IPv6 Turns 20, Reaches 10 Percent Deployment (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Ars notes that the RFC for IPv6 was published just over 20 years ago, and the protocol has finally reached the 10% deployment milestone. This is an increase from ~6% a year ago. (The percentage of users varies over time, peaking on the weekends when most people are at home instead of work.) "If a 67 percent increase per year is the new normal, it'll take until summer 2020 until the entire world has IPv6 and we can all stop slicing and dicing our diminishing stashes of IPv4 addresses."

"A decade or so ago, it was still quite common for people to complain about certain IPv6 features, and proclaim the protocol would never catch on. Although part of that can be blamed on the conservative nature of network administrators, it's true that adopting IPv6 requires abandoning some long standing IPv4 practices. For instance, with IPv4, it's common to use Network Address Translation (NAT) so multiple devices can share the use on an IPv4 address. IPv6 has more than enough addresses to give each device its own, so there's no NAT in IPv6. The Internet is probably better off without NAT and the complications that it adds, but without NAT as a first but relatively porous line of defense against random packets coming in from the open Internet, it's necessary to be much more deliberate about which types of packets to accept and which to reject."

Comments

what

[phantomfive]

without NAT as a first but relatively porous line of defense against random packets coming in from the open Internet, it's necessary to be much more deliberate about which types of packets to accept and which to reject.

What? If you want the same 'security' as NAT, can't you just set the firewall to reject all incoming connections?

Re:what

[unixisc]

The summary seems to imply that there is no supported NAT in IPv6. Au contraire, the IETF did specifically define a NAT standard for IPv6 - it's called NAPT. It has the same concepts as IPv4 NAT - translating a public address to a private one (granted, there are more categories of the latter in IPv6). Only thing different is that it's a 1:1 address mapping here, as opposed to a 1:many address mapping in IPv4. Which saves the agony of Port Address Translation and there being fewer ports for other applications that NEED it.

But if someone wants to have something handy for load balancing, NAPT can be used. I'm not sure of what the defined multi-homing mechanism is in IPv6, and whether it necessitates the use of NAPT or not

Re:what

[lokedhs]

Or, you might want to read up on Privacy Extensions before you start talking about exposing internal information which hasn't been valid since 2001. Yes, that's 15 years ago, as modern as 2001 may feel to us old guys.

Re:what

[unixisc]

But it's the firewall that comes w/ NAT that does the defending - the same thing that can be done w/ a public IPv6 connection. Not that I recommend it, but one could even use a combination of NAPT w/ IPv6 public addressing if one HAS TO use NAT: you'd still get the firewall, and you'd still have the warm and fuzzy feeling that NAT gives you.

Re:what

[Anonymous Coward]

Only idiots use NAT when given a choice. This pretty much sums it up. The only benefit NAT has is as a bandaid to patch over an already broken network design.

Re:More like 0.1% -- IPv6 traffic is special purpo

[jfdavis668]

My cell phone traffic has been IPv6 for years. Every time I watch a youtube video, piles of IPv6 traffic flow. A large amount of network traffic is now handheld related.

Re:Topology detection

[unixisc]

No, subnet addresses are the 49th to the 64th bit of the address, or something beyond 49th to 64th, depending on how it's allocated. Most routers would recognize the entire lower half of the address as the interface ID. There is no concept of 'class' networks the way there was in IPv4. Everything is 2^64.

Yeah, one could break the protocol and assign subnets to something in the lower half, and a few things, like SLAAC, RAs would stop working.

Re:Familiarity with IPv4 is hindering adoption

[silas_moeckel]

Your average consumer grade nat router that supports ipv6 has a default stateful firewall blocking unwanted inbound connections. Really no different than ipv4 with nat.