(Almost) All You Need To Know About IPv6 359
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?"
Re:All you need to know... (Score:2, Interesting)
You'll probably have to have proof of need for more than 1 public IP. Now that I think about it, my current ISP surely has more than half a million subscribers only using one of their alloted 2 addresses (or 5 depending on what plan they are on.)
Wouldn't it make more sense to analyze this before jumping on the "let's replace everything" bandwagon?
What they DID leave out (Score:0, Interesting)
Others are what can be best called as control freak fascists. I overheard one in his office one day ranting about how awful Phil Zimmerman and others were for their efforts. All well-known and respected people. It was truly shocking. But that's the type of person he was. He wasn't into security, he was more into control. A real nut-case.
It has come as no surprise that IPv6 has had security problems. Nor is it any surprise that it's adopted by the most control-freak countries in the world.
If you ever REALLY want to understand a technology, understand the people behind it. It's seldom that you see interviews with the entire bunch at once.
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.
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.
Re:Meager adoption (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Address scarcity will not drive adoption of IPv (Score:3, Interesting)
Sig. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Peak Internets! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Web 2.0 (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Re:Forget IPv6 (Score:1, Interesting)
It may well be a few more versions down the road before something workable is proposed.