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(Almost) All You Need To Know About IPv6
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Mar 08, 2007 11:50 AM
from the billions-and-billions dept.
from the billions-and-billions dept.
Butterspoon tips us to an article in Ars Technica titled "Everything you need to know about IPv6." Perhaps not quite "everything"; the article doesn't try to explain the reasons behind IPv6's meager adoption since its introduction 12 years ago. But it should be regarded as essential reading for anyone overly comfortable with their IPv4 addresses. Quoting: "As of January 1, 2007, 2.4 billion of those [IPv4 addresses] were in (some kind of) use. 1.3 billion were still available and about 170 million new addresses are given out each year. So at this rate, 7.5 years from now, we'll be clean out of IP addresses; faster if the number of addresses used per year goes up. Are you ready for IPv6?"
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Web 2.0 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Web 2.0 (Score:5, Funny)
I think that's why it's called Web 2.0. Because it's two more than IPv4.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Web 2.0 (Score:5, Funny)
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All you need to know... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:All you need to know... (Score:5, Insightful)
MIT (I know they make use of public IPs, but 16 million addresses?)
Haliburton (!)
Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc (?)
Ford Motor Company
This [iana.org] website has an updated list. There are a lot more on the list who have waste space, I just don't feel like going through all of them.
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Re:All you need to know... (Score:5, Informative)
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No longer BBN's (Score:3, Informative)
BTW the company changed its name to "BBN Corp." around 1995, at which time its commercial ISP operation took the name BBN Planet. That used Net 4, as well as ASN (autonomous system number, used by BGP) 1. In 1997, GTE bought them. In 2000, Bell Atlantic (l/k/a Verizon) took over, but as terms of the deal, BBN Planet became a separate partially-owned subsidiar
Rearrange those deck chairs... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:All you need to know... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:All you need to know... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Eats up about 5 years of your IT budget"
In that case I pity your IT budget. If your IT staff actually knows what they're doing it doesnt need to cost much. Or anything. The difficult part isnt rolling out IPv6, it's ending IPv4. And you can let that take care of itself by letting the unsupported things die of old age.
"they don't run servers"
Server in the realm of networking isnt the hardware you put in a big room somewhere. Client software like netmeeting is a 'server'. Backup software, configuration software, etc, etc.
Put your company behind a NAT. Then explain to your boss why he cant connect with netmeeting to the CEO of a newly acquired company. Try to integrate networks after mergers. Put your network behind a nat, and eventually you'll need to do the IPv6 installation _anyway_ to get some new functionality.
NAT doesnt solve the same problems that IPv6 does; it's at best a temporary stopgap measure.
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Meager adoption (Score:5, Insightful)
Widespread NAT
Re:Meager adoption (Score:4, Interesting)
NAT really does turn out to be a good thing overall for most home users. They are forced to use it if they want multiple computers on the Net (in most cases), and it protects them.
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Re:Meager adoption (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe home consumers, but not users in general. Even less technical users may want to publish a webcam or to play their music from a friend's computer during a party. From the birth of Internet, users with regular UNIX accounts on shared machines could run their own little services on non-privileged ports. That this ability is not available 20 years later is ludicrous.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
20 years ago, though, the people who were doing this sort of thing knew at least a LITTLE something about computers and networks. Now that it's got mass adoption, of course people don't know how to do things. That's really a big part of the reason that malware propagates so easily in the first place.
Even so, there have been attempts to address it using uPNP. And uPNP is a security hazard, much like running without a firewall. Shocking, eh?
Re:Meager adoption (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Meager adoption (Score:5, Insightful)
Erm, that's easier said than done. A normal residential IPv6 allocation will be a /64 prefix, which means you are allocated a 64-bit prefix, and you can select any address in the remaining 64-bit address space. So you'd have 18446744073709551616 addresses to scan to find all the hosts on the network. Assuming that the hosts have Privacy Extensions turned off, and that they are all autoconfiguring based on their MAC addresses, you know that the 12th and 13th bytes are 0xFF and 0xFE respectively. That still leaves 48 bits of address space, or 281474976710656 addresses. Good luck.
Parent
UUCP made life easy too. (Score:5, Interesting)
Second, there are applications coming that aren't going to play well with NAT, particularly internet telephony. We need to get rid of NAT in order to allow for WiFi/cellular phones, and portable devices that will multihome across networks. There are whole classes of applications and technologies that will be possible, once the infrastructure allows for things like this, and NAT is holding it back.
Complaining because NAT makes your printers easier to set up securely, and thus ought to be kept around, is a little like people who grumbled that persistent network connections between campus mainframes were a huge security risk, and that everyone would be better if we just stuck with UUCP and nightly dial-ins. While they may have been right, I think we can all agree that the benefits, in hindsight, of not all being stuck on isolated systems that only connected to each other at midnight to exchange traffic, outweigh the hazards. (If you disagree, signal your discontent by reaching behind your PC and unplugging that network cable or antenna.) It's a shortsighted position.
Until households and "dumb devices" get globally routable addresses, we won't know the sort of things that we can do with them. The ideas that people have outlined today -- the ability to use broadband applications on your cellphone or portable device over your connection at home, and then seamlessly failover to the cellular network (or another WiFi network, or whatever) when you walk out of range, without dropping the connection or needing to do a messy DHCP renewal -- that's just the beginning. That's like someone in 1985 trying to give a sales pitch about the Internet: how many things do we have now that weren't really possible to foresee at that point? (Good and bad.) A whole lot.
Third, even with the widespread adoption of NAT, we're still running out of IPv4s. There are enough applications and situations out there that require routable addresses, that even if we were to use NAT on everything, we'd still run out. It's a temporary solution at best, and an admittedly very cool hack, but we're coming to the end of the road for it. It's time to implement a real solution.
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Is it stable? Can old systems use it? (Score:4, Funny)
I am running a i386. Should I just stick with IPv2?
Peak Internets! (Score:5, Funny)
Ted Stevens (R-Pork): As my colleagues from across the aisle are pointing out, we're facing Peak Internets. Clearly what we need is to open up drilling in IPNAR (Internet Protocol National Address Reserve) and start drilling in those unused /8s. We need more tubes!
Ted Kennedy (D-Ham): Sure, how about 34.0.0.0/8, Halliburton?
Dick Cheney (R-Oil): Suck it, Ted. Your union buddies in 19.0.0.0/8, Ford Motor Company, ain't long for this world anyways.
Senator BOFH (I-Maginary): Umm, dudes? I didn't know DEC was still around, let alone still owned (16.0.0.0/8), and do enough people still go to Interop (45.0.0.0/8) that it deserves a whole frickin' /8 to itself?
FCC: All of y'all, shaddap. The telcos paid us good money to put us in charge of this little exercise, so we'll take it from here. Everybody switches to IPv6 on our timetable. It shouldn't take us much longer than it took to phase out analog TV.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
MIT and Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
As of January 1, 2007 too many IP addresses were in (some kind of) use by Apple and MIT who have entire class As but don't need that kind of address space. In 7 years when we are approaching what this particular author believes will be the end of the road for IPv4, those two (and anyone else with too many unused addresses) should be mandated to give them up so that everyone else can use them.
IPv6 won't be in wide use until the ISPs drop their ridiculous additional IP charges. They make a good bit of money through that so I assume they will be the absolute last people to switch over. Because most residential connections are on Comcast and other providers that don't want anything to do w/making less money, there's no way that this will happen w/o a fight.
Re:MIT and Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
IPV6 handles routing almost automagically. We should see fewer problems with chunking and "wasted" IP addresses. And of course, there are many other benefits. I honestly can't wait for the day when IPV4 is a terrible memory.
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Applying the gates response... (Score:5, Funny)
May i be the first person to say (Score:5, Funny)
You heard it here first. iThankyou.
Re:May i be the first person to say (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Kindest Regards,
Dr Toreo Asesino, BSc, MSc, GeneralLikerOfComplexAndGeekyThings (From the 'longer-is-better' department)
Address scarcity will not drive adoption of IPv6 (Score:3, Insightful)
I think we have much more pressing problems. I seriously question whether or not our advanced technological society will last long enough to exhaust the currently available address space, and even if the prediction is true, and we approach that state within the next 7.5 years, it is more likely that measures will be taken to ensure that abandoned or underutilized address space is reallocated.
Re:Address scarcity will not drive adoption of IPv (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Address scarcity will not drive adoption of IPv (Score:3, Informative)
IPV4 + RFC1918 != IPV6, NAT / Proxy saved IPV4 (Score:5, Insightful)
When I say direct consumers as it relates to IPV4 the two largest consumers are Internet service providers and large corporations.
I remember when I started my first ISP. Everyone that dialed up to our modem bank was assigned a public IPV4 IP address. Later as higher bandwidth solutions arrived it was nothing for an ISDN user to have a
Now that has changed. Generally unless you pay extra you are going to have a RFC1918 (IP addresses that have been mutually agreed upon to be private). With this type of IP address nobody from the Internet can initiate communication to and of your equipment. These IP addresses are not routed on the public Internet. When you initiate an outbound communication to some server on the Internet your ISP will do a hide NAT to get you out to the Internet.
A hide NAT is when many systems using private address space all use the same IP address as their source when they leave their ISP. So, instead of the good ol (not so good) days where ever user needed a public IP address now an ISP can hide thousands of customers behind a single IP address.
Large corporation use similar techniques. They realized that not ever computer on ever desk need a public IP address. Again, they could use hide NAT and let them all use RFC1918 (private IP space) and when they would go out to the Internet they could either be hidden behind an IP or use a proxy. Also, almost simultaneously the idea that not all the servers in your data center needed a public address either. Your web and mail servers might but their back end database servers wouldn't. These wouldn't even require NAT because for security reasons it is just better if the have no interaction with the public Internet. The web servers could communicate with them with a physical separated network or internal routers could route their traffic to the proper location within their corporate infrastructure.
Two factors drove this movement. First was the fear of running out of IPV4 addresses. Arin and the like were doing there best to scare consumers into rationing their allocation in fear of not being able to get another. Second came from network security. Firewalls and proxy servers and the like were being implemented more rapidly than ever before. This was partly in response to the ever expanding IT bubble that many were sure would grow indefinitely and the majority was due to the realization that without proper security the bad guys would enter you system and start poking around. A system (server environment) can never be made 100% secure but the more money you are willing to spend on security the higher you raise the bar for a potential black hat hacker. As you increase security you make those that don't easier targets so a hacker would go after the easiest to penetrate rather than the more secure environments. This feeds upon itself. There will always be hackers and network security will have to continually evolve.
But back to IPV4. Looking at the current utilization of IPV4 as to what it was say in 1990 you see a completely different picture. The current picture is what was the promise of IPV6 and that is that it doesn't look like we will be running out in the foreseeable future. It's true with IPV4 we don't have enough public IP addresses so that everyone can have all their kitchen appliance connected to the Internet with a public IP. I have listened to many people tell the analogy that IPV6 has enough IP space so that every grain of sand on the planet Earth could have it's own IP address. Well, the truth is that we don't need that many, not anywhere near that many. And though it's true that IPV6 has more features t
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You may get away with it for a while, but wait until your company merges with another company that uses the same private IP addresses. You'll change your mind quickly.
Globally-unique addresses should be used on anything that interacts with the internet. Anything else is a cheap hack that will bite you in the ass eventually.
I realize that some are forced to NAT because IP4 sucks. But to choose NAT for "security" reasons when real addresses are an option is, well, ignorant.
NAT Translation is Dead On. (Score:5, Insightful)
The article does a great job of presenting the debate. In every talk, you should tell the audience what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell you what you told them. In this case, the author took the novel and interesting approach of using a Slashdot summary of the subject, linking to a previous discussion and paraphrasing it. I present the summary and the expansion side by side to highlight their ingenious rhetorical style:
"Use NAT, n00b. All 1337 of my Linux boxes share a single IP and it's safer, too!"
"NAT is not a firewall."
"NAT sucks."
"You suck."
Thanks for the shoutout, Ars. The explanation of various non free software limitations for using IP4/IP6 and partial explanation of why those systems may need firewalls to begin with is sure to add to the human body of knowledge and foster civilized conversations. After reading the article, it's all clear to me, for sure not at all. Respeckt!
Sig. (Score:4, Interesting)
IPv6 is way too painful (Score:4, Informative)
1) Our local provide (XO) doesn't even offer public IPv6 address space.
2) ARIN wants thousands of dollars PER YEAR for portable address space.
3) Identifying what/how-to use a substitute for the deprecated "site-local" addressing. Tracking this down took days of searching and piecing things together. All the docs agreed that site-local was deprected but rarely mentioned what was going to take its place. Here is some links to what was found, MS has surprising helpful documentation:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/network/evaluate
http://book.itzero.com/read/cisco/0602/Cisco.Pres
Generate a global ID with either of the tools below:
http://www.kame.net/~suz/gen-ula.html [kame.net]
http://www.hznet.de/tools/generate-rfc4193-addr [hznet.de]
Additionally it is nearly impossible to control the allocation of hosts to specific suffixes. We often organize customers address space so that global catalog for each site are at, say,
In a nutshell, IPv6 tools and implementation on hosts fall far short of the enterprise tools used define and organize a LAN for IPv4 and until ease of use is at least on par with MS IPv4 DHCP point/click environment it is going to continue to languish. It absolutely must have integrated DHCP server redundancy with automatic failover/failback/sync so sorely lacking, LO these many years in MS offerings.
Reasons for meager adoption. (Score:3, Insightful)
Try to get a page from Slashdot's servers using IPv6 - that is to say, using IPv6 format packets, NOT IPv4 packets.
Then ask yourself again why IPv6 is NOT being adopted.
(NOTE: You can replace Slashdot with CNN, Digg, or whatever other mainstream site floats your boat.)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A very small peice of the IPv6's space is simply there to allow IPv4 to still work, so those devices won't have issues.
Besides, if everything else moves to IPv6, wouldn't that allow for IPv4 addresses to be freed up for this old systems?
~Francisco
Re:Running out of IPv4 (Score:5, Informative)
NAT though is NOT a solution, it's a patch, a fix to a problem of running out of space. There should be enough IP's out there for everyone, but the '/8 should be enough for the average company' idea from the 80's-early 90's screwed us all up. Each Coca Cola or IBM-owned computer for example could have it's own public IP, the way it should be, but they own 16M+ addresses, way too much for their needs. But anyway, IPv6 is going to keep us out of trouble for now until we make the same mistake (history has a tendency to repeat itself) and we have to invent IPv8 or so.
Next to that IPv4 has been missing some major features and runs into problems with large networks and (very) fast links (talking 10Gigabit for example) IPv6 will solve for us, it routes faster, it has inheritely support for multicast and jumboframes, IPSec and mobile versions while IPv4 usually has that functionality bolted on (sometimes implemented slightly different with each manufacturer).
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Re:Running out of IPv4 (Score:5, Informative)
I suppose at that point, history will repeat itself and we'll have to invent IPv8.
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Re:Running out of IPv4 (Score:5, Insightful)
And it's oh so delightful when you have to connect to heterogenous networks who are both using the same private IP scheme. Or when you have to VPN into your office from a customer network and you're both using the same scheme. Or when you have to VPN through a NAT firewall.
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Re:Running out of IPv4 (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, relax, Chicken Little. Once we run out of IPv4 addresses for our NATs, we'll just stick all those NAT's behind other NAT's. Pretty soon we'll just have one IP address tied to one NAT that everybody shares and the problem will be solved.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://sonic.net/features/ipv6/ [sonic.net]
Or at least it's an IPv6 tunnel (not sure how that might differ from 'native').
I haven't got around to setting it up, but if/when I get my WRT54GL setup with OpenWRT I'll probably have it run IPv6 as well...
I'd have built our whole network on IPv6, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
IPv6 adoption won't occur in the US unless ARIN comes up with a better policy.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Thomas Edison was a control freak and, from what I've read, an all-around asshat. Didn't stop him from being revered by the public and making millions on his inventions,
Re:Meager adoption (Score:5, Interesting)
When the folks who invented IPv6 wanted to give people a chance to use the new protocol in a test environment, they created the 6bone. They then spent years getting the folks who make backbone routers to implement the new protocol on those routers, and when the backbone routers had firmware that would do IPv6, they declared victory and went home. One of the last exchanges I participated in on the 6bone mailing list talked about how, since everyone in the world now had access to IPv6, there was no more need for this test network.
The only problem is that protocol adoption and demand for addresses typically happen from the leaf nodes first, and then they move to the backbones. The sole focus on the backbone providers meant that IPv6 became a solution looking for a problem. Yes, I could have gotten native IPv6 service....if I had been willing to get an OC-512 backhauled from Germany. The problem is, I was (and am) a user with a SOHO LAN and I can't justify paying better than commercial cablemodem rates for access and, as far as I am aware, native IPv6 transport is still not available from Time Warner or Comcast or whoever does the service in my area.
Of course, the news isn't all bad. All the operating systems I routinely run now speak IPv6 natively. The thing is, if I can't buy transport for the protocol, it doesn't matter how cool it is, how cheap the addresses are, or how easy the autoconfig is, it's not at all useful in the real world.
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Re:IPv6 - never gonna happen (Score:4, Interesting)
Want to know what's changed in the past few years (apart from the significant decrease in free IPv4 address blocks since 2000), and why it's far more likely to take off now? Simple.
The [chinadaily.com.cn] Chinese [cio.com] are [breitbart.com] supporting it [itworld.com] in a big way.
Could be argued that the Chinese government have their own reasons (cynical or otherwise) for supporting this, and that there's no need for the rest of us to go along with it. However, it's not like they're supporting some proprietery technology (a la SVCD). And although they're nowhere near the West in terms of technology penetration (yet), it's a fair bet that the sheer size of the market will encourage many in the rest of the world to support IPv6 as well. This could be the catalyst that will finally encourage IPv6 to take off properly.
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