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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.
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."
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).
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.
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....
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.