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Level of IPv6 Usage Is Vanishingly Small
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Aug 18, 2008 05:52 PM
from the nine-hundred-days-to-exhaustion dept.
from the nine-hundred-days-to-exhaustion dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The impending IPv4 address allocation shortage has led to a lot of speculation on the future of IPv6 (including here). A new study says that Internet IPv6 migration is not just going slowly — it has basically not even begun. After spending a year measuring IPv6 traffic across 87 ISPs around the world, the study concludes 'less than one hundredth of 1% of Internet traffic is IPv6... equivalent to the allowed parts of contaminants in drinking water.'"
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IPv4 Address Crunch In 2 Years, IPv6 Not Ready 539 comments
An anonymous reader writes "We've known for ages that IPv4 was going to run out of addresses — now, it's happening. IPv6 was going to save us — it isn't. The upcoming crisis will hit, perhaps as soon as 2010, but nobody can agree on what to do. The three options are all pretty scary. This article covers the background, and links to a presentation by Randy Bush (PDF) that shows the reality of the problem in stark detail."
Submission: Vanishingly Small Levels of Internet IPv6 Usage by Anonymous Coward
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Why it doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it impacts the other guys, not me. It's the people in China and India and everywhere else that need addresses. Me? I've got a whole block right here.
Re:Why it doesn't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
I think people who can will continue to use ipv4 for that reason, and those that just need a lot of cheap address space will start using ipv6 as ipv4 gets harder to get and/or more expensive.
Parent
Should have gone to A.B.C.D.E.F.G format. (Score:5, Interesting)
We could have even just added a 3 more positions in the address and assumed a default of 1.1.1. as the default prefix if none was given. That would have given us 16 million * the current 4 billion addresses - 64 quadrillion addresses.
At the risk of repeating the 'no one needs more 640k', I'd have to say that I think 64 quadrillion is more than usable for the next several years. The upshot is that it would have been much easier to deal with that. From a pragamatic viewpoint, there's a whole lot of software out there invested in the dotted quad format. Modifying that to deal with a few more X.X.X places wouldn't have been as hard (think GUIs that check IP validity, for example) as moving to IPv6.
Lame excuses, perhaps, but I think we'd have seen much faster adoption to a format like X.X.X.X.X.X.X because it's an incremental, not radically different.
Parent
Re:Should have gone to A.B.C.D.E.F.G format. (Score:5, Informative)
IPv4 addresses can be represented in IPv6 as 0::10.10.1.12 (Or as 0::FFFF:10.10.1.12 in some cases.)
I don't see that using dots instead of colons makes a transition any easier.
Parent
Re:Should have gone to A.B.C.D.E.F.G format. (Score:5, Informative)
Really? The dots vs colons thing is the single most problematic thing I've encountered. No seriously - network level is easy, just upgrade firmware or hardware. It when working with configuration files and addresses that IPv6 sucks. Firstly, : was already very widely used used, for separating IPv4 address from port number.
Just using abcd.abcd.abcd.abcd.abcd.abcd.abcd.abcd would have meant that abcd.abcd.abcd.abcd.abcd.abcd.abcd.abcd:443
would have worked much like 123.123.123.123:443, though obviously distinguishably - hex and more sections.
People seem to have settled on enclosing the IPv6 address in square brackets to make it work reasonably parseably (given abbreviation, see below) into config files and urls and stuff, at least that seems to be the most widely used convention. i.e. [abcd:abcd:abcd:abcd:abcd:abcd:abcd:abcd]:443
It works okay, but it could have been simply avoided, damnit.
Secondly, the :0000:0000:000: to :: abbreviation rule was actually a terrible mistake. It makes parsers somewhat harder to write, and means that IPv6 addresses can't be munged with regexes nearly as handily as IPv4 addresses, which seriously inconveniences time-pressed sysadmins. Yes, Ipv6 address are long if unabbreviated. But without the abbreviation they would have been REGULAR.
Parent
Re:What regex problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not any less handy? you have _got_ to be kidding. You expect people to whip that monstrosity up every fucking time they want to match for addresses? When working over a serial terminal on a barely-capable quirky embedded shell? And who the fuck compiles regexes? Programmers, that's who. This represents the core problem - IPv6 addressing seems to have been designed by programmers, not sysadmins.
Parent
Re:Should have gone to A.B.C.D.E.F.G format. (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm. Base 85, eh?
I hereby propose a closely related 40-character format, where each base85 value is represented by a pair of letters, consonant-vowel -
The "bananafofana" IPv6 address notation...
17 consonants: bdfghjklmnpstvxwz
5 vowels: aeiou
=> 85 distinct consonant-vowel pairs
(dropped c,r because of confusion possibilities with s/k,l. h is tricky for some non-english speakers, but it can typically be learned. I tend to think of x as the ch sound in irish/scottish "loch", but, well, it doesn't matter all that much.)
First, transform to base 85 is performed as per the RFC1924. Then,
rather than mapping to 85 different ascii characters, the 0-84 base85 digits are mapped to consonant+vowel pairs in consonants*vowels sequence i.e.
("ba" "be" "bi" "bo" "bu" "da" "de" "di" "do" "du" "fa" "fe" "fi" "fo" "fu" "ga" "ge" "gi" "go" "gu" "ha" "he" "hi" "ho" "hu" "ja" "je" "ji" "jo" "ju" "ka" "ke" "ki" "ko" "ku" "la" "le" "li" "lo" "lu" "ma" "me" "mi" "mo" "mu" "na" "ne" "ni" "no" "nu" "pa" "pe" "pi" "po" "pu" "sa" "se" "si" "so" "su" "ta" "te" "ti" "to" "tu" "va" "ve" "vi" "vo" "vu" "xa" "xe" "xi" "xo" "xu" "wa" "we" "wi" "wo" "wu" "za" "ze" "zi" "zo" "zu")
These pairs are then concatenated to give a 40 character nonsense word string -
So, for example, 1080:0:0:0:8:800:200C:417A => base85 4-68-70-46-66-12-63-31-61-19-4-37-53-75-0-58-57-65-34-51 (from the RFC)
=> [buvoxanevefitoketegubulipowabasosivakupe]
There, much better ;-)
Maybe spaces should probably be allowed between every 8 characters, just to make it a bit more legible. Especially out loud :-)
Q. Hey, what's that server's address, again?
A. [ buvoxane vefitoke tegubuli powabaso sivakupe ] !!!
Parent
Re:Should have gone to A.B.C.D.E.F.G format. (Score:5, Funny)
[ buvoxane vefitoke tegubuli powabaso sivakupe ]
Why is it suddenly raining blood?
Parent
Re:Should have gone to A.B.C.D.E.F.G format. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well that whole 640k thing with regard to IP addresses has been largely negated by the adoption of routers within the home. Back when cable/DSL adoption was first starting, many people would end up with a switch and then have to call up the ISP for a second IP address. And with several computers in every home these days (not to mention other devices that grab IP addresses - games consoles, WiFi cell phones, network printers, etc), that plausibly could have become a very big issue very quickly. I've got at least a dozen pieces of hardware that consume a local IP address (not to mention the two or three VMs I have going at any given time), and it's a very good thing they don't each consume a slot in the worldwide public address space.
For all practical purposes, even an A.B.C.D.E would probably be enough thanks to routers - that still gives us ~1 trillion unique IPs worldwide. Of course if we were to make the switch it would make sense to give us the additional headroom. I'm hardly intimately familiar with the inner workings of IPv6 but assume it has benefits beyond mere address space, but the added complication to sysadmins of dealing with something like "2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:0000:1428:57ab" (thanks, Wikipedia) is simply a nightmare in the making. Four bytes versus sixteen? I can remember which computer is 192.168.0.11 on my local network easily enough (and could certainly remember my public IP if I were bothered, as it never seems to change despite not paying for static), but you can practically smell the smoke coming out of my head after just looking at that.
It's certainly forward-thinking, but having (estimated) fewer atoms in the universe than IPv6 addresses available is just slightly overkill, doncha think?
Parent
Re:Should have gone to A.B.C.D.E.F.G format. (Score:4, Interesting)
The first broadband ISP I ever had was Shaw Cable, and back then, there was no such thing as 'broadband routers' - heck, we couldn't even justify buying a switch, so we just used a 10baseT hub (ew).
Imagine my surprise when I found out that our networked Brother printer, which we had only used over Appletalk-over-Ethernet, had had a public IP address for a year. Fortunately, it seems that the printer designers had (for whatever reason) prevented printing/access from non-local subnets, limiting the number of people with access to it to somewhere around 64 or 128 (we weren't part of a full class C, for sensible reasons).
Oddly enough, the ISP wanted you to pay for extra IPs - but didn't require it. Honour system ftw.
Parent
Re:Why it doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
it impacts the other guys
It affects the other guys. This is Slashdot, not a marketing department or a boardroom. Let's use English instead of Marketese. Further reading. [mtholyoke.edu]
Parent
Re:Why it doesn't matter (Score:5, Informative)
Affect/effect are one of those amusingly nasty little hand grenades in English. Handy crib sheet:
Affect, n: emotional response. "The Minister for Granola appeared to be displaying flattened affect during his speech, leading to suspicions that he was abusing his own product."
Effect, n: causal result. "The effect of the proposed granola reform would be catastrophic."
Affect, v: alter. "The proposed reforms will affect the granola industry greatly."
Effect, v: put into immediate action. "If elected, I will effect sweeping reforms of the granola trade."
Parent
Stupid arbitrary units of measurements (Score:5, Insightful)
'less than one hundredth of 1% of Internet traffic is IPv6... equivalent to the allowed parts of contaminants in drinking water.'
Like that means anything to me. Can they compare that percentage in terms of the number of pages per Library of Congress?
Re:Stupid arbitrary units of measurements (Score:5, Funny)
No, because it's IPv6, you have to compare against the number of grains of sand on the planet.
Parent
Re:Stupid arbitrary units of measurements (Score:5, Funny)
Like that means anything to me. Can they compare that percentage in terms of the number of pages per Library of Congress?
Sure.
'That's like less than one hundredth of 1% of the number of pages in the library of congress.'
Parent
Re:Stupid arbitrary units of measurements (Score:5, Funny)
Well, if this sentence was in a book in the Library of Congress, IPv6 usage would represent its adoption lev
Parent
Re:Stupid arbitrary units of measurements (Score:5, Funny)
If you take all the IPv6 addresses and stood them end to end, they'd wrap around the globe six times!
The internet routers will carry 128 bits of address space. That is enough addresses to fill two thousand Olympic sized swimming pools!
The IPv6 address space is so huge, it would fill the Beijing Birds Nest.
Oh yeah, your mom is so fat, she weights more then an entire IPv6 /8.
Your mom is so fat, she needed the government to build IPv8 to hold all her IP addresses.
And an offtopic one I just though of: Your mom's sex tape is so nasty, even Pirate Bay banned her from their network.
Parent
You know what would help? (Score:5, Insightful)
If people could actually get IPv6 service from their providers instead of having to route everything through congested tunnels, THAT would help.
Re:You know what would help? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Wait... (Score:4, Funny)
Let me get this straight... It's not a truck?
No it's like a truck, except you can't dump stuff on it like it's a big truck.
Parent
Reasons. (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest reasons:
And probably many others. The bottom line is that right now today, there isn't a 'killer app' for IPv6.
Re:Reasons. (Score:5, Insightful)
Interestingly, Apple's AirPort Extreme/Time Capsule firmware does support IPv6 as local-link only, an IPv6 node, or tunnel to IPv6. It also includes an IPv6 firewall supporting incoming IPSec authentication and Teredo tunnels (to get through NAT).
Apple owns more than 10% of the retail WiFi N router market according to NPD [roughlydrafted.com].
Mac OS X, XP and Vista all support IPv6, but having support in the router is the important part. Enabling a significant percentage of users to flip on IPv6 and tunnel right through their legacy ISP is already possible. IPv6 just needs a killer app.
How about authenticated web apps? IPv6 secures traffic from the user to the cloud. That's something Apple has reason to push with MobileMe: "look at us, we have IPv6 security."
Look at what Apple's doing with Back To My Mac to support authenticated connections using Wide-Area Bonjour Dynamic DNS lookups. This could be done via IPv6 using direct addressing. Apple will end up selling more routers, MM subscriptions and IPv6 will get its foot in the door for others to use.
Will the iPhone Meet its Match from a Modern Day DOS? [roughlydrafted.com]
Parent
Re:Reasons. (Score:4, Funny)
I know I can't get IPv6 here. I've called my local cable company (CableONE) and they told me "Oh, that's not being implemented in the US. That's over in Asia."
But I must say that many new consumer routers advertise IPv6.
Parent
Re:Reasons. (Score:5, Informative)
There is a killer app, It's called
news.ipv6.eweka.nl
It has 120 (!) days retention, and comes to you at gigabit speed.
All for FREE if you use ipv6.
Parent
Re:Reasons. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
So if IPv6 is a water contaminant.... (Score:5, Funny)
Makes me happy (Score:5, Interesting)
It may be just me, but I always felt IPv6 is a solution looking for the problem.
There is a reason IPv4 is so well entrenched. Other than availability of software, hardware and services, it is convenience of handling IPv4 in all those things. This is what permits developers to create all those wonderful products, administrators to effectively administer them and users to enjoy them. A primary reason to that is IPv4 address size - it is 32 bit which is natively handled by all current hardware, and easily remembered by humans (short term) in its quad decimal form.
IPv6 has neither of these features. It is difficult to deal with in software (I know, I do this for a living), does not fit into any native data type (and won't until we move to 128 bit architectures - which does not seem to be very soon), cannot be remembered or used by a human (so effective administration requires magic automatic tools), does not give itself with any convenience to routing related data structures (like radix trees). All this for dubious benefit of addressing directly (in non-hierarchical manner) of every toaster in the world. This is directly opposite to the way the Real World operates (i.e. your home has an address, but noone gets to talk to your toaster directly without going through you first.
If I were solving this, I'd suggest separate and non-directly routable IPv4 address spaces for separate countries (and, perhaps, for other entities). And lots and lots of NAT or proxying. Of course that is kind of what is happening anyway.
China would be happier that way too. In case of cross-border cyberattack, just cut external links and your country is self-sufficient and interconnected :)
Anyway, I am ready to bet some cash that IPv6 will never become a major transport protocol.
I know I will do whatever I can to keep it far far away.
Re:Makes me happy (Score:5, Informative)
It may be just me, but I always felt IPv6 is a solution looking for the problem. [..] And lots and lots of NAT or proxying.
And NAT is a problem masquerading as a solution.
Anyway, I am ready to bet some cash that IPv6 will never become a major transport protocol.
I know I will do whatever I can to keep it far far away.
And I'll keep on enjoying all the free services people provide for IPv6 enabled hosts.
Parent
Re:Makes me happy (Score:4, Insightful)
You (and many people) are so accustomed to NAT you don't even see how wrong it is.
There is nothing really difficult to use IPv6 address instead of IPv4. Writing (or even using) a network application having to deal with NAT is a real pain.
Parent
Re:Makes me happy (Score:5, Insightful)
If I were solving this, I'd suggest separate and non-directly routable IPv4 address spaces for separate countries (and, perhaps, for other entities). And lots and lots of NAT or proxying. Of course that is kind of what is happening anyway.
Eww. Lots of room for bugs and weird feature interaction in the design of protocols that have to punch through NATs, either that or everyone has to role out new helper modules / ALGs each time some wizzy new app is invented.
IPv6 is really a clean-up job. Combing the complexity back out of the network has got to be a win for reliability, ease of administration, and perhaps even security. I'm in favour, though I have to say I'm doubtful about it happening any time soon.
I think the most optimistic scenario is this: when IPv4 exhaustion hits, particularly in countries that have to yet to have their internet 'boom' and so will have a very low number of existing addresses per capita, obviously some sort ISP side NATing is going to be required. People may decide that they might as well implement IPv6 and TRT [wikipedia.org] anyway, particularly if they're deploying new hardware / software combinations (netbooks? set-top boxes?) and so can dictate IPv6-readiness. Hopefully once sufficient numbers of IPv6-only nodes are out there, it'll seem worthwhile rolling out IPv6 on servers.
The alternative, ultimately, is people auctioning off tiny IPv4 address blocks and exponentially bloating routing table sizes, or a horrible twisty unreliable world of multiple NAT or ALGs, where net neutrality is a quaint concept consigned to history ..
And yes, printable IPv6 addresses are ridiculous. Admins will have to get used to trusting DNS (or /etc/hosts) when configuring stuff .. :)
Parent
Re:Makes me happy (Score:5, Insightful)
I usually do not reply to my own posts (or replies to my posts) on /., but this is one area where I think it may actually be important.
First of all, if I were to guess, I'd say that all those who replied while questioning my background don't actually do network development for a living. While I could start beating my own chest about how most of your traffic right now probably goes through something designed by me, that would be beside the point (and noone knows you are a dog on the Internet :) ).
That said, a few points specifically.
1) "Never heard of structs?". Structures are orthogonal to the size of IP addresses. You can represent IPv4 address as a structure (as original in_addr used to do, exactly because not all hardware supported 32 bit natively). You could do the same with IPv6 (or you can simply stuff it into 16 sequential bytes). What won't change is ability to perform operations directly on the data type. :) ). This is inefficient, prone to error and makes code less maintainable.
You can natively compare two v4 addresses by using a == b (which will translate into a single assembly instruction). You cannot do that on a 129 bit data item. Your choices are - memcmp, or defined operation (compare first 4 bytes, then next 4 bytes, then next, then next
2) Radix trees. Sure, anything can be stored in a radix tree with appropriately long prefix or appropriately large number of nodes in a prefix. What can't be done, however, is keeping this tree in memory (given current device and system memory sizes, which are in low gigabytes to a few dozen gigabytes). This problem is exacerbated by the fact that IPv4 address space is very compact of necessity (not too many holes, and everything is neatly CIDRed together), whereas IPv6 is of necessity full of holes (and designed to stay that way).
3) Performance is a relatively minor consideration in this.
As far as NAT goes - I firmly believe that solutions (in technology and elsewhere) are of two kinds - "organic", i.e. borne of and supported by needs and circumstances, and "artificial". Organic solutions are not always streamlined or pretty. Humans are a good example. A rock of salt is pretty darn inorganic (though I wouldn't want to stretch this analogy too far :) ) NAT is the former, IPv6 is the latter.
Parent
Re:Makes me happy (Score:5, Insightful)
While I could start beating my own chest about how most of your traffic right now probably goes through something designed by me, that would be beside the point (and noone knows you are a dog on the Internet :) ).
I don't know if you're a dog, but I do know that you haven't designed recent hardware, or you'd know that:
If you like simplicity and elegance and performance, you'd love IPv6.
Parent
Re:Makes me happy (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Not too many processors allow you to handle 1-bit or 4-bit structures, of which the IPv4 header contains many. The difference is the direction, not the direct handling.
2. Since IPv6 should have fewer exceptions to general cases, the number of nodes in the radix tree should be significantly lower, so giving you a net save.
3. Performance is so unimportant that IPv4 latency is one of the biggest things people loath and despise about IPv4. ATM is hardly a decent protocol, the payloads are absurdly small, but the latency is almost non-existent. As grids and clouds increase in usage, network latency is going to be the only latency that people will care about.
Parent
Re:Makes me happy (Score:5, Informative)
One of the key features of ipv6 is simplified routing (it was pretty much the #1 design improvement), so the amount of processing routers have to do goes way down, in spite of the higher bit count.
Please read the first page of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6 [wikipedia.org]
and of course more if you are seriously interested.
Parent
How to really accelerate the migration... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How to really accelerate the migration... (Score:4, Insightful)
Make all porn only reachable through IPv6.
Did you check the post above you? [slashdot.org]
From the post's link:
We're taking over 100 gigabytes of the most popular "adult entertainment" videos from one of the largest subscription websites on the internet, and giving away access to anyone who can connect to it via IPv6. No advertising, no subscriptions, no registration. If you access the site via IPv4, you get a primer on IPv6, instructions on how to set up IPv6 through your ISP, a list of ISPs that support IPv6 natively, and a discussion forum to share tips and troubleshooting. If you access the site via IPv6 you get instant access to "the goods".
Unfortunately, that won't work, because it's not aimed to the industry. The ones who decide whether the public will use IPv6 or not are the ISPs, and better internet access is definitely NOT in their agenda (Hellooo Comcast!).
Parent
Why bother? (Score:4, Insightful)
; > DiG 9.3.4-P1 > slashdot.org AAAA
; (1 server found)
slashdot.org. 3149 IN SOA ns-1.ch3.sourceforge.com.
hostmaster.corp.sourceforge.com. 2008080600 14400 1800 604800 3600
Go figure. This is why IPv6 isn't taking off and a pox on anyone who says otherwise. Trying to blame sysadmins for not deploying IPv6 is a downright insult. We're ready, Slashdot. Google's ready. A whole raft of other sites have connectivity and are ready. Looks like you're not.
So how do I switch to IPv6? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm actually in one of the rare areas that have more than one ISP. We have three available here. Our current ISP doesn't implement IPv6, so I can't use it. I checked with the other two. Neither of them allows IPv6, either. None of the three admits to any plans to implement it.
Most people have only one ISP, of course. What incentive does that ISP have to permit IPv6? I mean, here where we have three ISPs, none of them has an incentive to do it.
I don't see how we can ever switch to IPv6 until the ISPs stop dropping all IPv6 packets, and start forwarding them properly. And that clearly ain't gonna happen without a bit of "government regulation" ordering them to do it or else. But with the current political setup here in the US, that ain't gonna happen, either.
Anyone have any idea how to persuade the ISPs to come around?
Re:Solution looking for a problem (Score:5, Informative)
Also, most of the world is using Windows XP. Can you show me where in my TCP/IP settings panel I am supposed to enter my IPv6 information? Exactly.
You don't. As is the benefit of IPv6, if it's installed it should be automagically configured. It shouldn't require manual configuration.
Parent
Re:What's the downside? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the downside to being ready?
Because it's work. Work takes time. Time is money.
A certain product at a certain company (forgive my being vague, you know how these things are) has a network interface. This interface is currently IPv4 only, no IPv6 support. When anybody asks the design team why not, they say that no customers have asked for it. Somebody suggested that IPv6 was the sort of thing you want to support ahead of need, but these guys have a lot of deadlines to meet and not enough resources to meet them. They aren't about to spend time implementing features nobody's asked for.
Of course, the time will come when their customers realize they've put off changing over to IPv6 much too long, and will start crash programs to make it happen. They'll demand that this product start supporting IPv6 immediately, if not sooner. So the design team will begin their own crash program, and IPv6 support will be added to the product in a hurry. The implementation will probably cost more and be less robust (at least initially) than if they'd planned ahead.
But they have no incentive to plan ahead. It's a common pattern.
Parent
Re:nonsense (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Not needed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is everyone so eager to use NAT? I've never quite understood this, once NAT use became widespread things became a lot more problematic, in my first year of college all the workstations in the computer labs (Ultra 5s and older Sparcstation 5s) had public IP addresses and the ISP I used gave all 10 Mbps customers 5 public IP addresses. I've recently started taking a few college courses again, the uni's labs are all NATed (so you can't access /tmp or /var on workstationname-57.lab04.cs.unidomain.tld from home any more, you have to dump the files on your NFS mounted 150 MiB home dir and then access that, great fun) and my current ISP gives each customer ONE public IP address, but I suppose I should consider myself lucky for not being NATed...
Seriously, we need to move back to an internet where a machine connected to the internet can almost always be assumed to have a proper, public, IP address. It would simplify a lot of things. Also, any trolls pulling out the "yuo cant has teh firawalls withouts teh NAT!!!11" crap can please not respond to this as packet filtering does not in any way require NAT. (Not directed at parent post, just tired of trolls and ignorant fools always using that argument).
/Mikael
Parent
Re:I existed before NAT (Score:4, Informative)
And yet they're more secure than NAT, which you do trust?
Ever wonder how you're able to receive calls on Skype through NAT? I'll give you a hint: your network is not terribly private behind NAT ;). Private from TCP packets, sure, but NAT has to be incredibly stupid when it comes to UDP.
If you want to keep your network private, you should get a firewall that keeps your network private. NAT does not do that, but there are a lot of firewall implementations that will.
In short, when it comes to security, public IP + firewall > NAT.
Parent
Re:I existed before NAT (Score:5, Insightful)
If people like you ran the world, we'd still be afraid of using fire to cook meat, or of sowing grain to produce wheat. Fortunately, the world is usually run by people who apply reason.
The OP is right. Packet filtering has nothing to do with NAT, and it's only your paranoia (or trollishness) that's preventing you from seeing that.
Parent
Re:Not needed. (Score:4, Informative)
IPv6 has a feature that allows an admin to renumber an entire network quickly an easily.
See RFC2894
Parent
Re:It is obvious (Score:5, Funny)
99% of IPv4 traffic is bittorrent.
Coincidentally, 99% of percentages seen in Slashdot comments are made up on the spot.
Parent
Re:My gut feeling? (Score:5, Insightful)
1) The world is document centric, not IP address centric. I want to access a collection of named documents and services from "slashdot.org". I dont care if these come to me by IPv4, NetBUI, IPX/SPX, Token Ring or Carrier Pigeon. I want to get "slashdot.org" and I want to make sure "slashdot.org" really is "slashdot.org" and not "somephishingsite.com"
So what you're saying is that you have no real reason to be anti-IPv6?
2) "End 2 End" isn't a selling point. I dont want my home network to be publicly visible.
So stick it behind a firewall that blocks incoming connections to all IP-addresses assigned to you unless you allow them?
3) Protocols that route around my desire for #2 succeed. All good P2P clients support UPnP. 3.1) Protocols that do not work with my desire for #2 fail. See Active FTP and the failed or failing IM networks and IM software that do not transfer files over NAT.
So, you'd rather have ugly workarounds than see the internet work the way it's supposed to work?
4) Those P2P clients are proof that how documents get to me are independent of the underlying link. I have no doubt that BitTorrent could be easily adapted to operate as a wire protocol on 802.11g or on top of IPX/SPX.
See answer to #1
5) If (and a big one) IPv6 got any traction, smart entrepenuers will began creating new services or modify existing ones like BitTorrent to operate and bridge IPv4 and IPv6. Really smart ones will most likely realize that once they abstract TCP/IP out of their design, they can do other "fun" things like implement their file sharing network directly over WiFI or some other mesh type network.
Have you even heard of the OSI model? Why in god's name would you want to have a Layer 3/4 P2P protocol? That's what TCP and IPv4/IPv6 are for.
/Mikael
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Re:My gut feeling? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've noticed that most technical people pass through a phase where they want to do everything themselves, where writing to the bare metal is cool. We've all had that urge at one time or another. It takes a certain amount of humility and world-weariness to realize that there's plenty of good work that's already been done.
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Re:The end is nigh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Read the article more carefully.
If the IPv6 transition never happens at all, which seems likely at this point, then the carrier-grade NAT engines are still needed for operating the IPv4-only networks we have today.
If the IPv6 transition actually does happen, somehow, then you're right. The carrier-grade NAT engines are only needed for IPv4-compatibility. In the unlikely event that IPv4 goes the way of the OSI stack, then maybe the NAT engines will be obsoleted. Not until then.
In any case, if you're using IPv4 now and you haven't started transitioning to IPv6, then you need to prepare for a future when most of your residential and mobile customers will be communicating with you from behind carrier-grade NAT engines that multiplex multiple customers behind a single address.
For example: identifying your customers by the IP address from which they connect to you has always been a bad idea, but it will soon be an extremely bad idea.
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Re:The end is nigh? (Score:4, Interesting)
I disagree.
I used to run an amazingly high traffic site. It required quite a few GigE pipes to run the network. The datacenters combined would have required an OC192 to stay within acceptable growth potential.
I had the urge to switch or run IPv6 in parallel. I found out what was proposed to be mandatory was quite a bit harder than it appeared.
I never did find the clear path of "this is what you need to do."
The only way I found to get my traffic to other IPv6 users was to tunnel IPv6 over IPv4. If (if, if) we had done it, it would have likely swamped those gateway services. Sure, some people want to make it happen, but what happens when many multiple big companies do it. I know Google set up the IPv6 version of their site, but they have quite a bit of negotiation power. My negotiation power was in that I could say "I'm going to need lots of bandwidth, make it available to me", and the provider would ensure it was available and that the standard growth potential was available. We had our growth down to a science, almost so much as I could tell you our aggregate 95th percentile for 12 months in the future +-5%
If I, senior tech guy at a large bandwidth customer couldn't get it done, why do we think every home user, T1 user, and average Joe Slashdot User could get it done.
If IPv6 is what we're SUPPOSE to be migrating towards, a clear well defined path must be established, and some sort of encouragement must be provided.
IPv6 for us was just a play toy, even though I wanted it done. There was absolutely no demand for it. We were only using 6 to 8 /24's, so we weren't a huge burden on the available address space. Even still, I wanted to do it, and never got it done. Queries were left unanswered. No firm responses were ever given. Even the senior techs at the Tier 1 ISP's gave vague answers like "I think we can. Ya, we should be able to support it, but we don't know. We'll try to find out."
Now I work for a company with even less pull. We discussed it, but it's a much different product, and was put together in such a way that you can't be fuzzy with it's addressing. Things are very specific. Clients will connect to exactly where you tell them, and there's no room for "and you could do this...." I no longer have the opportunity to even attempt to switch, and since the client base isn't prepared, it won't happen.
I was looking forward to the change. I know there were neat proposals involved. Unfortunately, we were never able to implement it, and most people won't be able to.
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