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IPv6 Promotion Effort.
rafa writes "The IETF may soon launch an IPv6 promotion effort. The new IPv6 is an improvement over the current standard IPv4, that has a larger amount of addresses available, improves routing and has several other benefits. "
It's not FUD because it already happened. When Microsoft needed a TCP/IP stack quickly because Netscape was fucking them on the Internet they took *BSD TCP/IP stack. This probably wasn't just a cut&paste (needed some reenginering) but this wasn't developpng their own stack.
But this don't seem to happen with IPv6 (they are developping their own stack).
BTW, I know that linux support IPv6 but how god is the implementation?
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
That's less than accurate, and Micros~1 know it. FTP Software announced IPv6 support in their Winsock 2.0 stack for Win95 in 1996 - though I don't remember if they ever delivered one with the promised support.
(1996 - that's three bleeping years ago. I thought progress was fast in this industry.) :-P
Good thing for my job that we're running DHCP on something other than NT. "What?" you ask... We don't need NT? Nope.
The sales guys can take notebooks back and forth between offices and all they need to do is plug into the network. They're happy and I don't have to answer questions about how to reconfigure their machines.
For those who are curious, we run dhcpd on linux, but it's been ported to other unices, i'm pretty sure.
So, um, get a clue.
--
A host is a host from coast to coast...
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
There is a shortcut. All the null sequences can be left out. So your addresses are:
AAAA:3FFE:B00:C18:1::10
AAAA:2010:836B:4179::836B:4179
AAAA::836B:4179
AAAA:3FFE:1200:2001:1:8000::1
Apple got the IPv6 stack as part of its OpenTransport streams architecture from Mentat. It was demoed a few years ago but hasn't yet been released into the official MacOS.
> The main reason for IPv6 - the potential address
> shortage
This is one reason but not the only one. It is a silly reason to be sure and not a good enough one to convert to IPv6. IPv4 wasn't meant to be used the way it is today and has been hacked to make some things work. the IPv6 protocol removes uneeded clutter from the IP header and generally redesignes the way the packet is layed out, etc. The biggest advantage, imho, of IPv6 is that it is more efficient (better routing for example). Of course we can decide this isn't important and just keep throwing bandwidth at the problem which might actually work for awhile but isn't the right answer in the long run.
I agree though that the biggest problem is the cost. However, it is more than the cost of REPLACING old equipment. Routers are being replaced for other reasons, for Gigabit Ethernet, for example. It isn't a matter of how much is it going to cost to replace my router as much as a question of when I replace my router how much is it going to cost to get an IPv6 capable router rather than one that just does IPv4?
So the move to IPv6 probably won't happen until the cost of IPv6 capable routers and such (specifically ones that are capable of BOTH IPv6 and IPv4 for the duration of the transition period) become not much more expensive than IPv4 ones. A manufacturer isn't going to drop the price on IPv6/IPv4 capable routers because he isn't producing as many and they cost him more and he therefore makes less profit on them. But if the market demand for them rises then manufactuer's will produce more IPv4/IPv6 capable routers and find ways to produce and sell them at nearer the cost of IPv4 routers. It's a nice little circle. Some people won't bother with IPv6 if it's too expensive but they won't get cheap enough for those people unless enough OTHER people demand them.
There already is an allocation system setup. Check with the specs to see the details. Offhand there is the geographic layout that you suggest but the preferred addressing scheme at this point is based on provider. This greatly simplifies the routing since the address acts as a builtin list of directions over the internet's true topology.
The fields are already of variable bit length.
The design is intended to allow multiple addresses for each interface that corresponds to a different provider. This way the routers can get the clients to switch providers based on who has the cheapest rates at the time of connection.
Cool.. Note AAAA is not a part of the address, it is only the DNS record for ipv6 addresses (like MX is for mailing)
I'd like to ask a question I read in an article about IPv6 a while ago. Now that IPv6 uses : to seperate different sections of the address, how do you specify ports? If I use 1.1.1.1:33 or whatever right now, how do you do that in IPv6? Might be a dumb question but I haven't seen the answer yet.
All you need to get your block of 2**80 ipv6 addresses is to ask one of the access sites (listed off one of the links on www.6bone.com). And ignore that "experimental" crap -- if history repeats itself, the "experimental" network will become the real network, despite what anyone says.
-
-- Guges --
-
I won't be able to connect my PDP-11 :~(
No, he/she (let's not discriminate) are just an uninformed net user that doesn't have any idea how the internet works or why. Oh I pine for the days when you actually had to meet certain criteria to get access to the internet, such as having a real good idea of how it all worked.
So let me get this right: You mean I'm going to have to remember sixteen 8-bit numbers now to get to my machine? Dangit! If only there were some way to hash an easy-to-remember name to an IP address . . . now that would be really useful. Oh well.
1 20.221! What's your site?")
(I know the script kiddies are not gonna like this. "Hey! I got wArEz and p0rn at ftp://24.193.19.162.57.221.85.3.17.177.153.35.45.
iSKUNK!
Look how long it's taking for Unicode to be adopted... will IPv6 be any faster?
It'll take decades... if it happens at all :-(
Great. I'll pick '7'.
We asked about this at a recent conference.
Microsoft's response was something like "We will support it when there is a standard. As of right now all support for IPv6 from other vendors is still pre-beta, and we don't see any point in wasting our time with that in a shipping product."
There is a general crackdown on address allocation .. I got my class-C just before our local mom+pop ISP stopped offering them and moved to 16-address subnets. I expect it to get harder before it gets easier, but the adoption of IPv6 should make it easy again.
There are two sides to the dynamic IP vs static IP issue: the technical side and the psychological side. On the technical side, static IP's are only a logistical nightmare because ISP's route by *contract* (ie, who is paying them how much for how good of a connection -- talking about routing between ISP's here, not between the ISP and the end-user). If routers began routing according to optimal path (or a reasonable facsimile -- eg OSPF) then the complexity can be more completely hidden by automation, the way the Internet was supposed to work. Whether or not routing policies will change depends on whether it becomes more profitable to utilize bandwidth more efficiently than it is to negotiate complicated contracts, something that's in flux right now. On the psychological side, there is a *huge* established network of ISP's who think of the network as organized in a certain way -- static IP's for routing between ISP's, and dynamic IP's for end-users. The assumption that this is "just the way it works"
has caused a lot of proprietary software and network infrastructure to be developed to *only* support this model. These johnny-come-lateys to the internet (ie, almost everyone) don't look at the new possibilities that the new protocols open for themselves or customers -- they just want to keep doing things like they've always done them. There is tremendous resistance within companies to change a process once it is written down. What this means is that even though IPv6 makes it practical for everyone to have their own block of 254 (ie, 256 sans one for network (0) and one for broadcast (255)) addresses -- maybe one for their watch, one for their walkman, one for their home computer, one for their microwave, etc -- the ISP's won't make this option available because there is a lot of momentum behind the concept of using dynamically allocated addresses, one per customer. A seasoned engineer writes a process to be as modular as possible, and to abstract away the details of the implementation, but most
internet companies are not run by (or even necessarily hire) competent engineers -- implementation-details can often be found as far and wide as customer billing policies, bug reporting and tracking, et al. For instance, look at Pacific Bell, who is limited by their *policies*, and not by any limitations intrinsic to the technology, to associate DSL lines with POTS voice lines. A friend of mine has been having a hell of a time trying to get them to call him using his voice line, and not the (unused) POTS line they installed with his ASDL line, when providing technical support for that ASDL line. He's told them that there is no phone connected to that line, and to use , but their support process just isn't set up to handle it. It's stupid, it's suboptimal, it should be better, but it's the norm.
-
-- Guges --
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7 isn't a random number. But 17... that's a good random number...
All addresses that start with zeros, then FFFF, and a 32 bit number, in IPv6 is a one-to-one mapping of IPv4 numbers. So you'd start loosing access to lots of stuff when more and more sites move to IPv6 only, but most sites will likely at first move to IPv6 with an IPv4 compatible address.
Actually, I believe this is "taken care of" in the IPV6 standard. It's my understanding that there is a "provider" part of the address and a end-user part of the address. There has also been some talk on the 6bone list within the past month or two about how the organization that will be/is handing out addresses is setup and functions.
As far as routing, that's in the IPV6 "standard." They can't use the same routing protocols as in use today.
While I'm not sure that my statements are 100% acurate, I do believe that they are somewhat more than yours. You should at least know something about a topic before posting...
Check out RFC2472, it describes how IPV6 addresses SHOULD be chosen for PPP links. It appears to me that if a node (your home PC) has any EUI-48 or EUI64 address configured on any interface, it should use these addresses in "suggesting" an IPV6 address to the PPP peer in the config request. So, if your PC has an Ethernet card, as mine does, then you should use your Ethernet MAC as part of the IPV6 address (the "interface" part). There is even a method for turning the 48-bit MAC into the 64-bit interface ID.
All IPV6 related RFC's are available via 6bone
All right, this is the second comment that I've seen that I would personally classify as FUD. I wish I had moderator rights at the time so I could downgrade the comment.
/. even know what a RFC is anymore...
If you read the RFC's you will see that they have addressed all of the concerns you list above. There are already two other comments listing some specific responses to your concerns, but I humbly suggest you visit the 6bone and read the friggin RFC's yourself.
I thought this site was supposed to be "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." I also thought the "nerdy" thing to do would be to read up on a topic before making senseless comments. May be that's the "old nerd" way of doing things.
I wonder how many (what percentage of) people on
I need my ISP's *routers* to support v6; I don't particularly care what their servers can do. And since real ISPs route with dedicated hardware (general-purpose computers have serious trouble with that sort of volume), upgrading isn't easy.
Yes, you read that right. MS's research group has been releasing their stack with source code for over a year. The license even allows for redistribution of changes, so I think this fits within ESR's definition of "open source" but IANAL.
Check out www.research.microsoft.com/msripv6 for the scoup.
So I suspect MS won't be needing to copy the *BSD work. If anything, it looks like they're farther along.
The main reason for IPv6 - the potential address shortage - has been blown out of proportions.
While it is true that this is not a problem yet, it could become a problem of Y2K proportions if not headed off soon enough.
Another thing to think about is new types of Internet devices. Today, we're mostly just running IP to desktops. If you want every cell phone in the world to speak IP, however, you've suddenly increased the number of needed IP addresses by a lot. A whole lot. A since cell phones are mobile by nature, you'd really like those addresses to be global, not hiding behind NATs.
And if you want to make every electronic device in your home Internet connected (even if just to set the time automatically via NTP -- no more flashing VCR clocks) than you want IP security (which comes with IPv6) and global addresses. NATs come with a whole slew of interoperability problems that will bog down development of new IP devices. IPv6 is a much better solution.
There are already more people on the planet than there are IPv4 addresses. There will never be more than there are IPv6 addresses.
THis is not the cost of IPv6-capable router
(well, practically all the routers used on
INTERNET backbone are IPv6 capable) but the
*cost of converting the INTERNET backbone*
which is the major stumbling block.
Grunt. Oink, oink.
http://www.ipv6.inner.net/ipv6
I couldn't access it of course.
If more sites like this emerge, demand for ipv6 will increase correspondingly.
I don't think there's anything interesting there, but I wanna know for sure dammit!
The only reason all cover-ups appear to fail is that you never hear about the ones that succeed.
So I suspect MS won't be needing to copy the *BSD work. If anything, it looks like they're farther along.
How so? Have you even looked at the *BSD efforts? There are two major stacks that work quite well with the various BSDs, and in fact the US Military has developed a third "major" stack. And MS has one pre-beta one. Hmm. Which is further along?
The revolution will be mocked
It's www.6bone.net, not 6bone.com. (Dunno what 6bone.com is--InterNIC doesn't even seem to have a listing.)
And as to your comment that the experimental network will become the official one--it can't. Unless we continue using IPv4 forever. The 6bone tunnels through the IPv4 network, overlaying itself on top of it. If IPv4 goes away, then the 6bone does, too. (This also means that some features of IPv6, such as anycast addressing and host mobility, cannot be fully realized until the underlying network is all-IPv6.)
Furthermore, the 6bone has a temporary TLA assignment. This means that only a fraction (an infinitesimal fraction, though still pretty huge by IPv4 standards) of the total address space is available in the 6bone. Going with the 6bone as the official network would radically reduce the total address space available. It would also enforce the current address allocation mechanism (which is very bad and intended to be temporary) forever.
In sum, you're wrong. And anyone who deploys production services on the 6bone risks getting bitten.
Oh please. I've had more "per capita" trouble with my previous Linux based ISP (dsp.net/dsp.com) than I have with Hooked -> Wenet -> GST.
DSP was very unorganized and just offered wretched performance. Hooked incidentally ran BSDi modem and smtp+pop3 servers and now has a FreeBSD news server.
The revolution will be mocked
And most of those fscking loosers run Linux. What's your point?
The revolution will be mocked
pay a major pron site (persian kitty or playboy or something) to move to an IPv6-only network. i guarantee that ISPs will be forced by user demand to switch over asap.
never forget the power of the masturbation superhighway.
They've been doing this since the later DOS versions...
:P ) who needs to call MS for support you're basically fucked.
At this time, Microsoft Research has no plans to support this experimental stack on Windows 95 or Windows 98.
So any newer tech will not work on their just-previous release of the OS. Unless a 3rd party makes it work. In which case you've 'invalidated the warantee' or whatever, and if you're a clueless newbie (you know who you are
The site doesn't look MSish which is good.. but they handle themselves just the same, wether they release a buggy proprietary code or not.
you know what they say, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck...
No way! I was gonna pick 7!
The IPv6 protocol allows headers to be hooked on after the main header that can hold other data. That means then an old SunOS box with an normal IPv4 address communcates with an IPv4 machine an
gateway embeds the IPv4 header inside an IPv6 packet thats sent over the IPv6 network, then it
arrives at the network its translated back into an
IPv4 packet thats sent to the taget host with only IPv4 stack. this way IPv4-to-IPv4 communcation over an IPv6 network works fine. I guess is that IPv4 and IPv6 will co-exist in parallel for many years to come.
Read the Fu**ing Comment. DUH
P.S. Its accually Request For Comment, I'm just being silly.
Us techies can only take on so many things in mass. Right now we are still working on tricking the world into hiring us for making sure their pentium III's are Y2K compatible. Once we've gotten all the money we can outta that (sometime in mid January) we'll suddenly announce that by some date in 2001 we will run outta IP numbers, and that the world's computers will suddendly not be able to connect to the internet due to the problems of dynamic IP which are a rare resource like oil. But we can fix their problems with a genius idea called IPv6 which will give them 19^23 (or something like that) possible numbers. Everyone will be stressing up untill everything is declaired cleared, and till the prospeced date even. Then we will find some other "Tragedy"
(note: most of this was sarcasm)
You idiot.
How many Cisco 7500's run on Linux?
t
But i think if they upgraded to IPv6 they should make it's structure compared to IPv4 similar to Unicode's structure compared to ASCII. It would make things alot simpler, make it backwards compatible with the 32bit addresses but then let you also use 128bit addresses. So each domain of the address would go from 0 to 65000 or so. which means all current adressing using IPv4 would be compatible with the IPv6 addressing. It should be as simple as possible but not simpler, everyone should have the ability to use the internet, not just those who have the money to buy new hardware and software.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
A few weeks back I was thinking about the ultimate way to get people to switch to IPv6, and then it hit me...
Setup a giant free porn site with only IN AAAA DNS records.
:)
--
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
IPv6 has a variety of other mechanisms for securing corporate hosts more flexible and less intrusive than NAT.
--
Employ me! Unix,Linux,crypto/security,Perl,C/C++,distance work. Edinburgh UK.
Xenu loves you!
But with IP6 there will be no need to use DHCP or other dynamic address schemes. Dial-in users could have static IP addresses, which would make life a lot easier for most people. It would make it easier for the dial-in user, and make it much easier to trace abuse etc as the IP address would identify the customer/user rather than an ISP port so there would be no need to correlate the IP address with logs to identify who was using the address at a particular time.
Back when IPv6 was first being discussed, I'm sure I recall seeing a fair amount about guaranteed QoS -- i.e. an ISP could sell a service with guaranteed n bandwidth and m latency between two addresses, for a price; and if you couldn't afford the price, you could accept a lower quality service.
This sounds great -- I'd love to be able to pay a tenth of the price for a nice, slow-but-permanent, link for my email, while the people who want 128K for their Quake matches pay their own way -- but I don't see any mention of QoS on the website.
Did that stuff get left by the wayside?
--
Why should the interchange points be involved in IPv4/IPv6 issues? At least the Stockholm D-GIX is only a link-level interchange.
I think that there's an experimental IPv6 network called the 6-bone. It's used to test IPv6 in a real-world situation, and get any glitches out before wide-scale adoption.
I don't know how open it is. it might be interesting to find out - since Linux already has support.
IPv6 should be very easy to use for new users since the specification includes autoconfiguration.
It also includes end-to end encryption, and flow labelling.
Rikard
[Science] is one of the very few things that raises human life a little above farce and gives it the grace of tragedy.
We can be free at last of the scourge of IP NAT!
--
Some keywords for the NSA in the Lord of the Rings universe: One Ring bind find Sauron quest Nazgul freedom
There's a HOWTO at http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/
Rikard
[Science] is one of the very few things that raises human life a little above farce and gives it the grace of tragedy.
I don't understand what all the fuss is about. I've read up on this a bit from the IPv6 website. In reading ftp://ftp.ipv6.org/pub/rfc/rfc1924.txt , I realized that IPv6 has already been implemented.
The preferred form is x:x:x:x:x:x:x:x, where the 'x's are the
hexadecimal values of the eight 16-bit pieces of the address.
Examples:
FEDC:BA98:7654:3210:FEDC:BA98:7654:3210
I thought that FEDC:BA98:7654:3210:FEDC:BA98:7654:3210 looked remarkably familiar, and sure enough, I was right! It was my W98 CD Key!
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Linux has been ready for IPv6 for quite a while. Why are we waiting?
Here's how:
1) Ask your ISP if they use Linux (or other IPv6-aware OS) on their servers. If not, find a new ISP.
2) Tell them to get on the 6bone.
3) Get on the 6bone yourself.
4) Ride the wave of the future.
---
Put Hemos through English 101!
Posted by 2B||!2B:
a ny].[division].[department].[machine/user]
.COM or .ORG tells me absolutely nothing)
I just worry that if the whole address space isn't properly allocated then we could end up with a true nightmare. I place 90% odds that it won't be done in a very practical manner initially (which makes it even harder to fix later).
It would be cool if IPv6 were modified in a DNS kind of way. Instead of 128-bit numbers, I would much prefer the option of something like:
[country].[region].[industry].[specialty].[comp
where the subdivisions aren't necessarily 8-bit, but are instead scaled to need, and there aren't necessarily 8 of them. Each blank could be filled by either a name or a number, as appropriate. This could also allow more than one path to the same site when appropriate. It's potentially long, but could be significantly abbreviated in a local context (which IPv6 is going to do anyway). I've always thought normal DNS naming is rather worthless, anyway. (something being under
Comments?
Well, perhaps it's about time noticing that "the INTERNET backbone" (as you call it) is continuously being replaced.
BTW, what do you mean by that? What else on the backbone but the routers do you think need converting that will make it so much more expensive ("major stumbling block")?
Er, lots of places loose power at the same time on a regular basis, or so I would think.
Millville is having thunderstorms and the high was supposed to be 97 today. I'd say it's probably a combination of those thunderstorms and brownout because of too many people cranking thier AC's.
Cape May is similar, with thunderstorms and a high of 95.
Fullshear is having thunderstorms all the way through Thursday... (ever hear of lightning striking a power distribution field?).
Riyadh/Khaled has a high of 109 - holly crap! but "plain old" Riyadh is only 32 - must be celcius... Besides, I don't know enough about their power systems to trust it anyway.
Get a life, and a clue. If you took five minutes to check out the weather at these locations you can see that there is a pretty good expectation that they would loose power at this time.
Now you go to bed with no cookie and no fireworks (Since 75% of your sites were in the USA I figured you're in the USA and would have been able to watch them if you behaved properly).
so it ain't goin away any time soon
support gun control: take guns from cops
If you write domain name in URL, you do not need to say "ipv6". For example, www.kame.net has both A and AAAA records and you can just specify http://www.kame.net/, and you'll connect to either of them (just like when a web server have multiple IPv4 addresses).
Numeric IPv6 address is little trickier because they have colon inside. for this there are several draft submitted in IETF.
::ffff:10.1.1.1 type of syntax is just for use inside IPv6-capable node, so that programs that runs on IPv6 socket can manipulate IPv4 connection on the wire.
Transition issues are discussed in IETF ngtrans working group, so it may be useful if you check IETF drafts named "draft-ngtrans-*".
Maybe the 6bone is working ok, but a bunch of the proposed standards already seem kind of dated, and some parts of the proposal seem frankly dumb. Tying IPv6 addresses to link-layer addresses (and using half the 128 bits for it!) is dumb - it makes it very difficult to switch hardware around without having to wait for DNS changes to propagate, and there are plenty of other reasons to object to it too. The proposed reduction in routing tables is, I believe, mostly a sham. There may be a factor of 2 in there, but with the complexity of today's internet topology, I find it unlikely they'll cut down the size of the backbone routing tables by very much. And really, handling more routes is just a matter of more memory, and memory's cheap. The current full BGP internet routing tables contain somewhere around 100,000 address ranges - this fits comfortably in 64-128 MB of memory (even with multiple entries for each set of addresses). The handling of multi-homed sites under v6 is pretty much left up in the air - there is no good solution to real multi-homing (ie. a single site with multiple ISP's) other than an entry for the site in almost every relevant routing table - and the RFC's acknowledge this won't help much if we have more than a couple of hundred thousand multi-homed sites on the internet. And some of the proposed topology diagrams seem laughably antiquated.
Somebody really needs to study how the various parts of the proposals really match the stated goals of IPv6 given the current (and evolving) structure of the internet - it looks like the proposals are very much based on the internet of 5-10 years ago, and a lot has changed.
Here's an alternate proposal - simply prepend 96 bits to IPv4 addresses, all zero for current IPv4's, and then sell the new address space to ISP's and exchanges on a per address basis. The proposed IPv6 protocols could still to be used. And we could switch to fancy hexadecimal notation. I bet this would serve the original goals almost as well with a lot less disruption.
Energy: time to change the picture.
I imagine TCP, which is also crufty and largely ineffective at stopping sequence number attacks and the like, is also being upgraded? Is it going to be a higher-level protocol, an extension header on IPv6 packets, or are they just going to have plain old TCP wrapping IPv6 packets instead?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
It's FUD because it can't happen. Have you tried to cut'n'paste the tcp/ip stack from say FreeBSD to Linux. Good luck. Their effort is better spent on developing their own stack.
Besides, if they really wanted to, they could cut'n'paste from Linux. W2K is closed source, so you'd never be able to tell (and don't start screaming about tcp/ip fingerprinting, there's a million reasons why a system might have the same fingerprint).
The revolution will be mocked
I love overkill.
I had heard a little bit about the new standard. I thought they were just going to add another 8 bit address to the end.
I thought "Sure, and 20 years from now, when people are hooking up their lazy-boy chair and their furnance and their microwave to the internet, we'll run out of IP addresses."
Now, I can't even imagine what it would take to use up all these IP addresses.
By the way, hex is annoying. Fast for hardware, but annoying.
Later
Erik Z
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Posted by !ErrorBookmarkNotDefined:
Must be because it's good news about MS.
Half the so-called 'funny' comments get a 2.
-----------------------------
Computers are useless. They can only give answers.
The transition to IPv6 will not happen over-night. Backbone routers will continue to run IPv4 in parallel, and networks will slowly migrate.
M$ is relatively 'open' in their effort to make NT and W2K IPv6-ready. Checkout the website at research.microsoft.com.
what just can't be forgotten are IPv4-to-IPv6-migration-HOWTOs!
hany
% /usr/games/number 340282366920938463463374607431768211456
:)
three hundred forty undecillion.
two hundred eighty-two decillion.
three hundred sixty-six nonillion.
nine hundred twenty octillion.
nine hundred thirty-eight septillion.
four hundred sixty-three sextillion.
four hundred sixty-three quintillion.
three hundred seventy-four quadrillion.
six hundred seven trillion.
four hundred thirty-one billion.
seven hundred sixty-eight million.
two hundred eleven thousand.
four hundred fifty-six.
It sounds like a child's song.
This is NOT an IETF sponsored effort. The
IETF does not encourage closed groups with
member-only web sites. The IPv6 Forum seems
like it's being started by the same fanatics
that were in the ATM Forum when ATM was at
it's deathbed.
The IETF believes in open specifications and
open web sites unlike these "Forums" that
seem more interested in making a quick buck.
Ignore such doomed efforts, and support the
real IETF IPv6 task force!
This is not what is going to happen, but with 128 bit addresses you could just pick a number at random and use it. The odds of 2 people chosing the same number is low enough to be acceptable.
The actual probability is approx:
1- exp(-n*n/m)
where n is the number of addresses selected
and m is the total addresses available.
If 4 billion people select addresses at random then the odds of a collision are:
1 in 415,828,534,307,635,078.
To put this number in perspective, your odds of guessing the right number to a 56bit DES encryption key on your first try is 1 is much better:
1 in 72,057,594,037,927,936
We won't be running out of IP addresses anytime soon. 2^128 is not big enough that we could assign each atom on the planet is own IP address (this number is ~2^170), but we certainly could assign each atom that could possibly be seen it's own IP (i.e. by excluding those in the earth's core). Considering that you need a fair number of atoms to store just to store a 128bit number, I think we are safe until space travel explodes.
-- Virtual Windows Project
There is very little motivation amongst the
major ISPs to migrate to IPv6. The main reason
for IPv6 - the potential address shortage -
has been blown out of proportions. More efficient
address space allocation, as well as extensive
use of private addresses and NAT make
'the day when we all run out of address' further
and further off. There are no other solid reasons
to move to IPv6. The only other reason I can
think of - very elegant scheme of assigning
addresses to the host - is no longer relevant
due to the wide speard of DHCP.
Granted, the large address space is indead much
better than the combination of private address and
NAT, as well as the IPV6 scenario for allocating
addresses to the host is better than DHCP -
but not at the extent to justify the massive
conversion of INTERNET backbone to V6.
What I've heard from someone who's been
participating in IPv6 committee (can't give his
name but there is a hint: he wrote several key
RFCs 'on how to write RFCs' and also teaches at
Harvard) that the whole IPv6 was nothing but
the big P.R.: IP was still evolving, its enemies
has been trying to speard the FUD, and 'runing
out of addresses' scare was part of that FUD.
Consequently, IPv6 specs was mostly response to
that FUD. Of course now IETF feels kind of
funny: they've spent so much time and efforts
and seems like noone cares.
Grunt. Oink, oink.