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