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CNN On IPv6
i am the waltuss writes "CNN has tackled The Great IP Crunch of 2010 in this article. Its a good overview/intro to the subject that will likely take the place of the Y2K "bug" after January 1. "
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Don't you know that the solar maximum is what's going to be messing everything up in the new year?
Oy. First El Nino (sorry, no tilde). Then 9.9.99. Y2K is coming up. Then it's going to be either the IP crunch or the solar maximum.
I'm betting on the solar maximum. IP addresses are too much for the hardwired little brains of most end-users...
The regional registries are charging big bucks for blocks of numbers and managing them as if they were as scarce as IPv4 address space - or as if the world was beating down their door and needed to be throttled. Results: Only the big router builders' research departments (garage shops need not apply) and the universities (grant money and need to keep at the cutting edge) are interested.
ISPs aren't going to buy numbers until they roll out the infrastructure. Why tie up even a few grand now, when you're not going to use the numbers until later? There's enough numbers to give one to every hair on every human's head, so they won't run out if you don't jump early. (And they want to encode routing in the numbers, so it might be better to wait.)
What burns me is that price tag. The home experimenters can't get in on this unless they ante up (or do all their work with bogus numbers - which is problematic when you want to start interconnecting with the other guys). So we get to depend on the Cisco/3Com/Ascends of the world.
Microsoft would be proud.
Hmmm... Maybe we ought to pick a block UNofficially and divy it up for playing with. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I work for a wireless phone provider. One of my duties includes the keeping an eye on whether or not we have enough numbers. I also represent my company in matters regarding new areaa codes. Suffice to say, this is a serrious pain in the ass for everyone. Here (Minneapolis/St. Paul) we just split the 612 area code into two, with 651 being the new one, about a year ago. We're already planning to split the 612 again, this time into three pieces. All of these have been/will be geographical splits. All the phone companys are pushing for overlay splits, but the public, and the Public Utilities Commision hate those. A geographical split is where one area has one code, and another has a different one. In a overlay, both codes occupy the same physical areas. IE you and your neighbor may have different area codes. Solution to this? Beats me. But the day is coming where it'll be required to dial 10 digits to make any call. The public will hate it. But there is no way around it. Number Portibility is the new process in which we're hoping to save numbers. You move? Take your phone number with you. No need to issue a new one, or hold your old one for 90 days before reissue. Lots of technical problems involved with this. Not to mention the billing headaches it creates.
Erm. I guess that's as likely, feasible and practical as running your toasters on in a Beowulf cluster through your kitchen Intranet. :)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
OK, so I'm a math weirdo, but play along for a moment. If one trillion Bill Gateses were standing in a circle and threw all their pennies in, how tall would the pile of pennies be?
Actually, there wouldn't be a pile at all: the density would only be one penny per 2.5 square cm. Assuming three Gateses per linear meter. Evenly spread out, there's plenty of room to spare. 1*10^12 people -> (1/3)*10^12 m circumference -> 1.06*10^11 m diameter -> 2.5*10^21 m^2 area -> 2.5*10^13 cm^2 per Gates. Each Gates gets to throw his wealth of 1.06*10^13 pennies into a square 50 km on a side.
If all those Gateses were standing in a circle, light would take over five minutes to cross its diameter. The circle would be not quite the size of Mercury's orbit around the sun.
To be precise, about 2.9%.
But good luck rewriting the TCP protocol for your penny network -- its end-to-end space-time delay is ten minutes!
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
IPv6 may not have been DESIGNED to handle routing table overload, but that will probably be a side effect.
IPv6 is much more geared toward route aggregation. And since its just being rolled out, and people already know the effects of the messy routing setup of today, route aggregation will be encouraged to a much greater degree.
Yes, this could be done with IPv4. But it isn't going to happen. Far too late into the game.
--
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
Imagine this picture in 5 years:
I carry a digital cellular phone. Maybe it uses Voice over IP, or maybe it can just connect to the web to check my email. Either way, it needs its own IP address.
I carry a PDA, hopefully a descendant of my beloved Palm V. I carry it because my phone is a tiny little thing, making its screen so small that I'm willing to carry a separate PDA. My PDA can hotsync itself to my databases, which are on a server on the Internet of course. So my PDA needs an IP address.
My watch synchronizes itself to the atomic clock, using multicasted NTP packets. It also sets its alarm to tell me when its time to take my heart medication. It sets its alarm by checking my medical schedule, which is on a server on the Internet of course. So now we have three IP addresses on my body.
After my last heart attack (brought on by the stress of working 70 hour days in Silicon Valley back in 2003), the hospital gave me a monitor to affix to my ankle which monitors my blood pressure, hydration levels, etc. It collects its data and sends a packet to the hospital once per hour.
At my house, all five of my very expensive cars (the oldest being my old 1999 junker) have a mobile entertainment center which can pull in HDTV broadcasts, connect to whatever the WWW looks like in 2004, etc. So I have 5 more IP addresses.
And of course, the fax machine in my main vehicle is an aftermarket addon which doesn't cooperate with the car's built-in gigabit ethernet network, preferring to use its own wireless net connection. Another IP address.
These are all mobile connections. MobileIP doesn't work with NAT: you have to have a globally unique IP address for the remote proxy to route things to you.
NAT is useful to hook up the 27 computer systems I expect to have in my house by 2004.
IPv4 and IPv6 can co-exist on the same subnet. In fact, they can co-exist on the same host. You can have a machine which has an IPv4 address and operates as an IPv4 machine, which simultaneously has an IPv6 address and operates as an IPv6 machine.
Every ethernet packet has an ethernet header. There is a two byte field in the ethernet header called the ethertype (also called the SAP in some terminology). The ethertype identfies what kind of packet it is. For example, IPv4 is ethertype 0x0800, which IPv6 is 0x86dd. Thus, you can happily mix IPv4 and v6 packets on an ethernet, your machines will look at the ethertype to figure out what to do with them. Likewise your routers can simultaneously handle IPv4 and IPv6 traffic.
BTW, it isn't just ethernet. Every modern network type, including FDDI, ATM, Token Ring, PPP, etc has a two byte SAP field in its header. The only two network links I can remember which didn't are SLIP and Apollo Token Ring, and I'll wager you aren't using either of those.
I'm glad to know that there is at least one more technological crisis to worry about come 1/1/2000.
Seriously, won't the switch require huge changes to existing infrastructure? The big routers on the great big cables -- won't they have to be changed/upgraded/reprogrammed to handle the larger numbers without screwing up the network addresses?
Seems like it to me... but I haven't been following too closely. What are the low level changes we need before we can switch?
--
QDMerge 0.21!
how to invest, a novice's guide
I think copyleft or thinkgeek should re-release an updated version of Vinton's classic (legendary?) t-shirt to promote IPv6 and get people more interested in using it...
:)
IP (more) over everything.
-or-
IP over everything from anywhere.
You get the idea.
-Chris
As addressed somewhat by the article, it seems to me that the address problem is only the most obvious part of the problems with IPv4. The components of IPv6 to do with intelligent routing will greatly increase our usage of available bandwidth, something we'll need even more if we have an address for "every toaster in the world."
Besides, if I stick knife in my toaster to get out the bread, I'll probably blow the whole Internet.
Hotnutz.com
Why exactly should every toaster, microwave, dishwasher etc be connected? And even if they are all connected, why in the world do they need their own ip address?
Seems like NAT and IP Masq. are perfect for this kind of thing. What most people do on the internet can be perfectly done through NAT or Masq: web, mail, ftp, ssh, etc.
How does having your own large address space help anything?
(Not to slam on ipv6, tho. I do like build in ipsec).
This sig is false.
Try http://www.ipv6.org/
:)
It's really neat, there are a few networks that support it (vBNS has some limited support right now). Think ip addys with hex numbers instead of deciaml and you're halfway there
vBNS link at http://www.vbns.net/IPv6/index.html for those interested.
Hit up this FAQ put out by ARIN. To quote: IPv6 was not designed to address the routing table overload.
Not only that, CIFS is supposed to address this issue for ipv4. The biggest problem IMO is that router tables will simply become too large and cumbersome to maintain. There is a practical limit to how much routing info you can squeeze into a embedded system (router!) before the costs outweigh the benefits.
--
I would imagine, fundamentally, that everyone would *want* to switch, were it that simple.
However, organizations and companies have to tackle issues such as hardware and OS support, software written to recognize and work with *both* IPv6 and IPv4 until the transition has been made, as well as all the little differences in network architecture that may be necessary due to IPv4 vs IPv6.
I had heard that Linux already has support for IPv6; but how about hardware(NICs, routers, network topologies)? And do they work with Linux? And will the software we use, will they work with Linux?
For example take USB. Everything is USB today except for WindowsNT. Linux has better USB support, for crying out loud! Can't use USB mice, keyboards, printers, anything, under WinNT. Will there be a similar situation for IPv6? If the M$s and Suns of the world don't actively try to promote IPv6, and smaller alternatives such as Linux can't/don't/won't step up to the plate, how will anyone ever switch over?
Of course this is just another opportunity for Linux to show it's superiority =)
Linux vs WinNT
Better USB support
IPv6 support
Better low level scalability
Higher efficiencies and runtimes
Better clustering capability(Beowulf)
etc.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
I love NAT as much as the next man, but it's fundamentally a bad hack.
You lose transparency, flexibility and ultimately performance from doing this kind of thing. For a $100 student house network, it's great to use NAT, for a $100M company it gets ugly really fast.
Look more closely at your NAT box some time, it has Application-Level protocol handlers, because otherwise apps like Quake, CuSeeMe, FTP etc. wouldn't work correctly.
As time passes, and users demand more sophisticated services, it gets harder for NAT to work properly, and the implementation gets more and more fragile.
Supporting NAT because it's cheaper than upgrading is a false economy, like sticking with Win16 to save on NT licenses. You'll feel the pain later.
The wastage of numbers via ineffective use of exchanges does indeed suggest another vector via which "name space" may vapor away. The only good news is that cell phones and pagers are likely to "pack in" more effectively as they are not forced into a tiny geographic zone as would be the case for a local exchange.
The merely makes the "crunch" happen quicker; as the numbers of phone numbers per person grow, the population of needed numbers is still growing pretty rapidly.
The issue is not, in this case, one where there is a sudden date when everything breaks (as with Y2K, but rather something more like a ``brown-out'' where it becomes increasingly difficult to manage systems, and where new subscribers cannot be admitted, which will hit some geographic areas before others...
It may result in businesses moving to ``economically depressed'' areas where there are exchanges with space free :-).
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
True.. We could Run out of IPv4 Space By 2010...
But since we're going to have to freaking upgrade every router, adn networked piece of software.. do we really want to stick with IP?
I mean, I wonder if there's Some folks out there.. working on a good replacement protocol.. something that does all that Ip does.. But faster, Lower on memory, and easier?
Maybe IPv6 Isn't the answer.. Maybe We'll end up using Some weird Child of Banyan Vines.. Oor Ipx.. Or maybe there will be an open sourced Protocol.. Or maybe We will all fall under the Sway of Mr. Gates. and us MicrosoftIP-2000
-Warning I'm too lazy to spellcheck---
-And I could be making all of this up-
-So Take it all with a grain of Salt.-
http://thepoliticalgeek.com/blog/ Politics for Geeks.
Except for the appliances that one might need to gain access to from the outside world (security system, garage door opener, etc) you wouldn't even need (any in many cases you specifically wouldn't want) any incoming connections from the outside world. If i'm surfing the web with my toaster, all I need is an internal IP address and an IP Masquerading firewall between me and the rest of the internet. Simple port redirection would suffice for gaining access to most other appliances.
This is how I handle computers at my own place, I have an @Home cable modem, with a single IP address attached to a 486 box with two NIC cards running debian. This box acts as an IPMasq'ing firewall/dhcp server for the rest of the computers in my house. I use port redirection to ssh or ftp into the rest of the machines, and save myself having to pay for all of those extra IP's.
There's no reason that I can think of why every machine on the net needs its own IP address anyway, it's far more secure to have a firewall sitting in between you and the rest of the world, and IP Masquerading works with everything that a typical user would need (http, ftp, instant messenger, icq, quake, realvideo, etc.) and as far as latency is concerned, my 486 only has 8 megs of ram, and both NICs are old ISA NE2000 clones, but I get an average of 50-100 pings for quake2, and have downloaded up to 180 KB/s (which is darn near the max for my cable connection anyways), with room to spare - certainly more than my toaster needs to tell me that it's done or for my X10 server to tell my coffee maker to start brewing in the morning.
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
I -can- list some of the additions/changes, though.
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)
How I know? I was on the IESG when we approved most of those documents.
This is something a of no-brainer, but you can find out a great deal about IPv6 by checking out
v 6-04.txt
http://www.ipv6.org/
If you just want a in-depth understanding of why you should use IPv6 instead of Ipv4 take a look at
http://www.ie tf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-iab-case-for-ip
I predict that eventually, companies who own entire class A networks, and perhaps some class B networks, will end up getting into the access buisness when they find out that they have this TREASURE trove of IP numbers that are scarcer and scarcer. This could lead to a whole new outlook on things ISP's.. ;-P
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
IPv6 (which, as the article pointed out, offers more than just a larger address space) won't achieve widespread acceptance until (strangely) it has widespread acceptance. In other words, nobody wants to move to a standard until everyone else is.
As I understand it, IPv6 devices can still handle IPv4. So what we really need is for a few of the real leaders to come out and boldly adopt IPv6. I hate to say this, but: Are you listening, Microsoft? IBM? Cisco? Transition your products and services to IPv6, and the world will follow.
Now if we can just get everybody to strongly encrypt ALL IPv6 traffic...
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
This was a good article on a technical subject. I've looked into this a bit already, and this article agreed with what I already knew and confirmed a few things I'd only suspected.
This is of more than passing interest to us. My employer has recently aquired some other largish companies, and we need to set up a corporate Intranet. Problem is, we don't have enough IP addresses.
(Well, maybe we do. There are rumours of a class B address owned by some research lab somewhere in the company. People are currently trying to track it down. Failing that, we might just have to buy a company that already owns one.)
So now what do we do about IPv6? Everyone in the company is using IPv4, often with 10.*.*.* addresses hidden behind firewalls that do NAT. We need to integrate all these networks into one corporate Intranet, and the idea of having lots of NAT boxes playing games with IP addresses does not sound good. Neither does the prospect of renumbering all those boxes by hand. We don't run DHCP anywhere (someone once talked about security issues as the reason for that, I don't know anything more).
One idea is to create an IPv6 backbone for the Intranet with IPv4 subnets hanging off it, and use protocol translation routers to connect the subnets. That way we can get the subnets on with minimum hassle, and upgrade them as and when it becomes feasible.
As far as upgrading goes, our favoured solution would be to just buy new machines with IPv6 stacks installed. We certainly don't want a flag day. Reading the IPv6 site, it looks like IPv6 and IPv4 machines can co-exist on the same Ethernet spur or whatever. Am I right about this?
Any information would be gratefully received.
Something occured to me while I was reading this. They are now accepting registrations for IPv6 namespace, but how are they going to deal with the fact that domain names are already registered for IPv4 addresses? Aka, will slashdot have an 'IPv6' address, AND an 'IPv4' address? It's not like someones going to switch a light on and 'POOF', we're all on IPv6..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
NT 5 (w2k) can do USB. I don't know if there's an add-on way of doing it in NT4 (like there was for win95)
And Microsoft has an "unsupported" ipv6 stack for NT for download here: http://research.microsoft.com/msripv6/
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The following sentence is true.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
128 bits for an IPv6 IP address? Why _4_ times bigger? Since each packet's header needs both a destination and the source, that's 32 bytes vs 8.
If we say the average packet is 500 bytes (?), then IPv6 is imposing at least an additional 5% overhead on bandwidth limited lines. Like a tax--what are _we_ getting for it?
I'm sure the extra bits will be rapidly stolen to help routing (ie, a couple of bits for continent, a couple more for region (state), or the network topographical equivalents.
I have privacy concerns about this (static IPs) plus I wonder if Cisco isn't doing this to scr*w their competition (Linux routers?).
-- Robert
Seeing some discussion of IPv4/v6 in this forum is starting to scare me, so I thought I'd try and clear up some major misunderstandings.
I see a lot of posts saying that IPv4 is just fine and we should stick to it. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I realise that people on this group don't design routers every day, but I think you would be amazed at how much protocol hacking goes on under the covers. The vast majority of routers out there do some amazing things to try and hack together things like quality of service (QoS) and NAT that IPv4 just isn't designed to do.
Yes, IPv4 is working. But the amount of time now spent in the design phases to kluge together ways for NAT and QoS to work is becoming way more than most design houses will stomach. Features like VoIP, VPN, and QoS have major cash potential for ISP's, and they in turn will pay to get capable equipment. Doing this with IPv4 is a bitch, and a lot designers secretly wish IPv4 would go away and use IPv6 instead, because VPN and QoS are much easier to do.
One other major piece of misinformation here is that all boxes need to be replaced for this to happen. Not so. The vast majority of routers, hubs, switches, and all desktop computers are perfectly capable of running IPv6 right now. It involves a code load change, not a hardware upgrade. On a related point, most ISPs completely replace all their network boxes every 2 years anyways, so the threat of scrapping all hardware for IPv6 won't faze them much anyway (it's part of their cycle).
The last point is that people don't think that their toasters need IP addresses. This is also not so! Yes, in the next 10 years your toaster will need an IP address. Why? Because ToasterCompany will want you to do a firmware upgrade on your toaster because their have been field problems (like toasters burning operators). You will go across the wire, flash your firmware, and now your microprocessor-controlled toaster has CrispyToaster(tm) v1.16b firmware. We've already seen web servers implemented in ~4mm PIC processors, so expect them to become popular in the near future in your favorite household appliance.
To do this, you need an IP address (to speak IP of course). Please don't tell me how great NAT is... yes, I also run a Linux ipMasq box which works fine, but NAT fundamentally breaks many of the underlying IPv4 mechanisms. We can't keep dumping more patches to the NAT engine every time someone wants to NAT some new protocol; eventually we are going to reach a limit of effort.
Also note that using ports as a means of "IP expansion" is also a Very Bad Idea. A port is specifically designed (in TCP/IP spec) to represent a different service on a given host, not across different hosts. Yes, you can use this technique in NAT, but it tends to make performance/utilization metrics used by ISP's blatantly wrong, which leads to Bad Things.
Please also read Singal11's message above, he is right about the routing table issue. There is no current proposal (beyond CIDR) which can solve this problem. Also, see jd's post, it is a good summary of why IPv6 is needed.
The opinions I post here have nothing to do with my employer.
After all, there are doubtless lots of software packages out there that assume that telephone numbers are exactly ten digits long.
This doesn't break the phone system itself, but it breaks systems that track telephone numbers.
The upshot is that this breaks just any sort of "business" system that uses telephone numbers...
Happily, one of these systems that breaks will be the Circuit City systems that track who you are based on your telephone number. Customers may be quite happy about this, but Circuit City doubtless won't be...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
The problem is not that.
The problem is that even ten digits may not be enough...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Shouldn't Al Gore share some of the blame too? -Hasdi
P.S. sorry, i couldn't resist. ;-)
After all, there are only a theoretical billion numbers, which get cut down due to positional issues ( e.g. can't start either an area code or a local number with a 0 or 1, amongst other constraints).
When you count up telephone numbers used by home phones, business phones, fax machines, pagers, cell phones, and start tossing in Internet usage, the system will be running out of room at some point.
I hear rumor of some ideas the Telcos are working on to consolidate numbers; it won't be trivial...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
The y2k problem was a known problem with a known date, yet so many companies are waiting till the last minute to do anything about it. I think that this will be the same with the "running out of IPs" problem. If the forecasted date of sometime in 2010 is true, then I bet come late 2009, people will be frantically trying to think of a quick solution. That's just how people are, anything that requires added cost, will be done as late as possible. Hell, the oil reserves are supposed to run out in 30 years (AFAIK) and what are we doing about it now? Not a whole hell of a lot.
As for toasters,cars,coffeepots, all having their own IPs... I can see it happening with cars. Think about it, your car has a computer inside it that monitors the system, and -today- you can take your car into a mechanic, and with their own kind of computer, can hook up with your car's computer and find out what is wrong. I bet that in the near future, cars will have IPs, so that they can remotely talk to the mechanics' computers. And while we're at it, have a thing, where if someone steals your car, they can find out where the IP is located at. There are a hell of a lot of cars on the planet, aren't there?
And then there is the connectivity of cell phones, PDAs, people having dedicated lines to their computers in their home (eg. cable modems - connected all the time, so always have an IP). You have to remember that the IPs are not just for the USA, but for the rest of the world as well... the LDCs are beginning to be more connected, and as this develops, more IPs will be needed. With 6 billion people, if even half of them had at least one device that had an IP, it's easy to see that the 4 billion limit can run out very quickly.
It's going to eventually be like the area code problem, and have to punch in 10 digit numbers for local calls. Gawd, hopefully they won't run out of area codes...
Here is a good document that cleared up a number of false things I was told about IPv6. I don't kno how these spread, but I know I was wrongly told many of them to be true.
:)
The best new thing I am waiting for IPv6 to to do is force everyone to upgrade their routers to include multicasting. The large address spaces of IPv6 multicasting should have some extrememly interesting effects on internet broadcasting. I can't wait
can easily be revised to handle a few more than 4 billion addresses without a completely new infrastructure and more to the point, why the hell does my microwave need an IP address? IPv6 might have trillions upon trillions of addresses available, but it's overly complex IMO and needs too much work done in the background before it's even viable. IPv4 has 4 billion available addresses but thats assuming every address only uses a single port to connect with. You have the option of 65500 some ports to connect through which raises the potential number of addresses greatly. This shouldn't be new information to anyone. The NAT boxes are great because you can have hundreds of computers all on the same IP address and if you wanted to give each their own individual identity you could always assign each node a port that the outside user can connect to that node with now every IP address can have 65500 or so individual identities.
Lets say IPv6 was made a standard tomorrow and everyone had five years to convert or even ten years. Every router would have to be replaced with the cost being put now on the major backbone providers. Then every server and embeded system on the internet would have to be replaced by people like MCI and Aletnet. That means high speed access companies and ISPs who rent their services have to pay higher prices, and all the people that utilize their services have to pay a higher fee to make up for it. It comes down to a 40$ monthly dialup bill. My suggestion? Keep your microwave and toaster off the internet and think up more effective uses for NATs and network configurations.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Has anyone approached any of the Class A address holders (AOL, MIT, IBM, etc), and asked to have some of them back? I suppose that there would be some seriou opposition to this, and it may not even be technically feasible... Just a thought.