv6 on its IPv6 page. Might take a firmware update and information on the router's web site.

      --
      In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
    23. Re:I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by Coren22 · · Score: 1

      http://www.verizon.com/support...

      FiOS is working on it. Some of their routers don't support it yet, and as they use funky routers, it isn't exactly like you can go to Best Buy and get a new one.

      --
      APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
    24. Re:I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      they're IPv6 rollout

      "their".

    25. Re:I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by mtippett · · Score: 1

      AT&T does - phone support has their playbook, which doesn't go very far. Their online customer support actually was very helpful.

      My story getting IPV6 on AT&T - http://use-cases.org/2015/01/1...

    26. Re:I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My previous ISP (also in Europe) has been promising IPv6 for the last 5 years, but delayed IPv6 rollout year after year. Since UPC has recently been bought by Ziggo, IPv6 is not to be expected for the next 5 years as well. My current ISP (again, in Europe) is the only ISP that can give me more than 2MBit at my location, and I believe they haven't even heard of IPv6 yet.

      Luckily, I got myself a free IPv6 tunnel.

    27. Re:I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I have it on Time Warner. Took me quite some time to figure it out though.

      One issue was the "IPv4 Only" mode that my cable modem status page shows. For the longest time I thought this meant that there was no IPv6 available, and so I didn't look for it. In reality it just means that the modem configures itself over IPv4, and has nothing at all to do with the availability of IPv6.

      The other issue was that, in setting up a Hurricane Electric tunnel, Linux had become unable to operate with native IPv6. For some dumbass reason, when Linux is set up to route IPv6 packets, it ignores IPv6 router advertisements, and I had set it up to route packets when using the tunnel.

      As such, it wasn't until one day when running tcpdump on my network interface that I discovered I had IPv6 when I saw some IPv6 ARP packets.

      So maybe you have IPv6. Try looking harder.

    28. Re:I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Here in Canada: http://teksavvy.com/ipv6

    29. Re: I'm ready....My ISP isn't. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You don't run out of private IP addresses. I think you meant public addresses.

  2. The answer has been clear by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Why are we revisiting? Ipv6 simply has too much overhead.

    1. Re:The answer has been clear by pe1rxq · · Score: 2

      Which overhead do you mean exactly?
      The increased address size is not really a problem, route aggregation actually makes routing ipv6 easier than ipv4.
      Packet size increases a bit (20 bytes) but calling that 'too much' is simply unfair.

      --
      Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
    2. Re:The answer has been clear by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Capex costs.

    3. Re:The answer has been clear by jonwil · · Score: 1

      Getting big-iron carrier/backbone grade routers and other kit that can do IPv6 just as fast as the current gear does IPv4 is expensive.

    4. Re: The answer has been clear by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      A new alternative that's been emerging is www.enhancedip.org. It's an extension to NAT that allows for 64-bit addresses.

    5. Re:The answer has been clear by jaredmauch · · Score: 2

      [citation needed] for your assertion. Been deploying IPv6 at a major ISP/carrier for 13 years now. If you bought the wrong stuff or didn't ask for IPv6, you may be right but the proper gear is out there and doesn't cost any more. I can even get IPv6 over my VPN connection.

      The issue is one of mentality and training. Above someone says "turned off IPv6, problem went away". That's certainly one way to say "I blame IPv6". They didn't troubleshoot the problem. Perhaps it's a DNS problem or something else they haven't properly diagnosed. Without actually understanding how the protocols work, one is doomed to failure and blame.

      When you look at the major players who have deployed IPv6, including Netflix, Google, Yahoo to name but a few and compare that with the statistics on the cellular side... VZ Wireless sees over 60% IPv6 traffic. With the coming "great mobile demotion" tomorrow, it's more likely those devices if they come over 3GPP/LTE will perhaps visit you via IPv6 than via IPv4 if you properly enable your front door. If you are a CDN customer, it's a button to turn on IPv6. Cloudflare has it on by default, Akamai you have to ask, same for Limelight.

      The edge protocols have only really reached maturity in the past 2 years to deliver a connection to the edge or your home. CPE lifetime is somewhere in the 3-7 year range, we are still another generation away from having the home properly IPv6 enabled, but it's more often just going to be there and "just work". There are a lot of IT workers who haven't invested enough to learn about the subtle differences in V6, such as NDP vs ARP, etc and will block all ICMPv6 not understanding they are blocking NDP so can't see a response to their NS. This too will pass much in the same way as those who only knew appletalk or IPX routing.

    6. Re:The answer has been clear by Cramer · · Score: 1

      route aggregation

      Not the way most idiot admins want to use it. "Can I announce "my" /56 to other ISPs?" By "my" they mean the address block provided by one of their ISPs. I see this bullshit all the time. This leads to hundreds (or thousands eventually) of PI address blocks, none of which can be summarized.

    7. Re:The answer has been clear by Cramer · · Score: 1

      Most of it already can. If your ISP is still using 20 year old hardware without IPv6 silicon, it's time to find a better ISP.

      Not extensively tested within their network (software, hardware, and management) is the real bottleneck.

    8. Re:The answer has been clear by lokedhs · · Score: 1

      Oh yes, the ICMPv6 issue is real. I made the same mistake when I configured my IPv6 firewall. It's subtle because things seem to work at first but connections just hang. And the behaviour from the client side is that "accessing Google is slow but other sites work". Of course, accessing any IPv6 site is slow, but the browsers won't tell you that.

    9. Re: The answer has been clear by jd · · Score: 1

      Each level is given the parent's prefix plus one or two bytes. Yes, you can announce that and it is easily summarized.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    10. Re:The answer has been clear by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That is very easy to fix. `whois` lists the real owner anyway.

      It's probably the same idiot-type that posted that IPv6 has "too much overhead" to the same idiot-type that wants "their" address space broadcast to the internet.

      Also, some ISPs will literally give you 5 IPv6 addresses, like 5 /128. And that's for their VPS offerings. It's really amazing how they simply do not get networking.

    11. Re: The answer has been clear by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've heard people say that before, but what precisely do you think the lifespan of DWDM gear or PE routers are? Full depreciation is ~5-7 years, and after that time, you're trying to squeeze the profitability out of the devices.

      And don't get me started on what IPv6 does to crypto (yeah, show me something more than three years old that does *that* correctly), let alone MPLS...

    12. Re: The answer has been clear by Cramer · · Score: 1

      How the hell do you summarize two distant /56's out of some other provider's "non-portable" /32? Yes, the ISP ("owner" of the /32) will announce only the entire block. No other piece of that block should exist anywhere outside the ISP's network.

      We've allowed that bullshit in IPv4 for decades. The potential size that represents within IPv6 means it must be absolutely FORBIDDEN , from day one until the end of days.

    13. Re: The answer has been clear by Cramer · · Score: 2

      You've obviously not work in the Real World(tm). Companies will continue using hardware as long as it works -- not broken, don't need new features/functions not possible through software update(s), or don't need additional capacity (based on space and/or power)

      (Cell providers cycle through tech due to the last two.)

    14. Re:The answer has been clear by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I live in a medium sized town in the UK, I have two internet connections, one from Virgin Media, one from BT, neither connection provides IPv6.

      I have a couple of customers with IPv6 capable connections but both of those are PCI DSS sites and neither has a need for IPv6 so the safest thing to do is keep them on IPv4 until the IPv6 firewalling tech matures. And what I really mean by "matures" is until I can create an IPv6 LAN using non-routable addressing to satisfy the complex and strict rules and regulations.

      It's going to be a few years I think before I setup a live working IPv6 network and IPv4 will be around until every single service on the web used by one of my customers supports IPv6 and thats going to be a long time.

      I played with IPv6 firewalling tech a couple of years ago, I found it to be "leaky", it seems designed to promote interconnection rather than restrict it, until I can setup a working IPv6 environment where the LAN is truly dark from the the WAN I won't be installing it.

    15. Re:The answer has been clear by fisted · · Score: 1

      Too much overhead? It has less. In particular because the FCS is no lo longer computed over the (always changing) hop limit.

    16. Re:The answer has been clear by jaredmauch · · Score: 1

      I see consistently faster times with my IPv6 vs IPv4 with my native service at home, even with just pings. This seems to be the norm with most networks. If you are using a tunnel broker, such as he.net or otherwise you are most likely going a longer path with those artificial midpoints. Also, your browser may be broken as it doesn't implement rfc6555 properly.

    17. Re: The answer has been clear by gbjbaanb · · Score: 1

      not so - all big companies lease their equipment so they can mark it as a taxable expense and claim tax back on it and reduce their capital expenditure budgets, after a few years the manufacturer contacts them and asks if they want shiny new kit to replace the old junk that is now out of warranty and they always say yes.

      Its all about getting someone else to buy your equipment for you.

      Now I can't say if this is true of telecoms companies too, but even they will replace their kit eventually.

    18. Re:The answer has been clear by lokedhs · · Score: 1

      I'm sorry. I wasn't clear it seems. I mean I had that problem until I stopped blocking ICMPv6. Once I fixed that, IPv6 was as fast or faster than IPv4.

    19. Re: The answer has been clear by Pentium100 · · Score: 1

      So, how do you change ISPs but keep your IPs? For example in a failover situation.

      Currently the company I work for has its own AS and a /23 of IPv4, that can get announced trough one or both ISPs that we use (in case one goes down). If one ISP goes down the traffic goes trough another quite quickly. How do you do this with IPv6?

    20. Re: The answer has been clear by jd · · Score: 1

      Multiple IPs was one solution, but the other was much simpler.

      The real address of the computer was its MAC, the prefix simply said how to get there. In the event of a failover, the client's computer would be notified the old prefix was now transitory and a new prefix was to be used for new connections.

      At the last common router, the router would simply swap the transitory prefix for the new prefix. The packet would then go by the new path.

      The server would multi-home for all prefixes it was assigned.

      At both ends, the stack would handle all the detail, the applications never needed to know a thing. That's why nobody cared much about remembering IP addresses, because those weren't important except to the stack. You remembered the name and the address took care of itself.

      One of the benefits was that this worked when switching ISPs. If you changed your provider, you could do so with no loss of connections and no loss of packets.

      But the same was true of clients, as well. You could start a telnet session at home, move to a cyber cafe and finish up in a pub, all without breaking the connection, even if all three locations had different ISPs.

      This would be great for students or staff at a university. And for the university. You don't need the network to be flat, you can remain on your Internet video session as your laptop leaps from access point to access point.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  3. Waiting for the killer app ... by slowdeath · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Have Facebook and/or Google go IPV6 only for website access. You will see virtually 100% adoption of IPV6 within 24hrs ...

    1. Re:Waiting for the killer app ... by CycleMan · · Score: 1

      Came here to say this. A big first mover will shift the market in no time.

    2. Re:Waiting for the killer app ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And their advertisers will scream bloody murder at them. Again, chicken & egg...

    3. Re:Waiting for the killer app ... by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why would either company do that? IPv6 would help neither one.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    4. Re:Waiting for the killer app ... by suutar · · Score: 5, Funny

      facebook maybe. If google goes ipv6 nobody will be able to find instructions...

    5. Re:Waiting for the killer app ... by Shakrai · · Score: 2

      Facebook leaving the web could be a good thing, our generation's version of Eternal September would finally come to an end. :P

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
    6. Re:Waiting for the killer app ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      So brazzers.com, then?

    7. Re:Waiting for the killer app ... by bpier · · Score: 2

      facebook maybe. If google goes ipv6 nobody will be able to find instructions...

      Both Facebook and Google already offer their services over IPV6.

    8. Re:Waiting for the killer app ... by jaredmauch · · Score: 4, Informative

      Perhaps you missed world IPv6 day when they both jumped at the same time to enable their front pages? There are a lot of things that don't work right in an IPv6 only world, such as Skype but the list of things that doesn't work is getting shorter. If you take a look at the statistics it's quite encouraging to see a steady growth curve.

      https://www.google.com/intl/en...

    9. Re:Waiting for the killer app ... by theskipper · · Score: 2

      Too long. IPV6 Youporn would drop full adoption down to 5 minutes ;)

    10. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by jd · · Score: 3, Informative

      IPv6 would help both enormously. Lower latency on routing means faster responses.

      IP Mobility means users can move between ISPs without posts breaking, losing responses to queries, losing hangout or other chat service connections, or having to continually re-authenticate.

      Autoconfiguration means both can add servers just by switching the new machines on.

      Because IPv4 has no native security, it's vulnerable to a much wider range of attacks and there's nothing the vendors can do about them.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    11. Re:Waiting for the killer app ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Perhaps you confused "IPv6 only" with "IPv6 enabled". Go IPv6 only and people will make it happen. The only reason we aren't IPv6 everywhere is laziness.

    12. Re:Waiting for the killer app ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      exclusively?

    13. Re:Waiting for the killer app ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sounds like a claim for your PUC and/or small claims court.

    14. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You sound like someone who has never, in fact, run a network with more than 200 routers, and had to do change control on thousands of devices. SLAAC? Please. Show me something which works well instead.

      Faster routing? In what world, and on what precise platform, is IPv6 routed *faster* than IPv4 (to say nothing of the 2x TCAM cost)

    15. Re:Waiting for the killer app ... by timnbron · · Score: 2

      If Google started boosting the ranking for sites with an IPv6 address it would become the Next Big Trend...

      --
      There are some who call me ... Tim.
    16. Re:Waiting for the killer app ... by CauseBy · · Score: 1

      good cite

    17. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by Princeofcups · · Score: 1

      IPv6 would help both enormously. Lower latency on routing means faster responses.

      Responses? Most of the internet traffic is streaming video, which gains speed by being cached, not having a direct connection to the server. Fess up. Most people here screaming that they need IPv6 are only interested in game ping times. Or else they really don't understand the difference between latency and "ping time."

      --
      The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
    18. Re:Waiting for the killer app ... by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 1

      Have Facebook and/or Google go IPV6 only for website access. You will see virtually 100% adoption of IPV6 within 24hrs ...

      This is why that's never gonna happen.

      --
      Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
    19. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by FireFury03 · · Score: 2

      IPv6 would help both enormously.

      In the long term, yes. In the short term, going offline for the 93.69% of their users who don't have IPv6 yet would certainly be seen my most as a completely dickish move - I'm pretty sure their investors would be upset, for one thing.

      Lower latency on routing means faster responses.

      How does IPv6 yield lower latency? If anything, the latency on IPv6 is often slightly higher than IPv4 owing to the prevalence of IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnels where native IPv6 interlinks aren't available, along with larger headers slightly increasing the latency of cut-through routing.

      IP Mobility means users can move between ISPs without posts breaking, losing responses to queries, losing hangout or other chat service connections, or having to continually re-authenticate.

      Does anyone actually implement IP mobility? It requires support from your ISP, and I've not heard anything about any ISPs implementing it.

      Autoconfiguration means both can add servers just by switching the new machines on.

      DHCP does pretty much the same under IPv4 - I can't see this being a boon to Google/Facebook. (TBH I wouldn't be surprised if their infrastructure was too complex for any of these protocols - they've probably got some home baked protocol for doing that stuff).

      Because IPv4 has no native security, it's vulnerable to a much wider range of attacks and there's nothing the vendors can do about them.

      So no different from IPv6 then... both protocols have ipsec support (I think it's mandatory for IPv6 whereas the IPv4 version is an optional backport, but all major OSes support it in both cases so that's neither here nor there). However, ipsec use is currently pretty much reserved for VPNs - you can do adhoc ipsec but no one does. About the only thing you get from IPv6 is that IP addresses are much sparser, so scanning/attacking by picking addresses at random isn't effective.

    20. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's all wonderful but IPv6 is not backwards compatible so switching means essentially means shifting your server to the nega-internet and losing communication with upwards of 95% of your users. This plan is dead in the water.

    21. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Show me three people who both qualify as gamers (as in caring about ping times, not casual gamers), AND know what IPv6 is.

    22. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      DHCP does pretty much the same under IPv4

      Not in any regular setup. With DHCP you either get dynamic IP addresses or you need to set up static leases.

      With IPv6 autoconfiguration, you get static IP addresses.

      With servers, static IP addresses is what you want.

    23. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by jbolden · · Score: 1

      I'm a huge IPv6 fan and I don't game. What IPv6 does is recreates the pre-NAT world of easy communications between systems. Going back to the symmetrical world where everything on the internet is a server simplifies commuting immensely. That's why I want IPv6.

      That and I'm tired of the can't do attitude that IT has developed (and really society as a whole) since the early 2000s. I want to go back to the 1990s world where stuff changed all the time. DevOps and cloud are starting that transition from can't do to can do. But I see the kids doing something like a global IPv4 transition as being huge in getting them to start believing in their potential to make change to infrastructure.

    24. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by jbolden · · Score: 1

      Most everything runs dual stack. So no.

    25. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And you clearly don't know what in the hell you're talking about.

      Speed? No, stability and fluidity. Speed doesn't come from being cached except locally and only really under certain circumstances.

    26. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

      It's less TCAM overall, because of the large address space: you only need one v6 allocation to cover what ends up being thousands of separate tiny allocations in v4.

      According to this video at 18:44, Comcast measure v6 on their residential deployment (the one in this world) as being slightly faster than v4. I'm not sure if that's a precise enough platform specification for you, but there it is.

    27. Re:Waiting for the killer app ... by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      Big content providers have been enabling IPv6 but none have done what the GGP post proposed and disabled IPv4.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    28. Re:Waiting for the killer app ... by jaredmauch · · Score: 1

      We're not there yet. You can check the activities in sunset4 wg at ietf about disabling ipv4.

    29. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The problem with V6 is that it was designed by a bunch of people that had a very specific vision for how networks should work. And only their vision.

      That was a long time ago. V6's solutions are now either: Moot, or have been worked around in likely better ways

      Latency? - Dubious. In theory, sure. In practice you may not see any benefits outside of a lab or a small, controlled network.

      IP mobility - Moot. A task better handled by upper layers. Tying a user's session to their network address is a bad idea for security reasons.

      Autoconf- Moot. Turns out that the two-way negotiation that DHCP offers is much more useful, and is a superior solution. (Exchange of low level information prior to the establishment of a network address) There's a reason DHCPv6 exists.

      Native security - What native security does v6 offer that's substantially different that's offered in every bog standard v4 implementation?

      v6 is a classic case overengineering. Adding features instead of fixes. Adding constraints instead of options. It's worst sin is neglecting the obvious need for a transition mechanism. v6's design is rooted in the days where computers were much slower, much simpler, and layer 3 was expected to handle many more tasks on it's own.

      Today I can buy a 1.5ghz quad core 64bit, 2GB ram, 64gig storage, handheld device with 3-5 radios that connected to a world-wide connected internet. Retail. Anywhere in the US.

      What we need is not v6, but a simple address extension to v4 along with a few fixes to some of the most serious problems (TCP overhead, for one) More importantly, it needs to be designed explicitly as/with a transition mechanism.

    30. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      I'm a huge IPv6 fan and I don't game. What IPv6 does is recreates the pre-NAT world of easy communications between systems. Going back to the symmetrical world where everything on the internet is a server simplifies commuting immensely. That's why I want IPv6.

      Hah.

      Easy communications? Fat chance. Because there'll be firewalls in the way leading to plenty of issues - enough so that assuming you can connect between two hosts is not a safe assumption.

      In fact, you'll return to the early NAT days when they were rare, and spend hours trying to figure out why your VOIP app works half the time, but when someone calls in, you can't talk, at all because someone has a firewall in the way and it's blocking the connection.

      These days, NAT is pretty much understood and it's easy to detect and work around. Tomorrow, with IPv6, people are going to forget their NAT lessons and we'll go through the same pain that we had a decade and a half ago.

      And let's not forget the nice corporate firewalls that already exist today and filter everything that's not HTTP, HTTPS, FTP or SMTP. Just silently dropped. Those will be really fun to diagnose.

      And work firewall-less? This is the modern internet, and remote vulnerabilities, spoofs, amplification attacks and others are just sitting there waiting to be discovered.

      The myth of apparent reachability died ages ago. Along with the ability to plug a home PC straight into the internet without a firewall.

    31. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by CronoCloud · · Score: 1

      What IPv6 does is recreates the pre-NAT world of easy communications between systems. Going back to the symmetrical world where everything on the internet is a server simplifies commuting immensely. That's why I want IPv6.

      Most people aren't telecommuters and we aren't going back to the symmetrical world. That world was a world of neckbeards, alt.religion.kibology, gopher, and hytelnet.

      We don't live in a world where the internet is dominated by neckbeards anymore.

    32. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by jbolden · · Score: 1

      In fact, you'll return to the early NAT days when they were rare, and spend hours trying to figure out why your VOIP app works half the time, but when someone calls in, you can't talk, at all because someone has a firewall in the way and it's blocking the connection.

      I would agree that there will be transitioning problems as the world moves from a mature IPv4/NAT to a less mature IPv6. I see that as fairly short term and overall the situation will be much improved.

      And let's not forget the nice corporate firewalls that already exist today and filter everything that's not HTTP, HTTPS, FTP or SMTP. Just silently dropped. Those will be really fun to diagnose

      I don't think those exist much anymore. There are too many network protocols. And there is nothing to diagnose. If communication X has to happen on port Y and Y is blocked at location Z...

      And work firewall-less? This is the modern internet, and remote vulnerabilities, spoofs, amplification attacks and others are just sitting there waiting to be discovered.

      Our phones go on the internet essentially naked. Our laptops do as well. If the device doesn't allow unsolicited incoming on most ports and almost all ports are closed except when in use that is very much like a firewall.

    33. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by jbolden · · Score: 1

      True we don't. The Internet became asymmetric. On the other hand the PSTN never did. And non-experts use that. We don't know to what extent address scarcity issues drove the internet becoming asymmetric. If the internet is permanently going to be asymmetric than with things like virtual hosting there is no good reason IPv4 couldn't be made to work for a very long time.

    34. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by Wiblur_the_Once · · Score: 1

      Most people aren't telecommuters and we aren't going back to the symmetrical world. That world was a world of neckbeards, alt.religion.kibology, gopher, and hytelnet.

      The days of alt.religion.kibology were much more fun, symmetrical or not. Also, you must be a gamer NTTIAWWT, elsewise, how would you know the term 'neckbeard'? Also, also, I was just talking to my daughter yesterday about how modern social media is in serious need of a crossposting capability like they had in newsgroups. Facebook could use some wacky, harmless old school kibological trollery.

    35. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by dorky · · Score: 1

      Most people aren't telecommuters and we aren't going back to the symmetrical world. That world was a world of neckbeards, alt.religion.kibology, gopher, and hytelnet.

      The days of alt.religion.kibology were much more fun, symmetrical or not.

      Also, you must be a gamer NTTIAWWT, elsewise, how would you know the term 'neckbeard'?

      Also, also, I was just talking to my daughter yesterday about how modern social media is in serious need of a crossposting capability like they had in newsfroups. Facebook could use some wacky, harmless old school kibological trollery.

      HELLO SLASHDOT THIS IS A PENCIL.

    36. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

      It's worst sin is neglecting the obvious need for a transition mechanism

      If its worse sin is not doing the impossible, then it's doing pretty good: you can't talk between v4 and v6 hosts because of the pigeon-hole principle. There's just not enough space in the v4 dest header to fit a 128-bit address.

      If you have a brilliant idea for getting around that, please do share.

    37. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by MikeBabcock · · Score: 1

      Why do you believe IPv6 routing is faster than IPv4?

      --
      - Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
    38. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by MikeBabcock · · Score: 1

      The vast majority of IPv6 addresses being assigned aren't routable anyway -- do you really think those random local addresses you gave on your LAN at home can be globally routed from anywhere? Sure, if you get an assignment from your ISP, but do you really want your home alarm system, clock radio and fridge globally routable in the first place?

      --
      - Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
    39. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by MikeBabcock · · Score: 1

      What we really need is IPv8, based on IPv4 with a larger address pool and no other irrational changes to the protocol. IPv6 simply adds too much complexity to the system.

      --
      - Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
    40. Re: Waiting for the killer app ... by CronoCloud · · Score: 1

      I know of the term neckbeard from the Linux community. I do game now and then, more casually than self-defined gamers, but less casually than phone/tablet/facebook gamers.

    41. Re:Waiting for the killer app ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No he did not miss it, what he is asking for is "IPV6 only"

  4. How about basic security? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    IPv6 has a number of weaknesses:

    1: No encryption. This was promised, but in reality, transport encryption is still at the SSL/TLS level.

    2: Attackers can view your entire IP space. A simple nmap scan, then choosing what zero days to use... instant pwn-ership.

    3: Untested stack, relatively. The IPV6 versions of land, teardrop, ping of death, and other attacks have yet to be found.

    4: Support is spotty. Using IPv6 on the edge means most people around the world can't touch the websites.

    1. Re:How about basic security? by Shakrai · · Score: 2

      2: Attackers can view your entire IP space. A simple nmap scan, then choosing what zero days to use... instant pwn-ership.

      That's what firewalls are for.

      Let me guess, you're one of those that thinks the breaking of end-to-end communications (NAT) is an acceptable substitute for a firewall?

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
    2. Re: How about basic security? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      3. What a load. If your border router is forwarding incoming connections to your internal machines then you have bigger problems than ipv6. It would do the same if your machines had routable v4 addresses too, you know?

    3. Re:How about basic security? by pe1rxq · · Score: 1

      2: Attackers can view your entire IP space. A simple nmap scan, then choosing what zero days to use... instant pwn-ership.

      Bullshit. Just use a firewall the proper way and stop using crap.
      If your machines are that vulnerable you are already screwed. Hiding behind NAT and thinking you are safe is a joke.

      --
      Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
    4. Re:How about basic security? by I4ko · · Score: 0

      A firewall will not help you in that regard. If it did, then we wouldn't need IPv6 anyway. IPv6 is more or less like running the entire internet on IPX (if it was able to address that many machines)

    5. Re:How about basic security? by steveg · · Score: 3, Funny

      Simple nmap scan? Yeah.

      If they can scan 10,000 addresses a second they should be able to scan your home address space in not much under a million years.

      Assuming you didn't do something radical, like, maybe, used a firewall.

      --
      Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
    6. Re:How about basic security? by mtippett · · Score: 1

      2: Attackers can view your entire IP space. A simple nmap scan, then choosing what zero days to use... instant pwn-ership.

      Hmm... Non-direct allocated IP on your subnet, 64 bit subnet, pwn-ership aint that trivial. Scanning a 64-bit address space (AT&T allocates a full /64 to me at home) is going to be pretty obvious at the firewall.

      Welcome back to the internet of the early 1990's we all lived on the internet with real IPs, but were protected from firewalls... This whole concept of everyone on a Class C/B/A private subnet thing has only been around for a couple of decades.

    7. Re:How about basic security? by sjames · · Score: 2

      1. As opposed to IPv4 where practically nothing uses the pain in the ass to set up encryption

      2. Yes, if I am stupid enough to have no firewall whatsoever, even locally on the machines, all they have to do is nmap an entire internet's worth of IP addresses to find the 10 or so that actually exist on my network.

      3. Oh my yes, only 15 years of testing, AKA, 75% as much as the IPv4 stack in most cases.

      4. Not sure what you're saying there. Issue must be local, I've had no problem using IPv6.

    8. Re:How about basic security? by pe1rxq · · Score: 3, Informative

      Filtering out nmap to places you don't want it to go is EXACTLY what a firewall is for.
      And your IPX comparison is also flawed. You don't need to use your MAC address, that is just one way of generating an IPv6 address. And being able to address a packet to any node on the internet directly is exactly how the internet was suposed to work. (Note that a firewall may still prevent such packet from ariving unwanted).

      --
      Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
    9. Re:How about basic security? by fisted · · Score: 2

      an entire internet[] worth of

      Since a /64 is the default allocation, that's more like an entire internet squared worth of it.

    10. Re:How about basic security? by _merlin · · Score: 1

      Yeah, my ISP gives me a static /56 and a dynamic /64, so that's a lot of space to scan. My Windows boxes randomise addresses for outgoing connections, so you can't trivially get addresses to scan by sniffing egress traffic. And on top of that my router acts as a firewall and only allows incoming connections on whitelisted address/port combinations.

    11. Re:How about basic security? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh, thank goodness the bad guys don't have botnets and that A laptop can do 1 megapackets a second and a server can do 100 megapackets a second. Nor do they have blacklists of what not to scan to drastically cut down the time.

    12. Re:How about basic security? by Cramer · · Score: 2

      1: No encryption.

      Wrong. The protocol has IPsec bolted-on at the socket level. However, you are correct in that nothing knows how to actually use it.

      2: Attackers can view your entire IP space.

      A: FIREWALL. B: A 2^64 (::/64) LAN will take a LONG time to scan. But, yes, if you know the address of the machine not protected by anything, it's a lame duck.

      3: Untested stack, relatively.

      Less tested than IPv4, maybe. IPv6 has been around a lot longer than you may realize, and while issues are still emerging, many of them are due to poor protocol design and not poor stack programming.

      4: Support is spotty.

      This depends on where you are and how much work you put into correcting it (read: tunnels.) But this is ultimately what the entire thread is about... ISPs simply aren't bothering to support IPv6. Those that do are doing so in a mostly jedi-hand-wave gesture for marketing.

    13. Re:How about basic security? by lokedhs · · Score: 1

      If you are stupid enough to be running without a firewall, sure they your entire address space can be scanned. I hope they have lots of time though since even the smallest allocation gives you an address space of 18446744073709551616 addresses. That'll take a while to scan.

    14. Re:How about basic security? by dissy · · Score: 1

      Yes we know those are all well known and long unfixed problems with IPv4...
      But you promised a list of IPv6 weaknesses.

    15. Re:How about basic security? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh, thank goodness the bad guys don't have botnets and that A laptop can do 1 megapackets a second and a server can do 100 megapackets a second.

      And after a few minutes of that, the address space gets null-routed and nothing at all gets in. Brute-forcing like that isn't practical with IPv6.

    16. Re: How about basic security? by jd · · Score: 5, Informative

      IPSec is perfectly usable.

      Telebit demonstrated transparent routing (ie: total invisibility of internal networks without loss of connectivity) in 1996.

      IPv6 has a vastly simpler header, which means a vastly simpler stack. This means fewer defects, greater robustness and easier testing. It also means a much smaller stack, lower latency and fewer corner cases.

      IPv6 is secure by design. IPv4 isn't secure and there is nothing you can design to make it so.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    17. Re:How about basic security? by William+Baric · · Score: 1

      Several of my clients are charities for whom recycled Core 2 Duo with 2 Gigs of RAM are the best they can get. Some can't even get a semi-decent server, so they just use an old P4 as a file and print server. And you want those people to pay me to install and maintain a firewall? NAT with a $30 router is an acceptable substitute for a firewall when you don't have the money for anything else.

    18. Re:How about basic security? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Also, to the GP, you do realize that attempting to scan even a single /64 will take much longer than scanning the entire IPv4 internet, yes (let's say, 2^32 times as long)? How about to get things rolling, you port scan 0/0 on ipv4 and get back to me with a list of open ports when you're done, yes?

    19. Re:How about basic security? by BenFranske · · Score: 2

      I have given up trying to educate Slashdot readers about IPv6. Like most IT people they have stuck their heads in the sand and think NAT is the end-all-be-all. As an professor of IT I keep preaching knowing IPv6 to my students because someday IT management is going to wakeup to the fact that Asia (and other places) has moved on to IPv6 and if you want to do business with them you better be running it too. Then there will a rush to get everyone on IPv6 and people with experience will be in demand. So let them stick their heads in the sand, those of us who actually know the substantial advantages of IPv6 and are familiar with deploying and operating IPv6 networks will gladly be your highly compensated consultants when the day comes.

    20. Re: How about basic security? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If nothing knows how to use encryption, is it really there? (Hint: no)

      IPSec4 works *fine*. V6SEC, not so much.

      Also, v6 introduces all sorts of fun problems (RA guard, anyone?) where support for the needed feature is either really new or quite intermittent.

    21. Re: How about basic security? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Tautology much?

    22. Re:How about basic security? by Shakrai · · Score: 1

      NAT with a $30 router is an acceptable substitute for a firewall when you don't have the money for anything else.

      If that's your argument just use the Windows firewall. It's completely free.

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
    23. Re:How about basic security? by Shakrai · · Score: 1

      What's truly pathetic is I can't get it from Time Warner Cable on our dedicated fiber (not DOCSIS) connection, despite their claims that it's available to DIA customers. They have been dragging their feet now for eight or nine months, professing that we're the first business in our whole area (~250,000 people) to ask for it, so they don't actually have any experience getting it to us.

      That's either complete bullshit (we have one of the largest universities in NYS here, along with major defense contractors and even a Fortune 100) to stonewall my request, or it's actually true and a sad reflection on our complete lack of progress on this issue.

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
    24. Re:How about basic security? by William+Baric · · Score: 1

      I'll quote myself : "And you want those people to pay me to install and maintain a firewall?"

      Charities have access to donation from Microsoft. The problem is not the cost of the license (Linux is also completely free), it's my time. I REALLY can't install, configure and maintain a firewall for $30.

    25. Re:How about basic security? by I4ko · · Score: 1

      My comment has nothing to do with NAT but with the mess that BGPv6 is. IPv6 is good within an Enterprise, I actually prefer it over using RFC 1918 space, but there is much less need for it to be available to for a web site for example. You are going to hit a load-balancer anyway, even with a CDN you DNS query will only return a small subset of the entire CDN. Most of the internet does not need IPv6, with the exception of the endpoints.

    26. Re:How about basic security? by SuricouRaven · · Score: 2

      That 'simple nmap scan' is 2^48 addresses. You can't scan entire IP ranges on IPv6, you have to harvest addresses by other means.

    27. Re:How about basic security? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dude, I guarantee you you'll kick the bucket way before that day comes. The money is here in the West, that means Asia will have to use the 6to4 to do business with us. And for those remaining cases, there's the 4to6. There will NEVER be global IPv6 adoption. In a few years someone will propose something like IPv4.5 which will extend the existing standard, and that will catch on.

    28. Re:How about basic security? by thogard · · Score: 2

      Scanning IPv6 isn't as hard as you make it out to be. I look at it more like using dictionary attacks rather that sequential scans. The 1st 64 bits are known if your after a specific target. It is also trivial to know if a given /64 is even used. A tree of all known used /64 shouldn't take long to create.

      The 64 bits of the host is a bit different. They could be fully random (which is rare) or they are allocated based on mac address or statically assigned. The mac addresses means that 40 bits of the address are known if you know anything about the targets buying habits (i.e. they tend to buy Dell or Polycoms). That leaves 16 million guesses which can be reduced based on the vendor or the product version you which you intend to exploit once you find a target.

      You may not be looking for one in 2^64, but a network of devices that all may have many addresses and you might only need one.

      The static address assignment space isn't very large as well as netadmins like using :: when they type in addresses so they are unlikely to be random. That means their 1st network will be 0::something and their second is likely to be 0001::something. Oddly enough you might find they skip ::a and use ::8,::9,::10 as well or use something that match with their existing ip v4 address so things like ::192:168:1:1 is very likely.

      All these things mean that Monte Carlo scans of a specific IPv6 allocation on a remote network is well within the ability of small time hackers.

      Throw in a firewall that isn't filtering IPv6 properly and that will result in remote exploits of internal devices.

    29. Re: How about basic security? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It doesn't work with most internet addresses. You cannot contact an IPv4 address using IPv6. How long is it going to take you to realise how big a problem this is. It's been almost 20 years!!

    30. Re:How about basic security? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yet you can install, configure and maintain a NAT+firewall which is by definition twice as much work.

    31. Re:How about basic security? by jbolden · · Score: 1

      Agree with you Ben. This will change as the carriers in the USA upgrade to have IPv6 and home / small business rolls over. /. has become a can't do world of defeatists. Breaking connectivity is not going to be an acceptable option. That's obvious.

    32. Re:How about basic security? by jbolden · · Score: 1

      There are 0 American farmers whose cost of labor is low enough that it pays for them to scratch out dirt by hand than it does for them to use a tractor. There are 0 American builders who should shovel by hand rather than use an evacuator.

      The people in your charity are Americans. Their time is worth $25/hr minimum and likely more like $100/hr. The idea that they can't afford $1k investment per employee is stupid. Regardless of what they say. They may be cheapskates but their assessment of what makes sense is not based on reality.

    33. Re: How about basic security? by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

      It's actually not much of a problem. I run v6 everywhere and I've never had any problems reaching other v4 hosts.

      Why? Because I also run v4 everywhere and use that to reach v4 hosts. This is extremely easy to do: you just deploy v6, and then don't undeploy your v4, and there you go. v6 works over the same network topology as v4 does, so you can easily run both.

      This also has the advantage of not being impossible.

    34. Re:How about basic security? by tippen · · Score: 1

      Bullshit. Just use a firewall the proper way and stop using crap.
      If your machines are that vulnerable you are already screwed. Hiding behind NAT and thinking you are safe is a joke.

      Wait, you think firewalls provide security?

      Even if your network is one of the rare ones that doesn't just allow any internally initiated traffic out, you'll at least have ports open for web access, email, ftp, dns, etc. Guess where the vast majority of the attacks come from? Web, email, etc. The exact ports you already have open on your firewall.

      Attackers aren't stupid. They go where the opportunities are.

      Traditional firewalls (stateful, L3/L4) are mostly about access control. They don't protect your vulnerable machines other than reducing the ports they can be attacked on.

    35. Re: How about basic security? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There is nothing that is "secure by design". Something can be relatively secure by design or something can be insecure by design (or the lack thereof). IPv4 can be said to be solidly in the latter. The former cannot be said of IPv6- but it can be said that it's not in the latter, which is an improvement.

    36. Re: How about basic security? by Lord+Crc · · Score: 1

      Why? Because I also run v4 everywhere and use that to reach v4 hosts.

      So why are we even bothering with v6 again when all we need is just to keep our v4?

    37. Re: How about basic security? by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

      Because it's not big enough to number all our hosts?

      I can reach the hosts that have v4 over v4, but not the ones that don't.

    38. Re: How about basic security? by Lord+Crc · · Score: 1

      Because it's not big enough to number all our hosts?
      I can reach the hosts that have v4 over v4, but not the ones that don't.

      You said it wasn't a big issue that you cannot contact v4 from a v6 address, because one can simply use v4 to connect to v4. Yet you also say we need v6 because we don't have enough v4 left.

      See the issue now?

    39. Re:How about basic security? by pe1rxq · · Score: 1

      Wait, you stopped reading after five words?

      --
      Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
    40. Re: How about basic security? by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

      Ah, yes. When I said:

      I run v6 everywhere and I've never had any problems reaching other v4 hosts

      I meant to say:

      I run v6 everywhere and I've never had any problems reaching other reachable v4 hosts

      Sorry about that.

    41. Re:How about basic security? by steveg · · Score: 1

      Good points. I'd been under the impression that link local addresses were the only ones based on MAC address, but a little investigation shows me that there are schemes that also use the MAC address for public addresses.

      And you're also right that admins are likely to choose addresses that are simpler for them if they assign them manually.

      But all this is moot if a working firewall is in place. And that's really no different than the IPV4 situation.

      --
      Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
    42. Re:How about basic security? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wow, one would think that a "professor of IT" would be able to write better...

    43. Re:How about basic security? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      if your after a specific target

      "you're".

      Also, there is a comma key to the left of your period/full-stop key. You may want to consider using it occasionally.

    44. Re:How about basic security? by Pentium100 · · Score: 1

      No, it's not. A NAT router works as a good firewall straight out of the box, you may not even need to configure it other than setting the admin password. Uplink IP is configured using DHCP, the router has its own DHCP server for internal network and no incoming connections are allowed.

  5. okay, okay... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'll give up my 5 class-C addresses now, can we give it a rest?
    We've been running out for the last decade and nothing's happend yet. zeesh!

  6. No benefit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    There is no benefit to using IPv6 for most people. IPv4 works fine and there are enough workarounds to keep IPv4 relevant for a long time. IPv6, while it gives more address space, does not in itself really carry any benefits for either service providers or end users. That greatly reduces the motivation to switch.

    ISPs are not helping. Where I live the local ISP charges extra for IPv6, it's something that needs to be expressedly added onto the account Who is going to want to pay extra to provide/access a service most people aren't using?

    1. Re:No benefit by sjames · · Score: 1

      The workarounds are rapidly running out of steam. Add another layer of NAT and things start breaking for average users.

    2. Re:No benefit by jbolden · · Score: 1

      You don't have to use future tense anymore. They've run out of steam. We have a situation now where routers use conflicting IPv4 address schemes and thus huge blocks of machines have no IP path to other huge blocks of machines.

  7. IPv6's day will come, but... by rmdingler · · Score: 2
    IPv6 isn't backwards compatible to IPv4 and most people don't need it yet.

    Oh, and there's a learning curve. Most people are like water... path of least resistance.

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

    1. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by mtippett · · Score: 2

      The main difference tech people will see is that they can't ping an IPv6 address from memory. mDNS (as in xyz.local) will become the only way to access another machine with any sanity.

      Monitoring DNS at home, most services are already mixing (with a preference, but quick fallback from IPv6). So I'd say that the major websites are already primarily accessed via IPv6. You won't notice it.

      It'll just take years...

    2. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by sjames · · Score: 2

      For the average home user, there is no learning curve. One day their ISP will flip the switch and they'll just go on using the internet as before, unaware that anything changed.

    3. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by Cramer · · Score: 1

      Indeed. A great many don't know that switch has been flipped (aka Uverse.) In many cases, it's not until things are suddenly "broken" that anyone notices. (youtube suddenly gets slow -- going through an overloaded 6rd tunnel server, websites don't load as fast -- trying IPv6 first that then timesout, etc.)

    4. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by sjames · · Score: 1

      6rd is for when you want v6 but your uplink doesn't support it, so not an issue here. The DNS lookup doesn't cause much delay.

      Some operations did indeed screw up initially but others got it right first time.

    5. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by Cramer · · Score: 1

      Unless you're AT&T (Uverse), whose entire plan for IPv6 is 6rd.

    6. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by sjames · · Score: 1

      It seems like they didn't so much flip the switch as jam a penny in the fusebox.

    7. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by zamboni1138 · · Score: 1

      Jesus, really? I set up my IPv6 in 2008 with everybody else and can still rattle off my /48 block prefix just like an IPv4 block.

    8. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by sconeu · · Score: 1

      WTF do you need a /48 for? A /64 isn't big enough for you?

      --
      General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
    9. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by Dagger2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      A single subnet? That's not enough for a lot of people.

      Everybody with a guest wifi network, for instance.

    10. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      ISPs are the real problem. Little incentive to spend money implementing IPv6. Much is made of the shortage of v4 addresses, but they would still need to give everyone and IPv4 address anyway because there is some stuff that just doesn't work on v6 or via a v6 to v4 bridge at the moment (Skype for example).

      It's the usual short-sightedness, don't spend money on a problem until it can't be avoided.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    11. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by FireFury03 · · Score: 1

      WTF do you need a /48 for? A /64 isn't big enough for you?

      /64 is only big enough for a single network. /48s were quite common for a while, then recommendations were for ISPs to issue /56 to end users. There is no specific recommendation these days, but you certainly want to have more than a /64 if you can. I'd argue that /60 is a pretty reasonable size for a consumer grade ISP to hand out.. maybe /62 at a push, but that's starting to feel unreasonably scrimpy.

    12. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

      I don't buy this argument: tech people manage to remember their v4 addresses today (which usually consist of a pair of 32-bit addresses for each host), so they ought to be able to remember their v6 addresses (which consist of 48-56 bits of prefix plus 8 bits of host ID, with the rest of the bits being zero).

      Unless they pick a horrible nasty address that's not mostly zeros, but if you pick a nasty unrememberable address and refuse to use DNS for it then you can't really complain about how nasty and unrememberable it is.

    13. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by rmdingler · · Score: 1

      The pre-1982 US cent, if you will.

      --
      Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

      Ernest Hemingway

    14. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      The main differences tech people will see.

      1: NAT in ipv6 is strongly discouraged, so public addresses will be assgined on the lan (in addition to link local addresses). Better hope that unstable public addresses don't accidently end up in configuration files etc leading to things breaking when your ISP changes your block.
      2: network administrators will see a lot of duplicate work as every subnet will have both v4 and v6 for the forseeable future.
      3: it will be interesting to see the impact on internet routing table size. On the one hand there will be a lot less legacy cruft in the IPv6 table and the larger address space gives the option of expanding a companies block rather than given them a second one. On the other hand I could see a lot of medium sized buisnesses who currently use private IP addresses and NAT requesting PI space. And of course the IPv4 and IPv6 internets will be running in paralell for the forseable future.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    15. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by eap · · Score: 1

      There are more hosts than you could ever possibly use at home in a /64.

      If you want separate networks for guests, all you have to do is use VLANs.

      You can do that without ipv6.

    16. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      VLANs are *not* an access control mechanism. They're a broadcast domain partitioning tool. There are many, many attacks against their proported access control properites that can only be thwarted with hardware that's substantially more expensive than SOHO gear.

      A /60 is the smallest allowable IPv6 allocation to a residential site. A /56 is substantially better. Thing is, USian ISPs aren't going to get all that many more customers in the years to come, but their customers are going to get far more Internet-connected devices, and far more clever routers. ISPs can allocate space for their customers now that will be used to its fullest a few years down the road.

    17. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by sjames · · Score: 1

      ISPs are a problem here, but so are equipment vendors. There has been a push for v6 over 2 or three hardware upgrade cycles. In theory, the vast majority of hardware in an ISPs plant should be just awaiting configuration. Alas, much of that equipment was only v6 checkbox capable rather than meaningfully capable. Cisco sold a lot of gear that used the custom ASICs to route v4 and the anemic CPU to route v6. It all looked fine in the demo, but falls right down under a production load.

      Part of the problem is that the incumbents have massive blocks of IP addresses that they got when they were handed out like water. Back when nobody really looked at the justification section of the IP request. It's the new players that have a real problem getting addresses assigned. Next I suppose there will be a place to attach your latest colonoscopy report.

    18. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by Pentium100 · · Score: 1

      So, the designers of IPv6 could not conceive that somebody could have less than 2^64 devices and still want to put them in separate networks? Well, I guess IPv4 was divided using classes in the past, but CIDR is great.

      So now my ISP will have a say in how many internal networks I have? And this is supposed to be better than IPV4 with NAT?

    19. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by FireFury03 · · Score: 1

      So, the designers of IPv6 could not conceive that somebody could have less than 2^64 devices and still want to put them in separate networks?

      Networks are allocated as /64 chunks because it makes autoconfiguration easy. It is often argued by newcomers that this is a huge waste, but really, 128 bits gives you so many addresses that you can stand to do a bit of wasting in order to make things simple. Generally the "what a waste" crowd severely underestimate just how big 128 bits is.

      So now my ISP will have a say in how many internal networks I have?

      Yes and no. You _can_ allocate networks smaller than a /64, but you can't use SLAAC on such networks. That means you're stuck manually configuring devices or using DHCPv6. I believe Android has no support for DHCPv6, so you're probably very restricted if you choose to use a nonstandard network size.

      And this is supposed to be better than IPV4 with NAT?

      Oddly enough, yes - ISPs really shouldn't be restricting your internal infrastructure. If your ISP is being a dick about this then the answer is pretty obvious - switch to another ISP, it isn't as if ISPs are thin on the ground.

    20. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by Pentium100 · · Score: 1

      switch to another ISP, it isn't as if ISPs are thin on the ground.

      I have a few options, but AFAIK a lot of Americans do not (I do not live in the US). Even for me, since I live in an individual house it would be expensive o have another ISP get its fiber cable to me.

      You _can_ allocate networks smaller than a /64, but you can't use SLAAC on such networks. That means you're stuck manually configuring devices or using DHCPv6

      That's good to know, though it would mean that if I use Android devices I will have to type in the long v6 IPs even though IPv4 has shorter IPs AND DHCP works with all devices.

      Though since I would still need NAT (for keeping the IPs when switching to a backup ISP), I guess that is not such a big problem and AFAIK NAT exists for v6 (though not one-to-many as I understand, so I would need a proxy server to make all outgoing connections look like they are from a single device).

    21. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by Agripa · · Score: 1

      U-Verse did a great job flipping that switch where I am. IPv6 is both enabled and disabled on their router but they also now block protocol 41 (and they did so before enabling their broken IPv6) so my existing IPv6 tunnels which ran for years without problems are now useless. I managed to find a customer service transcript where AT&T says that they deliberately block third party IPv6 because of security and because otherwise their users would be able to get static IP addresses without paying for them.

    22. Re:IPv6's day will come, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is backwards compatible from the point of view of being able to throw a $20 router at a customer that has IPV6 only on the Internet side and dual IPV4 (using private subnet) & IPV6 (public and private subnets) on the LAN side.

      Routing IPV4 in IPV6 is one easy way to transit IPV4.

      So the issue still remains with the ISP to move, not the customer equipment.

  8. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They aren't being adopted because they try to solve problems that aren't really problems.

    IPv6: not enough IP addresses. The problem is very real.
    Rust: incompetent programmers who leak memory, which problem can be fixed at compile time (with tradeoffs that annoy some people but not others).

    Both solve very real problems, you just don't see them because they are at a level deeper than you understand. Don't worry, the 'magic' will keep working, and you can keep posting, because other people will solve them.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  9. Isn't it obvious? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Personally I've found IPv6 to be an extremely ungainly language.
    It's plain to see that there just aren't enough variable names left in the world to continue using IPv5, but for me, it's Ruby++ on Python or nothing at all.

    1. Re:Isn't it obvious? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The overhead of ipv6 compared to old versions sucks as well

  10. It is coming... On Weekends... From Home... by mtippett · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have IPV6 at home (took some calls to AT&T Customer Support). I don't have it at work, the migration will probably start small network endpoints (phones (apparently t-mobile has already switch), and home networks).

    Link local IPV6 is already fairly broadly available - it's the fe80 prefixed address on your ifconfig output. You should be able to ping other ipv6 addresses on your network (*nix to *nix).

    Google's IPv6 stats page indicates this too... https://www.google.com/intl/en... has a peculiar comb effect for the last few years. Zooming in seems to give a bit more insight. Google's count of IPv6 connections has a full 1% swing over the weekends vs the week days. Due to IPv6's addressing method, each unique device on your network appears as a unique device on the internet, vs the NATed IPv4 that we all know and love. This would also have an accelerating increase in the number of unique IPs that are visible on the weekend. I know I use more devices over the weekend (chromebook, phone, laptop, table) vs during the week.

    Open to other insights, but our homes will be likely IPv6 before our offices are. (Of course aggressive tech companies like google and facebook are likely already IPv6).

    1. Re:It is coming... On Weekends... From Home... by slimjim8094 · · Score: 2

      Came here to say this. Also note how far the US is ahead of the rest of the world. It's a rare scenario where the US is a world leader in something Internet. 14.5% of all Google's US connections are v6, and it's higher on the weekends. Only Belgium does better. The major US ISPs have actually been pretty good about v6 and at least TWC/Comcast offer it to all their customers, and all their provided routers do it automatically. All the other major ISPs I know about are at least testing deployment. As people swap out their routers that number will only rise.

      The lag as you observed is corporate networks since each one is different. (Also note around Christmas there is a huge jump, and the spread is getting wider.) But even there, eventually you won't be able to buy a device that doesn't automatically do v6 (or at least as automatically as it does v4).

      v6 is coming, folks. People can naysay it all they want but the facts don't support it.

      --
      I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
    2. Re:It is coming... On Weekends... From Home... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why would the home be the "first" place for wide IPv6 adoption; it has 0-benefit to the "average-user" (or even the "average business") except instead of our firewall rules saying "accept from IP4_ADDRESS rdr to INTERNAL_IP4_ADDRESS", it will say "accept from { IP4_ADDR IP6_ADDR } rdr to INTERNAL_IP6_ADDR" .. internal IP4 address were never the issue .. that's part of the reason NAT (and the 3 reserved network classes [10,172.16,192.168]) came about/exist: I could have 1 (or more) "external" IP's that the world sees, and the rest behind the scenes the world doesn't care about ..

      In reality it will most likely be a "mix" of the 2 where "external" IP's (those on "the internet of things") will be IPv6 and the "internal" IP's (i.e. my computer hardwired to my switch connected to my firewall or my printer/"smart" TV that should never have external access would just be normal IP4)

    3. Re:It is coming... On Weekends... From Home... by mtippett · · Score: 1

      If your router enables IPv6, your devices have IPv6 access - no endpoint changes necessary. Current versions of most Operating Systems actually prefer IPv6 but fallback quickly. So it is likely to be turned on transparently.

      There is no INTERNAL_IP6_ADDRESS, there is just an IP6_ADDRESS. The firewall blocks or permits dynamically (likely stateful connection management). The /64 subnet that is routed to your network is expected to be routed to the endpoint by your router if needed (modulo firewall rules).

      The biggest issue for home networking is the lack of management of the router/firewall itself. You can't port forward (no config UI), you can't permit specific ports in most current home router implementations. However, configuration of ports and so on are not something that the vast majority of users know or care about.

    4. Re:It is coming... On Weekends... From Home... by Cramer · · Score: 1

      Why would the home be the "first" place for wide IPv6 adoption

      Because it only takes one ISP to stop being a little shit and turn it on for millions of users to suddenly appear. Enterprise networks require the network admin(s) to actively set it up; no amount of tweaks at the ISP can convert them.

    5. Re:It is coming... On Weekends... From Home... by Kili · · Score: 1

      > Due to IPv6's addressing method, each unique device on your network appears as a unique device on the internet, vs the NATed IPv4 that we all know and love.

      Why I hate IPV6 in a nutshell.

      Because I don't want to give the advertisers and data analyzers yet another way to identify me.

      Unavoidable? Probably. Will I do it willingly? no.

    6. Re:It is coming... On Weekends... From Home... by rl117 · · Score: 1

      I use a smaller ISP (aaisp.net) which provides IPv6 natively. The router they provided, which is a fairly common technicolor model, does all the firewalling and port forwarding you could desire with both v4 and v6 addresses. In the case of v6 it's more a case of unblocking than forwarding ports, since the internal address is global, but the functionality is all there and it works. If you didn't want to run servers internally, everything worked out of the box for outgoing v6--totally plug and play which is how it should be.

    7. Re:It is coming... On Weekends... From Home... by oobayly · · Score: 1

      I want to live in Belgium - amazing beer and 33% IPv6 adoption.

    8. Re:It is coming... On Weekends... From Home... by dave420 · · Score: 1

      So it's ahead of the rest of the world if you ignore those which are better? Brilliant logic!

    9. Re:It is coming... On Weekends... From Home... by Lennie · · Score: 1

      Every desktop operating system (Linux like Ubuntu and Fedora, Mac OS X and Windows) has IPv6 privacy extensions enabled by default (server operating systems usually have it disabled).

      Privacy extensions automatically creates a secondary temporary IPv6 address for connecting to servers like websites.

      So you can NOT be tracked by IPv6 more than IPv4. But also not less.

      Most IPv6-enabled networks have a public range assigned.

      When you visit a website one day they will see an automatically generated unique IPv6 address from that IPv6 network.

      The next day they will see an other automaitcally generated unique IPv6 address from the same IPv6 network.

      This is thus completely similar information you get from IPv4 NAT.

      --
      New things are always on the horizon
    10. Re:It is coming... On Weekends... From Home... by jbolden · · Score: 1

      Absolutely home / small business go IPv6 before the rest. Those are huge networks in terms of being able to reclaim v4 space and they can be switched in a more or less uniform way.

    11. Re:It is coming... On Weekends... From Home... by jbolden · · Score: 1

      The home / small business will be first because they are huge networks that can be transitioned by carriers in a more or less uniform way. The average user just experience a switch over a short period of years:

      a) IPv6 is not available to
      b) IPv6 is available if they turn it on to
      c) IPv6 is on running dual stack with IPv4, IPv4 handles most of their traffic to
      d) IPv6 handles most traffic, IPv4 addresses are available but end user experiences lag and possibly other aspects of worse performance on v4 connections.

      At step (d) the carrier has lots of addresses

    12. Re:It is coming... On Weekends... From Home... by Aqualung812 · · Score: 1

      There is no INTERNAL_IP6_ADDRESS, there is just an IP6_ADDRESS.

      Actually, INTERNAL_IP6_ADDRESS is the link-local address (fe80). All of your communications on your local subnet use that.

      There is also the RFC 1918 (10.x.x.x, 192.168.x.x, 172.16-31.x.x) type addressing companies can do if they want a private non-internet-routable range: Unique Local Addresses. They start with fc07. Most people won't have these at home, but I expect many businesses to use them for things like internal routers. You don't want to have to re-ip those if you change ISPs.

      The really cool part is that both the link-local and the ULA can co-exist with your global IPv6 public address!

      The biggest issue for home networking is the lack of management of the router/firewall itself. You can't port forward (no config UI)

      I've noticed several SOHO routers apply the IPv4 rules to your IPv6 connections. So, if you allow RDP to 192.168.1.2, it will also allow RDP to the IPv6 global address that 192.168.1.2 has. Yes, having unique ACLs for both would be nice, but for most users, this is an acceptable solution.

      --
      Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
  11. ipv6 by JohnVanVliet · · Score: 0

    few things
    Microsoft windows XP
    Microsoft windows server 2003
    Microsoft windows server 2005 ( without the non MS patch )
    will NEVER use ipv6 they are forever stuck on ipv4

    and the idiots at Comcast !!!!!!!!!

    whenever is enable ipv6 on SUSE or RHEL6 and using Xfinity
    the modem runs into a ram overflow VERY FAST

    Comcast says they support it but it is one F'ED up version of something that almost resembles IPv6

    --
    "I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
    1. Re:ipv6 by sjames · · Score: 1

      You seem to have fallen into a parallel reality. In mine, all of those Windows versions can and do use IPv6. Even XP if you explicitly configure it in the network settings.

      I have Comcast and one day I noticed they were announcing v6 addresses. So I turned off my 6to4 tunnel. I haven't had any problems. Modem running out of RAM is a modem problem, not an IPv6 problem. Perhaps it's old or cheesy.

    2. Re:ipv6 by QuietLagoon · · Score: 2

      Comcast says they support it

      I've been using Comcast's IPv6 for well over a year. Not one problem with it.

      Maybe you should go to the Comcast HSI forum on dslreports.com and ask some questions.

    3. Re:ipv6 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Comcast actually does IPv6 surprisingly well. This sounds like a problem with your modem. (Have you tried turning it off and back on again?)

    4. Re:ipv6 by Cramer · · Score: 1

      Bullshit. XP supports IPv6. (it's "experimental" and has no GUI, but it a) exists, and b) works.)

    5. Re:ipv6 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Microsoft windows XP
      Microsoft windows server 2003
      Microsoft windows server 2005 ( without the non MS patch )
      will NEVER use ipv6 they are forever stuck on ipv4

      XP and 2003 have IPv6 built in natively (Since SP1 on each)

      If by 2005 you mean small business server, then seriously why would you even care that you have any IP stack, let alone a specific version of one? It's SBS for crying out loud.
      You've already promised legally to run all of your mission critical infrastructural services on a single non-redundant machine, with no high availability, no fail over hardware, no virtualization, and no technical ability to even fully backup the server at the block level.

      People running SBS don't care one bit about IP. Just plug in the cables and let NetWare for Windows do its magic.

    6. Re: ipv6 by jd · · Score: 4, Informative

      Windows has had IPv6 stacks since Windows 95 and Microsoft even started supplying them as of 98.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    7. Re:ipv6 by rwyoder · · Score: 1

      I've had Comcast and native IPv6 since the fall of 2012, (about 6 months after they brought it up on Memorial Day). I have had no trouble with it, and about a year ago they began issuing /60 prefix delegations. An interesting thing is that since they bumped up my speed to "50Mps" (download), their speedtest website consistently shows ~41Mbps for IPv4, and ~59Mbps for IPv6. I have no idea why. Back when I was getting 20Mbps downloads, there was no significant difference.

    8. Re: ipv6 by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 1

      Windows has had IPv6 stacks since Windows 95 and Microsoft even started supplying them as of 98.

      Ok so I'll wait for IPv10

      --
      Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
    9. Re: ipv6 by toddestan · · Score: 1

      No they didn't. Or at least if they did, they never released them. There was a download for IPv6 on WIndows 2000, which they called a "preview" and not officially supported. Windows XP had it built in but you had to install it. It was still not 100% there in XP yet (for example you couldn't do DNS over IPv6... which was kind of a deal breaker). The first version of Windows that really properly supported IPv6 was Vista.

    10. Re: ipv6 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Saywhatnow? Win2000 was the first, it was a unsupported add-on you could download. XP has it builtin but it is disabled by default and I'm not sure if it does DNS correctly. Vista is the first with real support and it is on by default...

  12. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Add HTTP/2 and https everywhere.

  13. Adoption inverse to ip address assignment by NotInHere · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think that in countries with many ipv4 addresses per internet user, we won't see any change soon, they still can support one ip per home. The US is one of those. It has tons of IPs. In countries without much ipv4 addresses, the companies (especially new ones, which don't sit on millions of addresses) will see the pressure, and will run a carrier grade NAT & native ipv6 approach.

    1. Re:Adoption inverse to ip address assignment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The reality seems to buck your prediction: the US is currently ahead of most other countries according to Google's data.

  14. My experience with IPv6 by alexhs · · Score: 2

    I can do IPv6 from my ISP since last November. My issues so far have been:

    • The ISP ADSL router hasn't been extensively tested for IPv6. Its caching DNS server tends to die after approximately 10 days, and the IPv6 connection itself is at times unavailable (probably not an up-link issue as rebooting the ADSL router fixes the issue. Temporarily.)
    • Some web sites have registered a DNS entry for IPv6, but don't have a properly configured IPv6 HTTP server. I could ask the DNS resolver to try IPv4 first, but then when would I actually be using IPv6 ?
    • I can't even experience the non-NAT'ed network, as I don't have IPv6 access from the work place.

    On the other hand, IPv6 was doing fine 12 years ago, on the IPv6 backbone from the university.

    --
    I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
    1. Re:My experience with IPv6 by wbean · · Score: 1

      I disabled ipv6 last night. Comcast drops the connection after a day or two and then anything that is trying to use ipv6 takes forever to fail over to ipv4. It was interfering with my usage. The only way to solve it was to reboot the router. Not worth it.

    2. Re:My experience with IPv6 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I can do IPv6 from my ISP since last November. My issues so far have been:

      • The ISP ADSL router hasn't been extensively tested for IPv6. Its caching DNS server tends to die after approximately 10 days, and the IPv6 connection itself is at times unavailable (probably not an up-link issue as rebooting the ADSL router fixes the issue. Temporarily.)

      Simple solution: don't use your ISP-supplied ADSL modem as a router. Have it act as a dumb layer-2 device and use a more capable device as your router (layer-3.) That also gives you the capability to lock the ISP out of your modem so they can't see all of your internal settings. The same applies to cable and FiOS. Whenever the ISP has the capability to perform remote administration and change your router's settings willy-nilly, your network is already compromised.

  15. IPv6 support from SOHO equipments? by sanf780 · · Score: 1

    I wonder how many IPv6 unready appliances do we have. For instance, I do not trust my ISP to have given me an IPv6 compatible router. And I cannot easily replace this router, Huawei HG253s V2, due to the fact that is needed for the optical trasducer.

  16. And Amazon doesn't support it by mtippett · · Score: 4, Interesting

    With the current incantation of Amazon Web Services (VPC),

    IPv6 support is currently not available for load balancers in Amazon VPC (EC2-VPC).

    http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Ela...

    So there goes lots of the internet....

    1. Re:And Amazon doesn't support it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >With the current incantation of Amazon Web Services (VPC),

      I think you mean 'incarnation'. An incantation is a 'spell' or other 'magic' words.

  17. djb explained it many years ago by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html

  18. Writing on the wall by wyattstorch516 · · Score: 1

    The writing has been on the wall for quite a while now. I think it was first discovered written underneath "As I sit here all brokenhearted..."

  19. Stupid shit by NotInHere · · Score: 1

    This has been written in a very pro-selldata approach:

    For example, if the proxy that’s providing a user’s address is located in a different city from that user, then location data that could aid in targeting ads would be unusable, he said.

    So, should ipv6 be enabled because it kills privacy? This article is stupid shit. I really don't like if internet protocols are designed with "targeting ads" in mind. This is where the google involvement into internet standardisation has brought us to: an internet built to spy on us. Google is not very much more than that: a company getting billions from running the most profitable internet ad network in the world (visit this, and search for "Advertising revenues"), and running other services in order to show those ads on.

  20. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why do ppl hate rust so bad? curious

  21. ISP by kb7oeb · · Score: 1

    T-Mobile supports IPv6, so I use IPv6 on my phone. Cox doesn't so I can't use it with the devices that generate the most traffic.

  22. hosts file by gmhowell · · Score: 3, Funny

    I would switch, but then I'd have to rewrite my hosts files.

    --
    Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
    1. Re:hosts file by Imagix · · Score: 2

      You use hosts files for something other than adblocking? :) 127.0.0.1 still works for that purpose. Or you could add ::1 entries as well.. should be a quick script to set that up.

    2. Re:hosts file by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I have heard on slashdot that a proper hosts file can block ads, all sorts of malware, reverse the negative effects of fluoride in drinking water, and solve the debate over anthropogenic global warming.

    3. Re:hosts file by Pope+Hagbard · · Score: 1

      APK's got you covered. :P

    4. Re:hosts file by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, dnsmasq works as a small and easy to configure DNS server that serves the contents of any number of /etc/hosts-style files, as well as being able to map entire domains to 127.0.0.1 or whatever you want.

    5. Re:hosts file by tepples · · Score: 1

      <APK>Yeah, but it works in user mode so it's probably slow as shit. Hosts files work in kernel mode, making them inherently faster to process with fewer context switches.</APK> :p

      But seriously, thank you for the recommendation. Do you know whether it uses an algorithm suited for efficient processing of multi-megabyte hosts files?

  23. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by PRMan · · Score: 1

    C# and Java also solve the leaky memory problem and are much more popular.

    --
    Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
  24. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by fisted · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You know what NAT defeats? End-to-end connectivity.

  25. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    And 99.9% of people don't care.

  26. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by bugs2squash · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I have come to believe that end-end connectivity is the problem that a lot of people think NAT solves.

    --
    Nullius in verba
  27. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by bpier · · Score: 1

    You know what else solves the "not enough IP addresses" problem? NAT.

    And it's a lot less of a change than switching to IPv6.

    OK, perhaps some reading would help you to understand how NAT is fine for very small networks, for the most part is a huge pain in the ass for large networks. And there's no end-to-end connectivity. NAT is a layer of obfuscation that often adds to errors for Net-Ops.

  28. Tunnelling by DrYak · · Score: 1

    That the point at which end users like us need to be proactive.
    Setup tunnels (like Sixxs and other similar IPv6 brokers), open tickets at your provider asking for 6rd support, etc. ...or just move to a country with pervasive IPv6... :-P

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
  29. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by EmeraldBot · · Score: 1

    C# and Java also solve the leaky memory problem and are much more popular.

    But not at compile time, and you can't use them in systems' programming on general hardware.

    --
    "Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
  30. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by sjames · · Score: 1

    Are you one of those people who got suckered into believing that if you zipped the zipped zip file enough iterations you could store everything in just one byte?

    There's only so much NAT can do and it's doing it now.

  31. NAT is just bandaid by DrYak · · Score: 1

    You know what else solves the "not enough IP addresses" problem? NAT.

    It's a short-term quick hack which might make some problem seem to disappear, but creates ton of other problems.
    NAT creates layers of indirection, and NAT makes machines not directly addressable.
    Require hole punching and the like even for very basic functionality (like VoIP).
    The internet was envisioned as a distributed network with all being equal peers, but NAT is contributing to the current assymetry of having a few key content distributor and every body else being a passive consumer.

    And it's a lot less of a change than switching to IPv6.

    IPv6 here. No it's not that complicated, and can be made automated. (e.g.: you don't even need to setup DHCP. your router just hands out prefixes, and the devices on the net autonomously decide their address by appending their mac address).
    With NAT, you'll end up needing to fumble with your router and open / redirect ports anyway, just to be sure that everything works as it should.

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
    1. Re:NAT is just bandaid by CauseBy · · Score: 1

      "Short term"? I guess so, for some very large values of "short".

    2. Re:NAT is just bandaid by Pentium100 · · Score: 1

      NAT creates layers of indirection, and NAT makes machines not directly addressable.

      Good. What if I want to have machines that are not directly addressable. Also, I may want to redirect the packets to various machines based on where it came from (internal network or outside).

      With NAT, you'll end up needing to fumble with your router and open / redirect ports anyway, just to be sure that everything works as it should.

      Which I will need to do with IPv6 just the same because I do not want to allow incoming connections by default.

  32. Att uverse supports ipv6 by sims+2 · · Score: 1

    Att uverse at work supports ipv6 Verizon wireless claims to support ipv6 but you can't route to their addresses stateful firewall or something So i can connect to equipment at work with either ipv4 or ipv6 but if i need to connect to anything on vzw I'm sol because the ipv4 is nat'ed and the ipv6 is firewalled

    --
    Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
    1. Re:Att uverse supports ipv6 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're almost there - using capitals for the beginning of sentences. Please, for the love of all that is sacred, can you start using some full stops? Commas help too.

  33. 6rd by DrYak · · Score: 1

    That why solution like 6rd.

    ISP can keep their current IPv4 gear, and just offer an IPv6 tunnel that the clients can use over the IPv4 infrastructure.
    No need to immediately replace all the components, and meanwhile, IPv6 is already available.

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
  34. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by EmeraldBot · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And 99.9% of people don't care.

    There are a lot of things 99.9% of people don't care about. If that's your justification...

    Me personally, I'd love my end-to-end connectivity back.

    --
    "Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
  35. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Cramer · · Score: 2

    Actually, in the process of solving the one problem it's supposed to solve, they created about 14 trillion other problems, stuck their head in the sand refusing to learn from history or listen to the industries that use the technology -- *cough*DHCP*cough*, didn't give a single second to privacy or security, and finally simply gave up without ever trying when it came to any type of transition policy/mechanism.

    We might as well be converting the internet to Appletalk. While they share a few characters in their name, IPv4 and IPv6 are radically different technologies. From an application programming level, there's not much difference, but that's never been much of a hindrance to IPv6 adoption.

  36. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Cramer · · Score: 1, Troll

    End-to-end connectivity.

    Something we've gone out of our way to intentionally break (read: FIREWALLS) on purpose for decades.

  37. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by jd2112 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They aren't being adopted because they try to solve problems that aren't really problems.

    IPv6: not enough IP addresses. The problem is very real.

    The problem with IPv6 is that alternate solutions to the IP shortage issue such as NAT are currently far less trouble and much less expensive to implement than IPv6.
    Where I work we have a LOT of computers (low-mid 6 figures) behind NAT. For the most part it works pretty well.
    I spoke with our network design engineer about IPv6 a few months ago and he said IPv6 isn't even on his radar at this time for the reason stated above. If he were implementing a network at a new company with no legacy technology to deal with he might go IPv6 but he doesn't see it much in established networks anytime soon.

    --
    Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
  38. Why? Because IPv6 isn't an extension by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    The original article adds no insights to the real issue, but Dan J. Bernstein outlines the issue
    nicely in http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html

    Choice quote: " Unfortunately, the straightforward transition plan described above does not work with the current IPv6 specifications. The IPv6 designers made a fundamental conceptual mistake: they designed the IPv6 address space as an alternative to the IPv4 address space, rather than an extension to the IPv4 address space. "

  39. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Cramer · · Score: 1

    Hah! Can you say "reference leak"? I knew that you could. (it's actually *easier* in Java/C# to leak memory, because you have no way to explicitly destroy an object, so programmers never think about it.)

  40. If my (censored) ISP supported it... by prochefort · · Score: 1

    ...I'd be more incline to do the move myself. The problem is when you ask if or when it will be available, you get the long pause and the "We don't know". My ISP, who shall remain nameless at this point, doesn't appear to have a plan. FOr the size of their organization, you would think they have a plan or at least are looking at it but their front line makes them look amateur-ish.

    I will not name my ISP but I'm in Canada and they are based out of Toronto...lol. (This should tell you who they are...)

    We should start calling them once a day and politely request IPv6 support once a day every day. (Politely because I'm canadian...lol)

  41. Dual Stack by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Windows and networks can run both side by side just fine. I think the one issue is typing the addresses, no fun at all.

    1. Re:Dual Stack by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ive always wondered this, for crap we never want to remember any IP for, give it ipv6. For stuff i want to remember, a server i pay for. ipv4. I know this makes no sense technically speaking. But im the same

  42. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by tepples · · Score: 1

    So if one wants to allow a particular protocol through the firewall that is a typical carrier grade NAT rollout, how does one go about it?

  43. DNS without DHCP by tepples · · Score: 1

    you don't even need to setup DHCP. your router just hands out prefixes, and the devices on the net autonomously decide their address by appending their mac address

    If you don't set up DHCP, then how do devices on the net bootstrap enough service to be able to resolve www.example.com. into an IPv6 address? Does each machine need to run its own recursive resolver or rely on 2001:4860:4860::8844?

    1. Re: DNS without DHCP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      SLAC

    2. Re: DNS without DHCP by jd · · Score: 4, Informative

      Anycast tells you what services are on what IP. There are other service discovery protocols, but anycast was designed specifically for IPv6 bootstrapping. It's very simple. Multicast out a request for who runs a service, the machine with the service unicasts back that it does.

      Dynamic DNS lets you tell the DNS server who lives at what IP.

      IPv6 used to have other features - being able to move from one network to another without dropping a connection (and sometimes without dropping a packet), for example. Extended headers were actually used to add features to the protocol on-the-fly. Packet fragmentation was eliminated by having per-connection MTUs. All routing was hierarchical, requiring routers to examine at most three bytes. Encryption was mandated, ad-hoc unless otherwise specified. Between the ISPs, the NAT-is-all-you-need lobbyists and the NSA, most of the neat stuff got ripped out.

      IPv6 still does far, far more than just add addresses and simplify routing (reducing latency and reducing the memory requirements of routers), but it has been watered down repeatedly by people with an active interest in everyone else being able to do less than them.

      I say roll back the protocol definition to where the neat stuff existed and let the security agencies stew.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    3. Re: DNS without DHCP by tepples · · Score: 1

      Multicast out a request for who runs a service, the machine with the service unicasts back that it does.

      I don't understand how this would work at Internet scale. Either I'm missing something fundamental, or you're claiming that IPv6 allows a host to port-scan the entire Internet for the DNS port with a multicast packet. Or were you referring to running a DNS server on your local subnet and discovering that with multicast? If so, how would that DNS server be automatically configured to use the DNS server operated by whatever ISP to which the machine is connected?

    4. Re: DNS without DHCP by tepples · · Score: 2

      Stanford Linear Accelerator Center? Small Liberal Arts College? You mean "stateless autoconfiguration", but it took until November 2010 for RFC 6106: Router Advertisement Options for DNS Configuration to bring DNS into Neighbor Discovery.

    5. Re: DNS without DHCP by bytesex · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Per-connection MTU's are a pain. You shouldn't be making that point if you think that routers having a PNAT table is a hack - having state is awful. And IPv6 has other flaws too: some headers fields are unprotected from bit-errors in transit. There is no specification as to how many extension headers I'm allowed to use. Higher layer fragments are completely unrecognisable to stateless concentrators (more so than in IPv4). UDP- and TCP-checksums are not allowed to be all zeroes (which was neat when you provided a better checksum yourself over, you know, fragments, which got ripped out).

      No there's plenty rotten in the state of IPv6. And it's not just because 'interests' ripped things out.

      --
      Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
    6. Re:DNS without DHCP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      you don't need DHCP to send the DNS resolver info, it can also be sent with SLAAC as the rest of the router info.

    7. Re: DNS without DHCP by fisted · · Score: 1

      He presumably meant to multicast the link-local multicast address, causing the link-local nameservers to advertise themselves as such.

    8. Re: DNS without DHCP by jbolden · · Score: 1

      That's interesting. Is there a good article that consolidates the what changed and why?

    9. Re: DNS without DHCP by Maritz · · Score: 1

      When it hits a router, it stops. Routers don't, generally, forward anything other than unicasts.

      --
      I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
    10. Re: DNS without DHCP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Which makes me laugh my ass off. With all those addresses DNS is more important than ever.

    11. Re: DNS without DHCP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Multicast does not mean internet scale, it simply means ability to target interested parties across multiple broadcast domains (aka sub networks).

      In the case of finding out the DNS server IPV6 address, it would allow a device inside a network ask the network for an answer, and a machine that might be 3 networks away (via multicast enabled routers) would be able to reply.

      For more usage however the DNS server is probably on the same network you are, and your multicast domain does not propagate outside our organisation.

      But there is still DHCPv6 as another way, pick your tool.

    12. Re: DNS without DHCP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Having the higher level protocols with checksums fields is an awful idea. So forget about your fictional unprotected bit-errors in transit non-issue. This should just be done at the Link Layer (Ethernet packet level) not at any other level. It was put into IP/TCP/UDP due to issues with 1970s networking that did not do this, such as SLIP/PPP/serial lines. Checksums inside the headers is just a non-sense and headache, the low level line transmission (ethernet, fiber, FDDI, whatever) already has to find a valid packet from out of the white noise anyway, and it can do so entirely in silicon very easily. If anything push another 32bits of checksum into there (moving it from IP/TCP/UDP headers if this were ever possible).

      Sure per-connection MTUs are a pain but you can not control the Internet, the use of VPNs/tunneling.

      Having stateful packet inspection routers is just fine, that can continue to be the main defence for connectivity, it would be better if the application/kernel co-operated with the SPI router to open additional inbound ports on the fly, there are protocols in IPv4 that attempt to do this. Who wants to trust their equipment vendors local firewall rules to be the only defence. I prefer having both SPI and local firewall.

    13. Re: DNS without DHCP by tepples · · Score: 1

      For more usage however the DNS server is probably on the same network you are, and your multicast domain does not propagate outside our organisation.

      I figured as much. But how would the DNS server on your home or small office network, such as the one built into a home Internet gateway appliance, find a recursive resolver? Or would it need to be a recursive resolver?

  44. just wait for ISP's to bill you per IP / outlet an by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    just wait for ISP's to bill you per IP / outlet and ban / lockout NAT.

    Right now ISP like Comcast may a lot of outlets fees on there TV side and when TV starts to really die down the last thing you want to have is to have it like the old phones days where they made for pay / rent EACH PHONE. Right now the cell phones provides make you pay per line to use the same shared pool of data / minutes and make you pay more to unlock tethering.

  45. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Then build your own network.

  46. and big business want to have INTERNAL only by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    and big business want to have INTERNAL only networks as well VPN's that let you get into stuff that you want to lock down to be inside only. A VPN with username / password does more then just basic firewall rules.

    1. Re:and big business want to have INTERNAL only by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In an ipv6 world, a VPN is just a new network hop to a globally-valid IP address range that happens to bypass the usual firewall rules. No real change to today, except that I won't have to carefully choose my home network's subnet to avoid conflicting with any of the subnets used by my employer.

  47. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Cramer · · Score: 1

    If you're behind CGN, then by definition you aren't allowed to run "servers" -- i.e. services that require outside systems to initiate connections toward you. (www, smtp, bittorrent, etc.)

  48. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    wow. i don't know if you're really familiar with ipv6. at all.

    there is some additional machinery around route assignment, and some dodgy bits in recursive assignment. but that
    stuff really is supposed to help the manageability and route aggregation for the entire network over time. not sure
    if would i want to abandon it.

    otherwise its pretty much the same old thing. maybe you could be a little more concrete in your criticism?

  49. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Also... to make things like IPSEC work through NAT involves all sorts of bastard hackery (IPsec NAT-T) that is of dubious security impact. Basically, we can perform all sorts of bastardization on every protocol to try and make it work through NAT, or we can fix the problem with adequate address space.

  50. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    With Blackjack! And Hookers!

  51. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    NAT is not a solution to the IP address shortage. it is a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound. Anyone who has ever tried to join corporate networks together that are on the same fucking 10/8 network for example knows this (oh fuck, we need to re-address all the things!). Sounds like your network design engineer is an idiot. IPv6 should be on everyone's radar at least, and any new equipment procured should have IPv6 support as a mandatory feature.

  52. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by tepples · · Score: 1

    If you're behind CGN, then by definition you aren't allowed to run "servers"

    Customers ought not to stand for inability to run servers. Therefore, customers ought not to stand for being stuck on carrier-grade NAT. Therefore, with more people than IPv4 addresses, IPv6 is a requirement.

  53. Re: IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How about the deprecation of broadcast+arp on a subnet, and the use of router advertisements? There is a lot in those two concepts that actual people running actual networks *really don't like*.

  54. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Cramer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    RA, aka. ICMP router advertisement. Abandoned circa 1970 as a "bad idea". It was a colossally bad idea in the 90's, and f'ing suicidally bad in 2000+. Yeah, let's trust whoever the f*** on the cable claims to be a router and send it our traffic. Oh, to protect my network(s) from that brain damage, I have to buy new switches that support "RA Guard".

    They didn't like DHCP. So "no f***ing DHCP in IPv6!" DHCPv6 is a bolt-on, staple-on, and bandaid addition to IPv6. It's a horribly incomplete shadow of DHCPv4, and still requires an RA tell you to use it.

    SLAAC... originally 80bit prefix plus 48bit MAC. They ignored the fact that ethernet is not the only technology in the universe. That was later amended (breaking older stacks) to 64bits. The entire purpose for the vast over-simplification of address selection (for tiny embeded systems with limit RAM/ROM/CPU) became moot 7sec into the IPng committee's existance -- IPSec shoots all three in the head, repeatedly, with artillery. Everything supports privacy extensions these days, so the logic for random address generation and duplicate address detection is there -- and rather trivial. Yet it, and SLAAC, demands the prefix-length be 64. Just to put that silliness in perspective, that's a single LAN with every ethernet device ever created (that will ever be created) in it 65,536 times over.

    This leads nicely into the blindness to history... a 64bit LAN is pure lunacy. Today and likely for several decades. But we "have an infinite amount of address space." Actually, NO, it is, in fact, quite finite: 128bits, to be exact. If we carve it up with the same pez-like abandon as the early IPv4 assignments, it will be even less "infinite". Sure, we can change the way we do things "with the next ::/8", but that dooms us to live with the colossal stupid of this ::/8 for ever. Again, dooming us (and our children's great grand-children) to live with our bullshit. We did a lot of stupid things with IPv4; and we're doing them all over again with IPv6.

  55. Tried IPv6 by melting_clock · · Score: 1

    My ISP is IPv6 capable but customers are configured for IPv4 by default. Making the change is just a matter of logging in to your account settings to enable IPv6 and making sure it is enabled on your router and devices on your home network.

    Most local ISPs do not support IPv6 so end to end IPv6 isn't really an option. There were also some strange issues with a few websites after making the switch. There were no measurable performance improvements. After trying IPv6 for several months, I couldn't see any benefits so disabled it on my account and went back to IPv4. It means a lot to those limited by public address availability but not much to the average Internet user.

    1. Re:Tried IPv6 by marka63 · · Score: 1

      The average user will notice the lack of IPv6 when a CGN is put in the IPv4 path and things like port forwarding stop working. For some ISP's that is now. For others it is in the future. Until then you really shouldn't notice whether you are using IPv4 or IPv6 to reach another site or how you are reached. If you do notice then the ISP / OS vendor isn't doing their job properly.

      Hopefully the ISP will take away the IPv6 knob and just deliver IPv6 to everyone in the near future. There aren't many IPv6 only reachable destinations yet but more are coming as more ISP's switch over to using CGN to deliver IPv4.

  56. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by CauseBy · · Score: 1

    You can't be serious.

    If I 'never think about it' in C++, my memory will explode in no time. If I 'never think about it' in Java, then maybe in some cases eventually my memory might explode, perhaps. That's not what 'easier to leak in Java' means to me.

  57. IPv6 has tons of useless changes and 1 useful one by egarland · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Automatic address assignment: Useless. DHCP is better.

    No more NAT: Useless. NAT is part of firewalls which are still needed. It's easy, and incredibly flexible.

    Better multicast routing: Useless. Multicast is dead, and will remain so.

    Simplified routing: Useless. This has been implemented outside IP

    QOS: Useless. The IPv6 implementation is wrong for how QOS is used now.

    Larger Address Space: The only useful feature in IPv6, but it was done wrong, and should be abandoned.

    We need IPv8 that does things right for the internet we have *today* not the internet we thought we'd need in 1998.

    --
    set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
  58. At some point, you will have no choice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    At some point, there will be nothing but growth. It might be tough now, but time and space is rapidly running out. When all space is gone, every new user will be using IPv6 and IPv4 will be considered 'old fashioned'.

  59. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Princeofcups · · Score: 0

    And 99.9% of people don't care.

    There are a lot of things 99.9% of people don't care about. If that's your justification...

    Me personally, I'd love my end-to-end connectivity back.

    People who think they need end-to-end connectivity for everything don't understand networking. It's not only not required, it is undesirable in most cases.

    --
    The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
  60. IPv6 is good for something by WaffleMonster · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I quite like vastly increased difficulty of scanning the whole IPv6 Internet. As soon as Comcast fixes their business class remote access via IPv4 is going bye bye. Sick of looking at all this crap in my logs. If random fools want to spam me they are going to have to work for it.

    1. Re:IPv6 is good for something by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Eh? I have a buddy who has Comcast Business Class *and* has a /64 IPv6 allocation. What's wrong with Comcast BC in your area?

  61. Can't remember adresses by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I can remember the IPv4 of ~10 of my servers. With IPv6 I'd be lucky to remember just one :(

    1. Re:Can't remember adresses by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

      Is this really that difficult?

      203.0.113.168+192.168.1.2 vs 2001:db8:71a8:1::2
      203.0.113.168+192.168.1.3 vs 2001:db8:71a8:1::3
      203.0.113.168+192.168.1.4 vs 2001:db8:71a8:1::4
      ...
      203.0.113.168+192.168.1.8 vs 2001:db8:71a8:1::8
      203.0.113.168+192.168.1.9 vs 2001:db8:71a8:1::9
      203.0.113.168+192.168.1.10 vs 2001:db8:71a8:1::10

      The v6 side is shorter! Plus of course I'm totally ignoring DNS, which is the elephant in the room here. Use DNS. This is exactly what it's for.

    2. Re:Can't remember adresses by Pentium100 · · Score: 1

      Takes longer to type, though maybe they will start making keyboards with hex numpads.

      Also, to me, remembering a number and letter combination is more difficult than just number combination (I guess it's related to the numpad).

      Besides, I never had to type external and internal IP at once. It's either the external IP (one, so not difficult to remember) or the internal IP (can be compressed as "the 192 subnet" 1 2)

    3. Re:Can't remember adresses by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

      Yeah, typing them out's a pain. I wish we could have a shorthand format like "~::2" which took the first N bits from your current network prefix. But I almost never type v6 addresses; it's usually DNS, or then copy/paste if I really am dealing with IPs for some reason. For that matter, I don't even know the v4 addresses for most of my machines -- I could give you the subnet, but I have no idea which IPs are which.

      For what it's worth, v6 assignments currently start with 2001 or 2{4,6,8,a,c}0*, which is pretty similar to the well-known RFC1918 ranges. And you'll see your own prefix often enough to remember it, hex or no hex.

    4. Re:Can't remember adresses by Pentium100 · · Score: 1

      I remember quite a few v4 IPs of my own machines, machines of the company I work for and of clients.

      Adding all that to a DNS server would be a pain (either having one private server with all of them or adding to the servers of the appropriate client, assuming the client has a DNS server, some don't, after all a network of x Windows PCs and a single samba server does not really need DNS, especially if the network is just a bunch of Windows PCs with no server).

    5. Re:Can't remember adresses by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

      And so would I if I absolutely had to -- I'd even remember the v6 addresses -- but I don't. My life is easier than that.

      We can't refuse to do v6 because "DNS is hard"; v4 with NAT everywhere is way harder.

  62. Its a solution to a problem that is now gone. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    IPv6 was thought up before NAT and was the solution to theIPv4 address space problem. With NAT and cheap router that is no longer a problem. And _why_ would you want all your variables global? That is just silly.

    IPv4 4ever!

    1. Re:Its a solution to a problem that is now gone. by darkain · · Score: 1
  63. Re:IPv6 has tons of useless changes and 1 useful o by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    THIS ^^^ a thousand times.
    Indeed, IPv6 was the vision of the future as it was seen from the past. As of today, it is useless garbage. Ever watched those sci-fi movies from the 60s and 70s? Where they thought we would by now have solved space travel problems yet our computers would still be the size of a fridge with tiny monochrome screens? That's what IPv6 is.

  64. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Ulric · · Score: 1

    I had mod points yesterday, but not today, so here's a reply instead of the "+1 insightful" you deserve. IPv6 does unsolve problems that already have solutions in IPv4. *cough* DHCP *cough* indeed.

  65. Re:IPv6 has tons of useless changes and 1 useful o by SuricouRaven · · Score: 1

    You've clearly never had to talk someone through configuring a port forward on their router so that a file transfer over IM could work, or so they could host a game server. NAT mostly works, but it turns a lot of things that should 'just work' into a need to fiddle around with the router config.

  66. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Cramer · · Score: 1

    With C and C++, the programmer has to keep up with it; thus they are constantly aware of memory usage. (well, those that aren't complete shits do.) In Java, the programmer has no say in it, so they don't think about it -- or for younger "programmers" (who may have never learned C/C++), don't know how.

  67. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Jack+Griffin · · Score: 0

    And 99.9% of people don't care.

    There are a lot of things 99.9% of people don't care about. If that's your justification...

    Me personally, I'd love my end-to-end connectivity back.

    Why? I'm an ex-Network Engineer. NAT served me fine for years and still does the job. IPv6 involves effort for no real reward, it can die in the ditch for all I care.

  68. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    LOL. You have no real idea what that means and why you want it, aside from it just sounding cool and hip, amirite?

  69. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Jack+Griffin · · Score: 1

    the 0.0001% of Nerd Customers ought not to stand for inability to run servers.

    FTFY.

    For those 0.0001%, there is AWS.

  70. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anrego · · Score: 1

    As someone who's not really a networking guy, this!

    I like the extra layer NAT provides. It's no substitute for a firewall of course, but having your internal boxes not publicly addressable at all adds an extra layer of warm and fuzzy.

    Is this attitude wrong? Probably. But it is also pervasive.

  71. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anrego · · Score: 1

    I doubt they'll go this route, but what would make sense to me would be to give customers the option to request a direct connection.

    Between cell phones and people who have no interest in running a server (even unintentionally), there's probably only a small portion of people out there who really need a direct connection, and there are probably plenty of IPs to support them if you put everyone else on CGN.

  72. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by ttucker · · Score: 1

    Probably closer to 99.999%

  73. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by ttucker · · Score: 1

    the 0.0001% of Nerd Customers ought not to stand for inability to run servers.

    FTFY. For those 0.0001%, there is AWS.

    Wah wah, for some reason it needs to run on under powered hardware in an uncontrolled environment over an asymmetrical residential connection, because, for reasons!

  74. Hurricane Electric by darkain · · Score: 1

    I'm in this weird bubble where I live. I'm currently on the city owned cable internet here in Tacoma WA. This ISP has some really shitty upstream connections depending on what site I'm trying to access. I also have Hurricane Electric's IPv6 Tunnel Broker service on my router itself, so my entire network has public IPv6 over IPv4. The route to the HE server in Seattle WA (~35mi away) seems to ALWAYS be stable. HE's backbone is also rock-solid world wide. Sites that are IPv6 enabled, I generally have a much better / faster / lower latency route to them, simply because my ISP has shit IPv4 routes leaving our local region.

    Some major companies that are or are not IPv6 enabled:
    google: yes
    facebook: yes (interesting note: they always have :face:b00c: in their IPv6 addresses)
    wikipedia: yes
    mozilla.org: yes
    amazon: no
    AWS anything: mostly no (they have some half-assed thing on their load balancer service that sucks ass, but nothing else)
    slashdot: no
    twtter: no
    microsoft.com: no

  75. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Rhywden · · Score: 1

    Yeah, the problem is though that some people then reach for NAT as the sole solution. That's the reason why my school's network is a triple NAT - 172.16/12 to 192.168/16 to 10/8.

    For my computer science course I recently askd for putting a server in our school's network so we don't have to strain our outbound bandwidth (only 10 Mbit). I also considered asking for it to be reachable from the outside - but after seeing that setup, I promptly discarded the idea.

  76. IPv6 is not an upgrade, it's a totally new thing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The problem of why IPv6 isn't spreading as much as its proponents would like is that it is a completely new, distinct and separate protocol.

    Currently; *everything* on the Internet uses IPv4 - It is the Lingua Franca of the Internet.

    IPv6 has absolutely no relation to IPv4 apart from the name. There is currently no way for IPv4 hosts to talk to IPv6 hosts easily or simply, and this is a critical flaw IMHO with IPv6.

    With IPv6, you essentially have to throw away the WHOLE IPv4 Internet and start again; This is why the roll out is going so slowly; You are effectively building the Internet Mk2 from scratch, bit by bit, with this new system.

    IPv4 will be around for a long time because of this for the same reason we still use x86 - There are too many current and legacy systems which only speak IPv4.

    It still boggles my mind that they didn't consider interoperability at all when they were developing IPv6; If there was a standard for bridging between the two systems so IPv4 and IPv6 hosts could communicate with each other this rollout would be moving a lot faster.
    And IPv6 still has the same shortsighted flaws for futureproofing as IPv4; It lacks extensibility. Sure it looks infeasibly big now, but they keep saying that and then we find we run out of space. It wasn't that long ago when a terabyte was considered unbelievably big yet now computers routinely come with drives of such capacities!

  77. I need a IPv6 firewall by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'm still running IPv4 at home because I don't have a IPv6 firewall. My router, with NAT, shuts down my external facing ports. I've been meaning to setup IPv6 for a few years now, but I always do some research, and then drop the idea when I don't know how to secure my home network.

    1. Re:I need a IPv6 firewall by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

      It isn't particularly hard. Just drop connections that come from the internet by default. Something like this in ip6tables on the router:

      ip6tables -A FORWARD -p icmpv6 -j ACCEPT
      ip6tables -A FORWARD -m state --state INVALID -j DROP
      ip6tables -A FORWARD -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
      ip6tables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o ppp0 -j ACCEPT
      ip6tables -A FORWARD -p tcp -j REJECT --reject-with tcp-reset
      ip6tables -A FORWARD -j REJECT --reject-with icmp6-adm-prohibited

      Basically it's exactly the same as you do on v4, except you don't add a -j MASQUERADE rule. You can open holes in it by doing:
      ip6tables -A FORWARD -p tcp -d <dst IP> --dport 3389 -j ACCEPT
      or even something like:
      ip6tables -A FORWARD -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
      to allow inbound ssh to all machines at once.

    2. Re:I need a IPv6 firewall by Pentium100 · · Score: 1

      I usually use DROP instead of REJECT. Makes port scanners take longer to scan.

    3. Re:I need a IPv6 firewall by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

      I figure that the port scanner doesn't really care how long it takes to run, but I really appreciate getting proper error messages back from programs when my firewall blocks stuff. You could perhaps involve "-m recent" and start dropping when too many connections come in from a single source.

    4. Re:I need a IPv6 firewall by Pentium100 · · Score: 1

      When a program does not work, I just run tcpdump (on both ends) and figure out the problem. A port scanner may only be able to scan a limited number of hosts at once, so if it spends a couple of hours trying to scan me, it won't scan others. Also, if the scanning is not automated (like a bot or virus) but is instead because somebody ran nmap, they might get bored and stop.

      This is especially useful if the server does not have publicly accessible resources (that is, all incoming connections are limited by source IP). Dropping packets makes it look like that host isn't even there. Also useful in case of a DOS (that is not enough to completely saturate the uplink) as there are no packets going back.

    5. Re:I need a IPv6 firewall by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

      "Just". I'd rather be told if my packets are reaching the remote end or not, rather than have to break out a microscope and go hunting. Assuming I even have enough access at both ends to do that.

  78. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by fisted · · Score: 1

    No. Just, no. A NAT and a firewall are entirely different things and used for different purposes. Please familiarize yourself with basic networking.

  79. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by fisted · · Score: 1

    By definition? What?

  80. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by fisted · · Score: 1

    God dammit. I see what you're trying to say, but seriously this is so wrong. It's no big deal (i.e. easy to implement) to have End-to-End connectivity and still not be "exposed" to the oh-so-hostile Internet.
    It is a big deal (i.e. impossible) to actually get End-to-End connecitivity when you do need it but find yourself behind a (carrier grade) NAT.

    Breaking this one fundamental principle for the added comfort of being able to just deploy a NAT and feel reasonably secure is totally not worth it. Really, stop.

  81. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by fisted · · Score: 1

    As someone who's not really a networking guy

    Yeah. It's showing.

  82. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by cardpuncher · · Score: 2

    >other people will solve them

    Other people are solving the real problem of address exhaustion, just not in the way that the IETF intended.

    Even the IPv6 enthusiasts accepted that adoption would have to be widespread before the regional registries started running out of IPv4 addresses if it were going to work as a solution. That hasn't happened and it's now just too late - don't forget this started 22 years ago when most of the host systems were still under the control of education and government institutions and migration could have occurred much faster than it could now.

    The thing that still irks me is that there'd been a very similar and very public (though much less protracted) attempt to deal with similar address limitations in DECnet that had failed miserably and the IETF chose to turn a deaf ear to those experiences which have simply been repeated on a larger scale with IPv6.

    The problem of address exhaustion remains. IPv6 is no longer the solution, it's time came and went. A different group of "other people" are now attempting to keep the Internet roughly connected, but I'm afraid end-to-end connectivity is gone because the solution that offered it has failed the acceptance test.

  83. Re:IPv6 has tons of useless changes and 1 useful o by Lord+Crc · · Score: 1

    NAT mostly works, but it turns a lot of things that should 'just work' into a need to fiddle around with the router config.

    I don't see how. Either you keep essentially all ports open to your public IP at all times (bad idea), or you need to open ports on demand.

    The latter requires the same fiddling around with the router config as with NAT, assuming UPnP isn't used. If UPnP is enabled it's not an issue with NAT either and the whole point is moot.

  84. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by fisted · · Score: 1

    That's only because dumb people (like you) don't realize in the first place when it would be useful. p2p comms with both ends behind a NAT?
    Sure, i mean routing your shit through a 3rd party server also makes it "work", but it's arguably undesirable, except for dumb people (like you, again) who do not care. Happy Skyping.

  85. Re: IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    IPv6 utterly sucks, though. There are much easier ways to solve the address exhaustion problem; and it actually makes the routing problem worse (and no, location/id split doesn't solve that any more than CIDR did).

  86. Y2K38 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I figure the problem will resolve itself by Y2K38. After all, legacy machines will have issues by then, right?

    I think one June, when Google did that thing with IPv6, my browser wouldn't load google.com until I turned off IPv6 on my XP machine.

  87. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anrego · · Score: 1

    It's compelling arguments like that which will surely convince people to give a shit about ipv6.

  88. Re:IPv6 is not an upgrade, it's a totally new thin by Dagger2 · · Score: 1

    It's not that it wasn't considered. The biggest problem with interop between v6 and v4 is that you can't really do interop between v6 and v4. The v4 header only has 32 bits available for the dest host, so there's no way to specify which v6 host you want to send packets to.

    Unless you count NAT64-like solutions or 6to4-like solutions, both of which do already exist.

    And IPv6 still has the same shortsighted flaws for futureproofing as IPv4; It lacks extensibility. Sure it looks infeasibly big now, but they keep saying that and then we find we run out of space. It wasn't that long ago when a terabyte was considered unbelievably big yet now computers routinely come with drives of such capacities!

    It does lack a way of expanding the address space, but we'd need to actually run out of space first for that to be a problem, and 128 bits really is a lot. 1 TB drives and v6 are in completely different ballparks: if v4 is 1 TB, then v6 is 80 million billion yottabytes. There are 300 million /64s available... for each person on the planet. And each /64 has essentially no limit on the number of hosts it supports. I could understand an argument that each person might end up running billions of computers (which would be no problem at all), but a quarter of a billion networks? Each?

    And that's just using the 2000::/3 space. There are five more unused /3s available, so we could do it all over again five more times (presumably with smaller-than-/64 subnets) before actually running out.

  89. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You know what defeats end-to-end connectivity with IPv4 addresses? IPv6.

  90. Buried Lede by ThatsNotPudding · · Score: 1

    Because IPv4 has no native security, it's vulnerable to a much wider range of attacks...

    I think we might have found the root cause for the glacially slow rollout.

  91. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by jbolden · · Score: 1

    NAT was a hack used when we started running out of addresses in the early 1990s. It was never a solution to problem. And it is a hack that can't work long term. We already have about 300m public IP addressed with fixed port needs (websites, SIP, FTP...). Moreover carrier IP is the same cost and possibly even more complex than NAT to implement.

    Carrier NAT is a terrible idea.

  92. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by jbolden · · Score: 1

    Of course it is pervasive. Since the early 1990s we've had 20 years where the internet has grown increasingly hierarchical and not flat. Our technological stack and psychology have grown up around that. When it becomes flat there will be a bit of adjusting. Then people will get the huge advantages when every endpoint is a server.

  93. IPv6 by ledow · · Score: 1

    My external servers - all IPv6, publish AAAA records, all services available on IPv6.

    My home - IPv6 compatible router, IPv6 compatible network, IPv6-compatible clients, even IPv6 VPN to my servers.

    What I don't see - IPv6 compatible websites. Slashdot is not IPv6 reachable. Nor is The Register. If even the IT crowd can't manage it, what chance do other places have? But that's no big deal, so long as they're IPv4-reachable anyway.

    What I don't have - an IPv6 compatible ISP.

    I can't use any IPv6 protocol except for 6to4, but the local 6to4 relay is "not supported" by my ISP and not run by them. That puts me at the behest of whatever routing is set up for that magic 6to4 address at any given point.

    Sure, I could go with Sixxs etc. but that requires all kinds of signup. It's actually easier to just VPN to my IPv6-ready external server over IPv5 and bypass worrying the in-between link entirely.

    It works. It's up. I receive email from third-party servers solely over IPv6 every day.

    And then, you find that Google mail and DNS is IPv6. The occasional website is IPv6. The odd mail server is IPv6. And nothing else. And they are all also on IPv4 too. All that hassle, hardware and configuration and I gain... nothing.

    Until we literally say "IPv4 is going to be marked for obsoletion in 6 months, and routing for it will going off on the 1st of Jan 2016, worldwide", nothing is going to change. Absolutely nothing.

    Slashdot - I'm invoking my rule again. You can post articles on the IPv6 deployment when you BOTHER to put a single AAAA record on your DNS.

  94. Allocation by Going_Digital · · Score: 1

    If I could easily apply for an IPv6 allocation that was portable then I would implement it. However I can only use our ISP supplied addresses, so it is not worth the trouble as renumbering would have to happen every time we switch ISPs.

  95. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by jbolden · · Score: 1

    Carrier grade NAT would likely have been probably slightly more expensive to implement than IPv6 for carriers. Of course NAT for companies doesn't cost much because NAT is a very mature technology and IPv4 stack is now built around the expectation of NAT. But that's not the right comparison.

    As for the network engineer and IPv6 in private companies. If you aren't directly serving home / small business customers then there likely is nothing that is going to drive you off IPv4 in the next few years. Your ISP for your website may need IPv6 but internally you won't. Where it is a problem for you though is tunnels. IPv4 network equipment doesn't understand IPv6 tunneling. IPv6 services will make your IPv4 network security look like swiss cheese. For many companies that still doesn't matter in which case you have time.

    Until the carriers clean up IPv6 for home / small business there really isn't much reason for most businesses to worry. But that's a yet not a never.

  96. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by FireFury03 · · Score: 1

    As someone who's not really a networking guy, this!

    I like the extra layer NAT provides. It's no substitute for a firewall of course, but having your internal boxes not publicly addressable at all adds an extra layer of warm and fuzzy.

    Is this attitude wrong? Probably. But it is also pervasive.

    That attitude is definitely wrong. The warm fuzzyness you're currently feeling is false security - lots of ways to trick a NAT into giving access to internal machines that you think are unaddressable. What you need is a stateful firewall - that gives you real security without breaking all the stuff that NAT does.

  97. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by FireFury03 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    People who think they need end-to-end connectivity for everything don't understand networking. It's not only not required, it is undesirable in most cases.

    Its undesirable in _some_ cases, it's absolutely required in others. So if you have a single IP address and you have to NAT everything, you win in the "some cases" situation and you lose for "others" (even worse with CGNAT). If you get rid of NAT and stick a stateful firewall in, you get the best of both worlds and can choose the best for the situation at hand.

  98. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by jbolden · · Score: 1

    You mentioned DECnet. I was involved in that migration in a company. Migration can occur very fast if they are a priority. And they will become a priority if things are allowed to break. Breaking right now is happening as you mentioned on the area of connectivity that problem is going to get worse.

    We have the technology for easy migration and we have the blueprint.

    1) Carriers migrate
    2) Internet companies (web hosting, CDN...) migrate
    3) Home / small business user migrate
    4) B2B communications migrate
    5) Company's internal networks migrate

    We are wrapping up (1) and (2) and staring on (3).

  99. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Maritz · · Score: 1

    They aren't being adopted because they try to solve problems that aren't really problems.

    No. They really are problems. Not enough addresses, too much NAT, too much PAT, yeah these are problems.

    --
    I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
  100. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Maritz · · Score: 1

    NAT is an ugly fudge than makes things more complex than they need to be. That makes it sub-optimal as a solution to the lack of address space.

    --
    I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
  101. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Maritz · · Score: 2

    Luckily for the rest of us, and hard as you might find this to believe - it's not all about you.

    --
    I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
  102. Re:IPv6 has tons of useless changes and 1 useful o by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    With IPv6 it's one rule at the firewall. With NAT, you need to forward a port from NAT device to NAT device, all the way from the carrier-grade NAT device at the ISP border router to your own - and most of those you will have to pay your ISP to have any forwarding added to.

    Oh, did you mean "NAT as it existed before we ran out of IP addresses"? Well, that's why we need IPv6, now when we are talking about NAT, it includes carrier-grade NAT.

  103. Google Priority to IPv6 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Google should give search result priority to IPv6 sites. This will provide a nudge to get the momentum of SEO sensitive businesses on the right path.

  104. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They will care once a large percentage cannot accept incoming connections. On a local network with NAT, you have UPNP, but you do not get that with carrier-grade NAT. Multiplayer games all over the place will start having issues. Console games do some sketchy things to allow other players without port-forwarding to play, like using other players as a proxy.

  105. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Maritz · · Score: 1

    But we "have an infinite amount of address space." Actually, NO, it is, in fact, quite finite: 128bits, to be exact. If we carve it up with the same pez-like abandon as the early IPv4 assignments, it will be even less "infinite".

    Haven't heard anyone call it infinite. Sounds like a bit of a straw man. But I have heard it's enough to give each square centimetre of the Earth 2 million addresses each, or to uniquely address every cubic foot of the Milky Way galaxy, so it is quite a lot.

    --
    I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
  106. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anrego · · Score: 1

    I get that NAT isn't a firewall, but I think it makes a nice second layer.

    Lets say I'm using shorewall, and for whatever reason I break my config and don't notice.

    Consider: (big bad internet) -- (broken shorewall + nat) -- (internal boxes)

    Suddenly you can't get to anything I was forwarding (which I'll probably notice) and yes there are probably effective attacks to get at my internal boxes through the nat, but at least it's not wide open as I imagine it would be in a configuration without nat.

  107. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I don't think you've played any games in the past 10 years. A lot of games require port-forwarding or UPNP to be working if you want to play. UPNP is pretty much enabled out of the box, so port-forwarding is transparent to most users, but CG-NAT would break that and consoles everywhere would cease working for many games.

  108. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    $70 for a 70/70 dedicated fiber connection over here. ISP says it's great for web hosting. My 0.2ms ping agrees. 7ms to Chicago. My trace routes go like this Me -> ISP -> Level 3. 1 hop. fk yeah! Freaking 0.2ms hop at that.

  109. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Because it HASN'T served you for years as evidenced here.

    Your "knowledge" that it "still does it's job" is irrelevant- because you were dead wrong on the subject all that time. You're an ignorant and arrogant fool that nobody should give the time of day to on this subject.

  110. Re:IPv6 has tons of useless changes and 1 useful o by jbolden · · Score: 1

    That's a good argument. I would agree the switch to IPv6 has taken too long and thus it has legacy problems already before implementation. I'd pick IPv6 over IPv4 but I'd certainly pick something better were that on the table as an option.

  111. Works for me by Chandon+Seldon · · Score: 1

    I've had IPv6 connectivity for the past 8 years, and native IPv6 connectivity through Comcast for the past two. The last time I installed a new modem and router, the configuration was automatic.

    The deployment process has been extremely slow, but in 10 years, most connections will be happening over IPv6 and most people won't even notice. Even tech savvy people will mostly find out when they try to debug something and realize the IP address is funny looking.

    --
    -- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
  112. FreedomBox by tepples · · Score: 1

    people who have no interest in running a server

    Are they just unaware of what advantages running a home server can offer? Or have the benefits of a server been explained to them after which they still decline?

    1. Re:FreedomBox by Anrego · · Score: 1

      Privacy isn't of great concern to many. It's not even an issue of comprehension. There are people who understand the privacy implications of things like facebook, but still happily participate because the social aspects are more appealing to them.

      Social media in general has caught on because a great many people _want_ to share everything about themselves to everyone. Sites like what you linked to do a fairly poor job of convincing such people because they:

      - Tend to focus on unrelatable things (like oppression in other countries, or oppression of people at home they can't personally relate to).
      - Are written from an opposite viewpoint where privacy is just automatically an important thing that everyone should want. If social media has shown us anything, it's not to many people. The FSF is at the forefront of this too. When you write a blathering piece where you just assume your position from the beginning, people who don't already agree just roll their eyes, and the only ones you convince are those who already agreed.
      - Not the case here, but often times focus on rare events where some shared information is used against them.

      Very least, going as far as running a server at home, even one that's basically a pre-configured appliance, is a fairly extreme step for most non-geeks to take unless you can make a really compelling argument that doesn't involve dystopian futures and acid mines.

    2. Re:FreedomBox by CronoCloud · · Score: 1

      What part of "The vast majority of people aren't Slashdot reading nerds and don't have the same needs or desires.", do you not understand

    3. Re:FreedomBox by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      People in general don't care about security. If they did, we'd have more of it. FreedomBox is a niche product at best.

      Assuming they cared, it looks like they're targeting Debian, which is an OS segment that very few people are in. Sure, Ubuntu is a great distro for the newcomer, but most people run Windows and most of the ones who don't run MacOSX. I'm not real optimistic about this running on MS Windows any time soon. "Windows" doesn't appear in the FAQ.

      I'm also going to go out on a limb and suggest that their goal of making FreedomBox as easy as using a smartphone might not be realized.

      I'm not trying to knock FreedomBox, but it's not going to drive mass adoption of anything.

      If you can come up with a use for a home server that runs on Windows, offers something most people want, and is easy to install and run, I'd love to hear about it.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
  113. Configuring the link-local nameserver itself by tepples · · Score: 1

    It's still a chicken-and-egg question. How does the link-local nameserver in customer-owned equipment configure itself?

  114. easy solution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    have the porn industry convert and all the issues will get solved quickly. Adaptation will follow ASAP.

  115. IPv6 too long by BeemanIT · · Score: 1

    I personally believe that IPv6 is just too many numbers for most people to input and remember when something is needed to be done quickly. If they could only make an alternate version slightly shorter. I do like the concept of the double colon (xx::xx) for a shortcut.

  116. Re:IPv6 has tons of useless changes and 1 useful o by Lord+Crc · · Score: 1

    Oh, did you mean "NAT as it existed before we ran out of IP addresses"? Well, that's why we need IPv6, now when we are talking about NAT, it includes carrier-grade NAT.

    If you're behind a carrier grade NAT then fiddling with your own router config won't help much will it. That's the part I quoted and objected to.

  117. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Don't worry about it too much. :) There's always someone in Slashdot who starts the "it's not a real firewall" whining when one mentions that he is using NAT to block incoming connections.

  118. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Coren22 · · Score: 1

    I run my own Teamspeak server, PPTP VPN, multiple game servers for my friends and I, a Plex server and probably numerous other things that will break. Please show me how I can trade that in for AWS that will run out of IPs as well some time soon.

    As far as underpowered hardware, I have a dual quad Xeon with 64 GB ram. Uncontrolled, well you got me there, I don't have redundant air conditioning. Asymmetrical, nope, FiOS went Symmetric already. But, running all of this is much cheaper than paying someone else to run all these services for me.

    --
    APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
  119. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Coren22 · · Score: 1

    He is trying to make the tired argument that residential connections aren't supposed to run servers. Technically you can get disconnected by your ISP for it, but FiOS actually seems to encourage it. Why else would they have symmetric for all their network?

    --
    APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
  120. Counting IPv6 addresses - one, two, twenty-three.. by userw014 · · Score: 1

    I've been playing around with my own (tunneled) IPv6 prefix at home for some time now. (I think Comcast will deliver IPv6 to me - but I haven't bothered yet.)

    I run IPv6 on some of my home LANs, but not on the one I have with legacy equipment on it like webcams, TV sets, printers, and other "Internet of Things" like devices that never get patches. Those networks get the usual NAT'd IPv4 stuff.

    On my IPv6 networks, I have EUI addressing turned off - a pseudo-random address gets generated from time to time (within the IPv6 LAN network prefix), and I often see those devices having multiple simultaneous IPv6 addresses. I believe that this is the default anyway for modern OSes.

    And so I think that any counting of adoption by full 128-bit IPv6 addresses will dramatically over-count IPv6 adoption - even if NAT could be taken into account. Google's technicians will know this. Google's marketeers might not care.

  121. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by petermgreen · · Score: 1

    There's only so much NAT can do

    True

    and it's doing it now.

    Nowhere near it, there are loads of public IPs that have only one or a handful of systems behind them. How many systems you can put behind a public IP will depend on the details of what they are doing and the details of the NAT implementation but I would think 100 machines per internet IP is more than feasiable.

    On the server side https hosting traditionally needed one IP per certificate (with each certificate covering either one hostname or a small group of hostnames) but SNI removes that need and with windows XP and andriod 2.x gradually fading using SNI starts to look like a more and more reasonable option.

    I don't like the world that ISP level IPv4 nat would give but pretending it's not a feasible soloution is silly.

    --
    note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
  122. Re:IPv6 has tons of useless changes and 1 useful o by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You clearly don't understand what NAT is. Though NAT is included with almost all firewalls, it is not there to address security. It was introduced to conserve the limited address space that IPv4 provides. Since IPv6 greatly expands the number of available addresses, it is painfully obvious that NAT will go away for a great majority of users.

    Will NAT go away in an all IPv6 world? No. It will fill some niche for those that have a specific need for NAT. A niche that 99% of home users, much like yourself, won't need or even understand.

    NAT is gateway functionality and was never meant to address security.

  123. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by CronoCloud · · Score: 1

    This is part of the AUP of my local ISP, the cable company:

    By way of example (without limitation) you may not:

            Use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from your premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your premises. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited to, email, Web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers;

    They don't mind if you do things on a temporary basis (I've accessed a machine via ssh and ran a IRC server for a few hours), but they don't want 24/7 servers on home connections.

    They also don't mind occasional use of bittorrent for things like Linux distros, software updates and the like. But they don't want you running a BT client 24/7.

  124. Re:IPv6 has tons of useless changes and 1 useful o by egarland · · Score: 1

    > Though NAT is included with almost all firewalls, it is not there to address security.

    You missed my point. Firewalls are needed for security, and if you have a firewall, you can do NAT. Not needing NAT becomes a non-feature because it doesn't significantly impact complexity or cost.

    --
    set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
  125. Re:just wait for ISP's to bill you per IP / outlet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    for ISP's to

    "ISPs".

    Right now ISP like Comcast may a lot of outlets fees

    "now, an ISP".
    "may impose a lot of" or "may charge a lot of".
    "outlet".

    on there TV side

    "their".

    the cell phones provides make you pay

    "providers".

    etc.

    Slashdot thoughtfully provides a "Preview" button on its post/reply page. Please use it.

  126. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by sjames · · Score: 1

    But it isn't feasible. On the server side, you can stuff a number of virtual websites behind a single IP, but many customers want their own VM (sometimes for very good reasons). There are things other than http(s) on the net.

    On the client side, there is a matter of administrative control. Who will own the NAT device that you and your neighbors all sit behind so that you can be NATed behind a single IP? Do you want to leave it up to your ISP if a rule can be added to the NAT box so you can ssh into your network through a selected port? What if your neighbor wants the same port for something else?

    It sounds more like a desperate last resort than a real solution. Compared to that kind of pain, upgrading to IPv6 is a no-brainer.

  127. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by petermgreen · · Score: 1

    But it isn't feasible. On the server side, you can stuff a number of virtual websites behind a single IP, but many customers want their own VM (sometimes for very good reasons).

    Reverse load balancers could be an option here if/when IPv4 prices rise to a level where the IPv4 address is a significant part of the cost of a VM.

    There are things other than http(s) on the net.

    While obviously literally true afaict services other than http(s) and mail are the exception not the rule.

    On the client side, there is a matter of administrative control. Who will own the NAT device that you and your neighbors all sit behind so that you can be NATed behind a single IP? Do you want to leave it up to your ISP if a rule can be added to the NAT box so you can ssh into your network through a selected port?

    Just because you and I don't like the implications of something doesn't make it unfeasible.

    It sounds more like a desperate last resort than a real solution.

    Sure.

    Compared to that kind of pain, upgrading to IPv6 is a no-brainer.

    For better or worse the internet lacks any strong central authority. If it had one maybe we would have had ubiquotous deployment of IPv6 in the 2000s allowing for an IPv4 sunset now.

    That hasn't happened though, there are still loads of clients and servers that are IPv4 only (including the one we are discussing this on).

    So the choice now is not between "deploy horrible mechanisms to keep IPv4 on life support" and "deploy ipv6". The choice now is between "deploy horrible mechanisms to keep IPv4 on life support without deploying IPv6" and "horrible mechanisms to keep IPv4 on life support and also IPv6".

    While i'm in favour of the latter denying that the former is an option is just self-delusion.

    --
    note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
  128. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by david_thornley · · Score: 1

    In C++, use smart pointers with a little intelligence and discipline. That's what they're there for.

    --
    "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
  129. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by sjames · · Score: 1

    The thing is, it wouldn't just suck for people who know what they're doing. VOIP and some games won't work well that way either. Anything like that needs to be seen as a stopgap only running in parallel with IPv6 deployment. There actually are people claiming that more NATting faster is an actual solution to the problem INSTEAD of IPv6.

    It's important not to mistake the bridge to the solution for the actual solution.

    One way it might help is that it will make IPv4 feel very much like the second class citizen.

  130. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by CauseBy · · Score: 1

    Yeah yeah. Certainly a good programmer who writes perfect code with faultless discipline can write C++ code with no memory leaks. I totally agree. But that is the rare case, not the common case. Or, at least, memory leaks are fairly common in C code. Memory leaks in C++ were the #1 most famous kind of bug. Memory leaks in Java are so rare that I can only think of one in fifteen years of programming -- and that one was long ago due to circular data structures which today are garbage collected.

    The original claim was it's actually *easier* in Java/C# to leak memory which I claim is plainly wrong.

  131. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    1st reason: service security starts with the physical security of the server. 2nd reason: when did God say that amazon is owed a tithe?

  132. IPv6 adoption is now going backwards in fact by mykro76 · · Score: 1

    My Australian ISP (Internode, now iiNet) was one of the leading promoters of IPv6 and was one of the first to offer such connections, years ago. Many customers used IPv6 with no issues for several years. Then Netflix came to Australia. Netflix, in addition to some Australian digital TV channels and a few local mirrors is excluded from the ISP's broadband quotas. But it turns out, quota exclusion only works for IPv4. So people set their account back to a IPv4 connection.

    Because of this, valuable momentum in IPv6 adoption has been lost.

  133. So ya wanna be an ISP? by knorthern+knight · · Score: 1

    > Are they just unaware of what advantages running a home server can offer? Or have
    > the benefits of a server been explained to them after which they still decline?

    Linux nerd here... sorry, but I have better things to do with my time than worry about constantly patching and running smtp/web/ftp servers, and constantly monitoring logs, etc, etc, etc. Having a life gets in the way of an internet.

    I have a reasonable idea of how vulnerable linux servers are on the open internet. It's mind-boggling how easily the average Joe/Jane Lunchbucket gets pwnd/social-engineered even with a client machine behind a stateful firewall. Give every one of them a server, and if you think today's botnets are something, you ain't seen nothing yet.

    --

    I'm not repeating myself
    I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
  134. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Olipro · · Score: 1

    a score of 5 for this tired old ignorant shit? Alright, let's get cracking.

    RA, aka. ICMP router advertisement. Abandoned circa 1970 as a "bad idea". It was a colossally bad idea in the 90's, and f'ing suicidally bad in 2000+. Yeah, let's trust whoever the f*** on the cable claims to be a router and send it our traffic. Oh, to protect my network(s) from that brain damage, I have to buy new switches that support "RA Guard"

    Right, because DHCP totally solves spoofing problems yeah?

    They didn't like DHCP. So "no f***ing DHCP in IPv6!" DHCPv6 is a bolt-on, staple-on, and bandaid addition to IPv6. It's a horribly incomplete shadow of DHCPv4, and still requires an RA tell you to use it.

    No it isn't. You can do practically everything that DHCPv4 does with DHCPv6. Yes you should send an RA, so what? DHCPv4 is as much if not more of a bolt-on than DHCPv6 is (in so far as it's absolutely not part of the protocol stack whatsoever)

    SLAAC... originally 80bit prefix plus 48bit MAC. They ignored the fact that ethernet is not the only technology in the universe. That was later amended (breaking older stacks) to 64bits. The entire purpose for the vast over-simplification of address selection (for tiny embeded systems with limit RAM/ROM/CPU) became moot 7sec into the IPng committee's existance -- IPSec shoots all three in the head, repeatedly, with artillery. Everything supports privacy extensions these days, so the logic for random address generation and duplicate address detection is there -- and rather trivial. Yet it, and SLAAC, demands the prefix-length be 64. Just to put that silliness in perspective, that's a single LAN with every ethernet device ever created (that will ever be created) in it 65,536 times over.

    Just to put YOUR silliness in perspective: the remaining number of bits is 2^61 (within 2000::/3 obviously) which comes to 2,305,843,009,213,693,952 /64s. Get a damn sense of perspective. As far as "older stacks" go... clearly not anything seriously used in production today.

    This leads nicely into the blindness to history... a 64bit LAN is pure lunacy. Today and likely for several decades. But we "have an infinite amount of address space." Actually, NO, it is, in fact, quite finite: 128bits, to be exact. If we carve it up with the same pez-like abandon as the early IPv4 assignments, it will be even less "infinite". Sure, we can change the way we do things "with the next ::/8", but that dooms us to live with the colossal stupid of this ::/8 for ever. Again, dooming us (and our children's great grand-children) to live with our bullshit. We did a lot of stupid things with IPv4; and we're doing them all over again with IPv6.

    No, your failure to grasp the scale of numbers is pure lunacy. If we somehow manage to fuck up 2000::/3, there's several times the size of the current global IP space waiting to be spun up with the flick of a pen, so we have plenty of opportunity to make mistakes.

  135. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by phantomfive · · Score: 1

    Why? I'm an ex-Network Engineer.

    Guess now we know why you are 'ex.' You don't sound like you understand the situation and other people's needs very well.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  136. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by phantomfive · · Score: 1

    The problem is that people like you 'never think about it' and people like me get paid to clean up after your mess.

    Come to think of it, that's not a problem, I get paid for it. Keep sucking, bro.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  137. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by phantomfive · · Score: 1

    C# and Java don't solve the memory leak problem, and those who think they do are invariably sucky programmers.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  138. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by phantomfive · · Score: 1

    Eh, IPv6 is spreading more and more. If you run netstat on your phone, you'll probably see a few ipv6 connections open.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  139. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by ttucker · · Score: 1

    I note that you did not specify which Xeon chips you actually have, which kind of suggests a set of E5450 or something similar. FiOS does not charge you enough for a continually saturated link, whether it is 25 or 500mbps, so you are still contending with some hard and secret GB limit (starts to make the $/GB model seem more appealing). Game servers tend to be pretty light, and most could run on very modest AWS hardware. Beyond that, EC2 costs nothing when the machines are powered down, and they provide a robust API & access control that would easily allow your friends to boot/stop the machines on demand. That setup is how my friends game, and you really should at least consider it when the service life of your server machine finally ends.

  140. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by david_thornley · · Score: 1

    That's not what I said. I said that a reasonable amount of local discipline will avoid memory leaks.

    When you allocate memory, assign it to a unique_ptr or shared_ptr. Do not change the type of the pointer thereafter. Allow raw pointers only for non-owning pointers, so deleting a pointer is an obvious mistake. This does not require perfect code or flawless discipline. All deviations can easily be spotted in a code review.

    I wasn't talking about C memory leaks, since C is a different language. C++ used to use C-style memory management (with constructors and destructors attached), but the original standard had one sort of smart pointer, the second was in the 2003 Technical Report, and the original smart pointer was replaced with something much better in the 2011 Standard.

    --
    "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
  141. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by CauseBy · · Score: 1

    Right right, I'm not trying to say you made the claim, but my response is to Cramer's statement: it's actually *easier* in Java/C# to leak memory.

  142. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by CauseBy · · Score: 1

    Okay, sounds good! Come work where I work and maybe someday you can find a bug to fix. So far, sucking has resulted in no memory leaks, but maybe it will someday.

  143. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Jack+Griffin · · Score: 1

    Because I didn't waste company money on white elephants and have since been promoted and earning double what I was then? Yeah, you got it in one.

  144. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by phantomfive · · Score: 1

    Heh.....got promoted to management, and now you don't know what you're talking about. Typical.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  145. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by phantomfive · · Score: 1

    So far, sucking has resulted in no memory leaks,

    It has, you just don't know how to find them.

    Either that, or you don't write anything significant. Which sounds likely.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  146. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by CauseBy · · Score: 1

    Yeah that's probably it. I suck and I don't do anything important.

  147. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by phantomfive · · Score: 1

    Probably. You could use some improvement anyway.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  148. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by CauseBy · · Score: 1

    You should come educate me so I don't suck so much. Find me in Palo Alto, we'll have a cookie at CREAM then go to my office for a lesson in Java memory leaks.

  149. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by phantomfive · · Score: 1

    then go to my office for a lesson in Java memory leaks.

    If you have a program that is long-running (that is, it doesn't clear all the objects you created every time a new http request comes in), and you aren't thinking about memory leaks, then you have them.

    Recently I saw a case where a guy had written a program half in C and half in Java. It had some leaks in it but he couldn't find them (mainly he had not been using any introspection tools, so it's not surprising. If you want to find leaks, you need to be able to look at what's going on with your memory. Use jmap or something).

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  150. Comcast was ahead of many US ISPs on IPv6 by billstewart · · Score: 1

    Comcast may have lots of other issues as an ISP, such as banning customers from running server at home, and monthly usage caps (if they still do that), but they were ahead of most other US consumer ISPs on taking IPv6 seriously.

    (My ISP supports IPv6 over tunnels, but doesn't run native dual-stack, at least on telco DSL. And I really should get around to actually trying it out, but I haven't...)

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  151. Future: IPv4 via NAT, IPv6 Native by billstewart · · Score: 1

    Back when I was closer to the ISP business, the general plan of most consumer ISPs was to start supporting IPv6 (once they had all their hardware and operations support systems able to manage it - it's amazing how many moving parts there are), and migrate most users to dual-stack, with NAT for IPv4 plus native IPv6, or else to use NAT IPv4 with tunneled IPv6.

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  152. IPv6: Longer addresses + magic vaporware by billstewart · · Score: 1

    IPv6 was originally supposed to solve a whole lot of problems - not only did it have longer addresses (which ISPs need to avoid having to deploy customers on NAT, and in general to avoid running out of address spaces and crashing into the "Here Be Dragons" sign at the edge), but it was also supposed to solve a whole lot of other problems, like route aggregation, security, multihoming, automatic addressing, etc.

    A lot of that turned out to be wishful thinking, e.g. the hard part about IPSEC tunnels is the key exchange and authentication, not building the tunnels, route aggregation didn't really work out because enterprises weren't willing to use carrier addresses instead of their own, and small carriers also wanted their own addresses instead of sharing their upstream's address space, or if it wasn't wishful thinking, it was addressing problems that IPv4 found other solutions for, like DHCP for automatic addressing.

    And while NAT is a hopeless botch, it does provide a simple-minded stateful firewall as default behaviour, while IPv6 users need explicit firewalling to get the same security with real addresses (which they needed to do anyway, but especially if you're using tunnels, you have to be sure to put it in all the right places.

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  153. Dual Homing Failover and IPv6 address aggregation by billstewart · · Score: 1

    Yeah, that turned out to be one of the big problems with IPv6 address aggregation - sounds great in the ivory tower, doesn't meet the needs of real customers, which is too bad, because every company that wants their own AS and routable address block is demanding a resource from every backbone router in the world.

    IPv6's solution to the problem was to allow interfaces to have multiple IPv6 addresses, so you'd have advertise address 2001:AAAA:xyzw:: on Carrier A and 2001:BBBB:abcd:: on Carrier B, both of which can reach your premises routers and firewalls, and if a backhoe or router failure takes out your access to Carrier A, people can still reach your Carrier B address. Except, well, your DNS server needs to update pretty much instantly, and browsers often cache DNS results for a day or more, so half your users won't be able to reach your website, and address aggregation means that you didn't get your own BGP AS to announce route changes with, but hey, your outgoing traffic will still be fine.

    My back-of-a-napkin solution to this a few years ago was that there's an obvious business model for a few ISP to conspire to jointly provide dual-homing. For instance, if you've got up to 256 carriers, 00 through FF, each pair aa and bb can use BGP to advertise a block 2222:aabb:/32 to the world, and have customer 2222:aabb:xyzw::/48, so the global BGP tables get 32K routes for the pairs of ISPs, and each pair of ISPs shares another up-to-64K routes with each other using either iBGP or other local routing protocols to deal with their customers actual dual homing. (Obviously you can vary the number of ISPs, size of the dual-homed blocks, amount of prefix for this application (since :2222: may be too long, etc.)

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  154. Re:Dual Homing Failover and IPv6 address aggregati by Pentium100 · · Score: 1

    your outgoing traffic will still be fine

    That may not be fine as well, since unless IPv6 can cram both host IPs into the packet, existing sessions will get dropped (which may not happen with IPv4, since IPs stay the same). Also, that requires more complex firewall configuration (what's the probability that one of the IPs will not be entered?).

    My back-of-a-napkin solution to this a few years ago was that there's an obvious business model for a few ISP to conspire to jointly provide dual-homing.

    There are a few problems with this:
    1. The ISPs must be willing to cooperate (unlike now, they only have to provide BGP access).
    2. The customer still cannot change ISPs (now I can take my AS to another ISP if I do not like the current one or another pair of ISPs if I'm moving and the current ISPs do not provide service in the new location).
    3. The failure of an ISP must trigger a BGP announce to stop traffic from coming to it. This may not happen. Currently we had multiple problems where the main ISP failed but did not announce that - out BGP router still though that the ISP is good. I had to write a script that checks if the internet is accessible and if not (for a few minutes) forces our BGP router to use the other ISP (done with prepends and priorities).

  155. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Jack+Griffin · · Score: 1

    Yeah that's it. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful force.

  156. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by david_thornley · · Score: 1

    And my response was to your statement about C++ memory exploding in no time. We may now be in agreement.

    --
    "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
  157. Re:IPv6 has tons of useless changes and 1 useful o by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    NAT != Firewall != Stateful Packet Inspection, they are all useful tools but independent functions. Having NAT for IPv6 might be useful in some circumstances but not as they way to access the Internet. The default way should be as IPv6 promises via unique addressing and your router should just operate SPI to protect your site from inbound attacks.

    Simplified routing is very useful, smaller global routing tables, no need for (buggy/problematic) extensions to BGP to cope with a large number of ASes and large number of prefixes announced.

    Larger Address Space: You do not cite any actual issue. I can't think of a downside. 6 extra bytes per packet, there is plenty of useless bits in IPv4 headers, but Meh!, technology now is faster more dense than it was in 1970s when IPv4 was created. So the extra bytes in the header fine by me.

  158. Re:IPv6 and Rust: overhyped and unwanted! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    WTF, RA is no less secure than DHCP. If you need to correct the issue of who to trust on the network then buy an enterprise router, has features such as device authentication, broadcast control (you can control who gets to be a "server" using the broadcast, without affecting ARP).

    RA is pretty secure, for example if another device managed to announce it was the router (without the real router seeing), it would still need to hijack packets and somehow send them somewhere useful (without going via the real router, since it could reject since it was not coming from the correct MAC, or the fake device would need to perform NAT). Its is no more broken than someone buying a $10 router and plugging it in and the DHCP server that is on by default taking your network down.

    I really don't see the issue with the address space. The carve up plan looks just fine. Maybe you can draw up some projections to hilight your areas of concern. This version of IP protocol only has to live the next 100 years, since within about 50 years there will be another version out. Even if it takes 25 years to adopt.