"There's no financial incentive for ISPs or any companies to invest in IPv6"
Hogwash.
Carriers are running out of public IPv4 addresses. When they do, they'll have to deploy multi-layer NATs (so called Carrier-Grade NAT (CGN) or Large-Scale NAT (LSN)). This presents a problems for the ISP: Cost. Right now, the ISP don't pay for NAT. Their customers do. With CGN/LSN, the ISP now has to run NAT. That's a financial incentive to deploy IPv6 (with IPv6, there is no need for the ISP to run NAT).
*Sigh* Shouldn't you be embarrassed to be so willfully ignorant of reality?
The whole "no, we're not really running out of IPv4" argument has been thoroughly debunked. The IANA free pool is down to 28/8s. The IANA allocates, on average, 10/8s per year. So in roughly three years, the IANA free pool will be depleted. The RIR pools will be depleted roughly 12-18 months after that.
The RIRs do replenish their pool by voluntarily returns of unused address blocks and by revoking address space (usually for failure of payment of membership fees by the address holder). According the ARIN, they have 1.08/8s of voluntarily returned space, and 85/16s of revoked space. See this presentation - https://www.arin.net/participate/meetings/reports/ARIN_XXIII/pdf/wednesday/rsd.pdf for more details.
In short, addresses are going out faster than they're coming back.
Sure IPv6 has it all. But I doubt any ISP will do business any differently with IPv6 than otherwise. In fact, they'll just salivate that any caps will be reached a bit quicker because of the increased IPv6 header size. Mobile operators are probably salivating as well - 5 cents per kilobyte (not kiB), which includes the OTA headers, plus increased IPv6 header size
Could we please stop it with the baseless assertions that the extra 20 bytes in an IPv6 header will cause so many problems? There is no evidence at all to support this claim. The best example of now IPv6 header size is a non-issue is a paper about adding IPv6 support to OpenMPI. The developers investigated potential performance impacts of running MPI over IPv6 in a cluster. They found a whopping 1.4% drop in throughput and no increase in latency (section 4.1). If IPv6 shows such little hit in a such a sensitive environment, I'm very confident that it will work fine in broadband and cellular access networks.
Further, if you were really so concerned with bandwidth, you'd stop using HTML, since it's a remarkably inefficient encoding system.
No one is getting preferential treatment. There have been a handful of legacy/8s reclaimed. But even if we reclaimed all of them, it would only buy 1.5 - 2 years of extra life for the IANA IPv4 pool. Reclaiming "unused" IPv4 addresses isn't a viable long-term plan.
Even if you reclaimed all of the legacy/8s, it wouldn't do you much good. The IANA allocates between 10 - 12/8s per year. At best, reclaiming the legacy/8s would only get you another 18-24 months in the IANA pool.
Rather than spend efforts trying (in vain) to reclaim legacy space, why not deploy IPv6?
It's already enabled by default in Linux distributions
That doesn't mean that every (or even most) of the apps that come with your distro handle IPv6, or that there aren't bugs with those that do. There's still a lot of software bugs to fix.
I think D-Link's tech support and marketing is wrong.
According to ipv6ready.org, the DIR-615 rev C1 supports IPv6 in firmware version 3.00. According to D-Link's support site, that firmware is shipping.
the only compliant home router for the moment is the Apple Airport
This is not true. The Linksys RVS4000 and WRVS4400N support IPv6. D-link has added IPv6 to several of their products: DIR-615n, DI-524, DI-624, WBR-1310, DI-784, WBR-2310. See this presentation for more details.
I suggest you read RFC 5157: IPv6 Implications for Network Scanning. Do not think that just because a v6 end-user network has 2^64 addresses that you're safe.
Everything that is worth buying has been IPv6 compliant for years.
That is not at all true. A great deal of equipment and software still does not support IPv6. That's slowly improving, but you still need to check the DOD and IPv6 Ready certification lists before you make a purchase.
XP cannot function on a v6-only network. It cannot perform DNS queries over IPv6, nor can it obtain Kerberos tickets or query LDAP over IPv6. So, no DNS and no Active Directory. For those abilities, you need Vista.
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"There's no financial incentive for ISPs or any companies to invest in IPv6"
Hogwash.
Carriers are running out of public IPv4 addresses. When they do, they'll have to deploy multi-layer NATs (so called Carrier-Grade NAT (CGN) or Large-Scale NAT (LSN)). This presents a problems for the ISP: Cost. Right now, the ISP don't pay for NAT. Their customers do. With CGN/LSN, the ISP now has to run NAT. That's a financial incentive to deploy IPv6 (with IPv6, there is no need for the ISP to run NAT).
*Sigh* Shouldn't you be embarrassed to be so willfully ignorant of reality?
The whole "no, we're not really running out of IPv4" argument has been thoroughly debunked. The IANA free pool is down to 28 /8s. The IANA allocates, on average, 10 /8s per year. So in roughly three years, the IANA free pool will be depleted. The RIR pools will be depleted roughly 12-18 months after that.
The RIRs do replenish their pool by voluntarily returns of unused address blocks and by revoking address space (usually for failure of payment of membership fees by the address holder). According the ARIN, they have 1.08 /8s of voluntarily returned space, and 85 /16s of revoked space. See this presentation - https://www.arin.net/participate/meetings/reports/ARIN_XXIII/pdf/wednesday/rsd.pdf for more details.
In short, addresses are going out faster than they're coming back.
They will possibly use DHCPv6 Prefix Delegation to configure your home router's DHCPv6 server. DHCPv6-PD is one of the more useful aspects of DHCPv6.
Also, Comcast will deploy IPv6 alongside IPv4, so your IPv4-only devices will continue to work just fine.
Sure IPv6 has it all. But I doubt any ISP will do business any differently with IPv6 than otherwise. In fact, they'll just salivate that any caps will be reached a bit quicker because of the increased IPv6 header size. Mobile operators are probably salivating as well - 5 cents per kilobyte (not kiB), which includes the OTA headers, plus increased IPv6 header size
Could we please stop it with the baseless assertions that the extra 20 bytes in an IPv6 header will cause so many problems? There is no evidence at all to support this claim. The best example of now IPv6 header size is a non-issue is a paper about adding IPv6 support to OpenMPI. The developers investigated potential performance impacts of running MPI over IPv6 in a cluster. They found a whopping 1.4% drop in throughput and no increase in latency (section 4.1). If IPv6 shows such little hit in a such a sensitive environment, I'm very confident that it will work fine in broadband and cellular access networks.
Further, if you were really so concerned with bandwidth, you'd stop using HTML, since it's a remarkably inefficient encoding system.
IP addresses don't identify people. They tell routers where to forward packets.
Can we please move beyond this 1980s idea that IP addresses identify people?
I'm not sure I follow. "Flat use" of IPv4? The IANA has allocated four /8s this year. That's hardly flat.
No one is getting preferential treatment. There have been a handful of legacy /8s reclaimed. But even if we reclaimed all of them, it would only buy 1.5 - 2 years of extra life for the IANA IPv4 pool. Reclaiming "unused" IPv4 addresses isn't a viable long-term plan.
The main problem with the original address allocation scheme was that it left big gaps in places that made it nice to route, but a bitch to memorize
Why do you need to memorize addresses? Use DNS (either static or link-local multicast). It's a lot easier.
Even if you reclaimed all of the legacy /8s, it wouldn't do you much good. The IANA allocates between 10 - 12 /8s per year. At best, reclaiming the legacy /8s would only get you another 18-24 months in the IANA pool.
Rather than spend efforts trying (in vain) to reclaim legacy space, why not deploy IPv6?
Windows Vista, 7, 2008 and 2008 R2 have IPv6 enabled by default.
Well, sort of. ff02::2 is the link-local all routers muticast group. You can ping6 that address to get the link-local address of your router.
Of course, you can also you router advertisements to have your routing table automatically populated. RAs are nice for home networks.
IPv6 is being deployed. For example, this shows the growth in the IPv6 routing table size during 2008: http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2009-03/fig7.jpg
You can also check out http://sixy.ch/ for a list of IPv6-accessible web sites. It's growing weekly.
Google has launched their IPv6 trusted tester program, making many of their services reachable over IPv6.
How is it not as intuitive as IPv4?
Why do you have users using IP addresses? That's what DNS is for.
There is no proper use of NAT.
The DIR-615 rev C1 supports IPv6 in firmware version 3.00. According to D-Link's support site, that firmware is shipping.
It's already enabled by default in Linux distributions
That doesn't mean that every (or even most) of the apps that come with your distro handle IPv6, or that there aren't bugs with those that do. There's still a lot of software bugs to fix.
Actually, there are over 1,000 IPv6-reachable websites. See http://sixy.ch/ for a list.
I think D-Link's tech support and marketing is wrong. According to ipv6ready.org, the DIR-615 rev C1 supports IPv6 in firmware version 3.00. According to D-Link's support site, that firmware is shipping.
the only compliant home router for the moment is the Apple Airport
This is not true. The Linksys RVS4000 and WRVS4400N support IPv6. D-link has added IPv6 to several of their products: DIR-615n, DI-524, DI-624, WBR-1310, DI-784, WBR-2310. See this presentation for more details.
I run a fairly decent sized network, and it's hard enough keeping track of what's on which IP.
Can't you use the all-nodes link-local multicast address? E.g., ping6 ff02::1 ?
I suggest you read RFC 5157: IPv6 Implications for Network Scanning. Do not think that just because a v6 end-user network has 2^64 addresses that you're safe.
Everything that is worth buying has been IPv6 compliant for years.
That is not at all true. A great deal of equipment and software still does not support IPv6. That's slowly improving, but you still need to check the DOD and IPv6 Ready certification lists before you make a purchase.
The only large automaker with a /8 is Ford. So you could reclaim one block. That won't last that long until it's used up again.
XP cannot function on a v6-only network. It cannot perform DNS queries over IPv6, nor can it obtain Kerberos tickets or query LDAP over IPv6. So, no DNS and no Active Directory. For those abilities, you need Vista.
DNSSEC is supported by Unbound and NSD. Microsoft is adding support into Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2, as well.