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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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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.
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
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.
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.
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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
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
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.
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.