Slashdot Mirror


IETF's Tips For Network Admins On How To Avoid Draining Smartphone Batteries (softpedia.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Two engineers from Cisco and Google have raised the problem of IPv6 networks that drain smartphone battery life and issued a series of tips for other network admins on why and how to properly configure their networks. The problem is because of Router Advertisements (RAs). These are periodic messages sent by the router to all network clients telling them its IPv6 address, at which it can be reached. Apparently some networks are sending these as often as every 3 seconds, while the engineers say the proper interval should be 7 per hour. Hence the reason why your battery life is often drained even if your phone is in sleep mode, but connected to a local network.

5 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Re:IPv6 is such a disaster by Maritz · · Score: 2

    I've heard that it is quicker for routers to do lookups on routing tables. I believe it might also be better for summarisation. I do find it weird that the RA stuff is so chatty though.

    --
    I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
  2. Re:IPv6 is such a disaster by amorsen · · Score: 3, Informative

    An IPv6 network is much easier to set up properly. Check out the HomeNet stuff, where you just chuck a bunch of routers together more or less randomly, with connectivity from cable and DSL and 4G, plus a bunch of wifi routers, and it all Just Works. IPv4 in the same scenario will require a lot of hand-fiddling and being strict about topology.

    No worrying about subnetting, setting up DHCP, making sure that there's precisely one DHCP server per network and all that.

    Some of it is still under development, like the daisy-chained routers more than one deep, but it will get there.

    --
    Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
  3. Re:IPv6 is such a disaster by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The Bad:
    -They did away with private addressing (site-local) "because it breaks the openness of the internet and firewalls". Tell that one to someone who's seen hackers use a Java-based PS2 Video broadcasting software to send files across the internet. Lets automatically use public addresses on air-gapped networks.
    -The standard has changed so many times in the last 10 years nobody can comprehend it; every book has a different set of material on it, every programmer has set their infrastructure up differently.
    -They did away with IPV4's simplistic subnetting and supernetting, and introduced EUI-64 addressing which can track devices as they move from network to network. Marketing companies like Google and Microsoft were helping to write the standard.
    -Very Few large deployments.

    The Good:
    -Better for networks with large numbers of hosts: Usually you don't make a broadcast domain any larger than a /22 block (1024 addresses). IPv6 breaks that mold.
    -Great for multicast\anycast traffic.
    -Great for creating complex and elegant networks when combined with VLAN's; 802.1x plus NAC plus EUI64 plus asset tagging has the promise to be really effective for physical port security in said large companies.

  4. Re:IPv6 is such a disaster by Zarhan · · Score: 3, Informative

    -They did away with private addressing (site-local) "because it breaks the openness of the internet and firewalls". Tell that one to someone who's seen hackers use a Java-based PS2 Video broadcasting software to send files across the internet. Lets automatically use public addresses on air-gapped networks.

    No they didn't.

    See https://tools.ietf.org/html/rf... - Site-local was the original spec and that's deprecated since it doesn't allow for easily merging of two existing private networks. ULA fixes that. So damn right you can have private networks.

    The standard has changed so many times in the last 10 years nobody can comprehend it; every book has a different set of material on it, every programmer has set their infrastructure up differently.

    Oh please. Only things that have really fundamentally changed are the IPv4IPv6 transition mechanism. Now that NAT64 and DNS64 are in use, you can pretty much work with an IPv6-only network (ironically, a couple years ago everything else, including gaming, worked via a NAT64, except for Skype, which is supposed to go through anything)

    They did away with IPV4's simplistic subnetting and supernetting, and introduced EUI-64 addressing which can track devices as they move from network to network. Marketing companies like Google and Microsoft were helping to write the standard.

    Oh please, even Windows uses privacy extensions for IPv6. No one forces you to use EUI-64.

    Very Few large deployments.

    Tell that to the Chinese. They have *huge* networks, IPv6 only.

  5. This. IPv6 unique local = better private addresses by raymorris · · Score: 2

    Exactly. Unique local addresses in IPv6 are not globally routable, just like private addresses in IPv4. They can be used just like IPv4 private addresses, if you want to. Unique local is all addressed starting with FD:.

    The IPv6 version is better, though, because each local network is likely to use different IPs, so you can choose to locally route them. Here are a couple of examples of why that's good. Suppose you have a small office in College Station, where someone set up a typical SOHO network with unique local addresses. Also, your headquarters office in Dallas has it's network with unique local. Just like IPv4, on the internet can't reach either network. Unlike IPv4, the two offices probably use -different- IP addresses, and you can decide to have your VPN router route between them, forming a company-wide network.

    Similarly, suppose that ABC LLC buys XYZ Corp. With IPv4, integrating the networks in a pain - both companies probably have machines with the same IP addresses, so you have to change the IPs on all of equipment used by XYZ. With IPv6, they are unlikely to match, so you can easily merge the two networks by routing between the two sets of "private" IPs (unique local IPs).