IPv6 Readiness Report 280
MythoBeast writes "In the latest episode of the Intellectual Icebergs podcast, Brett Thorson of Ravenwing provides a very good review of how ready our industry is for IPv6. He also provides a pretty good implementation guide for those who want to set up IPv6 at home."
IPv6 isnt really wanted (Score:4, Insightful)
IPv6 is a solution looking for a problem, at the moment in its current state nobody will use it, its complex , doesnt play with legacy systems (even win2k support is flaky at best) all those routers and wifi boxes that best buy are selling, most of the ISP's dont want it and dont support it let alone the users figure it out
its another "its coming" technologies thats "nearly" with us for the last 10 years and STLL nobody really cares, its like W3C validation, nice in theory but most people dont care about it and most of the html generation tools dont create it
Like Y2K? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:IPv6 isnt really wanted (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:IPv6 isnt really wanted (Score:5, Insightful)
As for the comment about W3C validation, it always has been, continues to be and will most likely continue to be very important in the future. Without such a service, how is one to tell what XHTML, HTML, etc. actually are? Machines are not intelligent, and so we cannot be content with the tag soup that passes for HTML on most sites, but we must reqire some sort of standard for quality. I would love to see a browser that, by design, will choke on any non-validating input, since by design such a browser would be simpler and easier to maintain. Without quality control mechanisms such as W3C validation, we would have a very poor Internet indeed.
Re:A podcast guide? (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with this, unlike a written guide a podcast has no copy'n'paste and it is much harder to follow talk than written text when the language used is not your native tongue.
Re:IPv6 isnt really wanted (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm, that's precisely why it's used. So it doesn't adhere to the purity of the end-to-end argument (in fact, it pretty much smashes it), big deal. It works, and it's the defacto standard, and it's pretty much pushed off the need for IPv6 to the unforseeable future.
Re:IPv6 isnt really wanted (Score:3, Insightful)
Beta was superior, VHS was good enough and cheaper.
Audiofile stereo equipment is superior. An IPod is good enough and cheaper.
IPV6 is superior. IPV4+NAT is good enough and cheaper. Which is very unfortunate because IPV6 solves real problems.
NAT provides a firewall (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm, [adding more devices is] precisely why [NAT is] used.
Apart from that, NAT is also useful because of an inherent side effect, namely that a basic firewall comes "free" once your router has implemented NAT.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:IPv6 isnt really wanted (Score:3, Insightful)
IPv6 is too big & complicated and does not play well with older systems (another poster noted Win 2K support is flakey at best). Do you honestly expect older devices like cellphones to be updated by the manufacturers or even better those of us using Treo like devices where we don't just throw them away each year and get a new one. IPv6 would "work," but it's not the thing thats going to work "best" (for one good luck keeping a list of 50+ IPv6 IPs memorized).
As for W3C quality control is involved I and many others would love that kind of setup. However that would block off many people who fit into the "I can code 1337 HTML for my grandma" family, but not the "I can learn to code well" group. Hell the internet hit critical mass because of browser & network flexability and not ridgidness and "quality control." Not everyone can code HTML as well as "some" on
What'll likely happen is all cellphones will migrate twards IPv6 (or something like it that works better) with a NAT between all of them and the rest of the IPv4 network and as older devices running the old IPv4 stack get older and older (old cells, 95, 98, ME, 2K, old Mac OSs) we'll slowly get over to whatever new thing. IPv6 is like HD-DVD & Blue Ray. Sure they might be nice as they are for the most part they are too soon and not just right, but at least IPv6 doesn't require hardware & licencing deals that can bankrupt companies when it false starts.
Re:IPv6 isnt really wanted (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever tried to set up a VPN between two sites which both use 10.0.0.0/24 as their network range?
Ever wished you could just ssh direct to your desktop machine from home without futzing around with vpns?
So you may not want it or see the need for it, but if you understood the amount of work that has gone into making NAT the 'solution' it is today you might appreciate it a little more
Re:IPv6 isnt really wanted (Score:5, Insightful)
It may be pointless to you, but there are many people who could deparately use it. Think of all the problems that go away when NAT is gone. Like being able to use BitTorrent or SIP or any other "push" technology without having to set up port forwarding on your router. And even when you do get it set up right, you can't run on multiple machines behind a firewall without some kind of proxy on the other side. NAT is to the Internet was segmented memory was to CPUs - a great idea to move things forward but not a good long term solution.
I'm really jazzed about the idea of having my own personal 64 bit address space on the Internet. Then again, I'm not sure that even that will be enough. :-)
Re:IPv6 isnt really wanted (Score:5, Insightful)
Ummm, no it doesn't work. It works for a few things, and breaks a whole lot of other things. You are arbitrarily limiting a whole set of end-to-end applications simply because you have no imagination. The simple fact is that I can, with my static IP, do a hell of a lot more than you can with some short leased DHCP IP behind a NAT.
Re:By the time IPv6 is ready (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Private networks and the business case. (Score:3, Insightful)
Back when it was just a proprietary BBS, Prodigy wanted to charge me $0.25 per email I sent - that business model does not want a wide open network where any host can connect to any SMTP server.
I think they became a full TCP/IP provider eventually, but I switched networks too quickly to find out. Let's hope that wireless providers understand the lesson here: if someone else can offer your customers a better business model, it doesn't matter what your business model wants.
Re:Business case for IPv6 (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Business case for IPv6 (Score:3, Insightful)
Since I used fragmentation as an example, when is fragmentation important? Well, let's say Business A uses standard ethernet frames (1500 bytes) and Business B uses jumbo frames (6000 bytes). Business B's packets will be fragmented into 4 parts at the point where jumbo frames are no longer supported. They will be re-assembled into a jumbo frame on Business A's firewall (in order for the packet to be validated) and will then be broken up again as Business A's network won't support jumbo packets.
All that takes time. If a fragment is dropped, in transit, the jumbo packet won't reassemble correctly and will be dropped, forcing the entire jumbo packet to be resent. (In other words, a dropped packet is 4 times as expensive.)
With IPv6, that doesn't happen. Business B connects to Business A. Negotiation identifies that the largest packet that will travel intact is 1500 bytes, so Business B (when sending to Business A) will use packets of that size. No fragmentation, a drop will cost 1500 bytes not 6000 bytes, and it doesn't involve Business B reducing its MTU to anyone else, so if other people can receive jumbo packets fine, the connection isn't degraded.
It doesn't help that IPv4 is based around byte-alignment and bit flags, whereas modern computers assume 32-bit or 64-bit words. Having things word-aligned and word-sized is much more efficient on a modern computer. That is something that has genuinely changed over time and wasn't merely a case of really bad design.
Re:Private networks and the business case. (Score:3, Insightful)
Most internal hosts are natted. I'm not sure about firewalled, and certainly not that many proxied. NAT is not a security measure. It does provide some security, but then so does having oil poured all over your front porch - but neither was created for or ideal for security. NAT was created to connect previously unconnected networks. It was not created for security. Security is an idea that was tacked on to it later to explain why home users should have NAT. Security is a marketing feature for helping sell NAT devices. Using it for depleted address space came years after NAT was first used as well.
No, it was the networks in the beginning that weren't on the Interent that were properly addressed. They were given 192.168.0.0 172.16.0.0 and 10.0.0.0 addresses (so used because they weren't on the Internet, so the companies didn't need to pay for the networks to get them on). Years later, when there was a need for these privately addressed computers to reach the Internet, it was cheaper to use NAT than change the IP on all those computers. NAT was a bean-counter's solution for poor planning (or saving some money in paying for addresses that weren't going to be used on the Internet). NAT had nothing to do with depletion of addresses, nor security. But most forget about that now, since that is not a though in any of the use of it now, aside from the few times a company merges with another company with the same internal IP range and double NAT gets some action. That's closer to the initial intention than any other use I've seen in a while.
Re:Why do we need to be ready? (Score:3, Insightful)
For a fraction of what you can do on the Internet, yes. Stop oversimplifying.
Even I as a regular user have run into the problems with two NAT'ed people trying to communicate with each other.
Re:IPv6 isnt really wanted (Score:4, Insightful)
hmmm............
IPv6 supports fragmentation (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:IPv6 isnt really wanted (Score:5, Insightful)
In Internet, every device is a server. That some of them are dedicated specifially to server duties does not change this. Filesharing networks, netphones, anything that lets two machines to exchange information in realtime - they all require at least one machine to have a public IP so it can be contacted. So yes, in Internet, every device needs public IP in order for the network to function.
Of course there are many interests that would love to see Internet to get broken and replaced by old-style broadcast network, since that would stop the competition from independent parties to those interests power. RIAA and MPAA, as two best examples, want to close Internet as a distribution channel for anyone but themselves. ISPs don't want you to be able to run your own servers, since that will increase the bandwith consumption and therefore decrease their profits. Blizzard and other MMORPG makers want to keep the costs of running a (small) server ridiculously high to keep competition to a minimum.
These are the real reasons for dynamic IPs, port blocking, and NAT. They are inconvenient, because they are designed to inconvenience you, to keep you in your role as a consumer. Producers don't want competition, and will do anything to stop it from happening.
Unless, of course, you want to call one ;). IP address is simply the Internets equivalent to a phone number.