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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. "
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 :-(
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.
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
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.
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")?
::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.
> Thanks. Any info about why they decided to use ':' instead of the trusty '.'?
Because the similarity to MAC addresses is no accident: The idea is that you get your own network instead of IP address, and individual addresses are as easy as tacking on the MAC address to that. It's already unique at that point even without the network part (theoretically, MAC collisions can and do happen occasionally) but the rest of the address is a routing hint, you don't want to keep a flat ARP cache for the whole damn internet after all.
Also because now that they can contain letters (A-F anyhow) it would be harder to distinguish them from names, which will probably still use dots at least as long as we continue to use DNS (I really don't see anyone pronouncing an X.500 address on the radio).
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
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.
Unlike IPv4 which was never meant to be used as widespread as it is today (and has required numerous hacks to make it to continue to work) IPv6 is redesigned very well. This isn't just about getting more address space. This is about sitting down, finding out all the flaws of IPv4 and fixing them, as well as designing it to be able to handle changes in the future. You're example of how to do it may be easy for humans to understand ip address but otherwise its not very efficient or practical. IPv6 uses the high order bits of the address to determine it's use (global unicast address, multicast address, local address, etc, etc). In the case of global unicast addresses the first three high order bits are 001 and then from there (real creative names) there is the top-level aggregation identifier (13 bits), next-level aggregation identifiern (32 bits), the site-level aggregation identifier(16 bits) and the interface ID (Mac address?) (64 bits). The 6bone is layed out a little differently and is really IPv6 wrapped in IPv4 (so they can test over the internet even though few of the routers understand IPv6 yet) though I am not sure of all the details other than the fact it contains part of the IPv4 address and the Mac address right now. The IPv6 packet is also redesigned. Overall IPv6 basically takes care of all the problems that exist in IPv4, including but certainly not limited to address space. Personally I can't wait for it to be used widespread. Someone go kick those morons over in redmond and tell them to hurry up, the rest of the world is waiting. Or better yet let's jump to IPv6 now and screw all the windows users... *grin*
% /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 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