darthcamaro writes "We all know that IPv4 address space is almost gone — but we also know that no major US carrier has yet migrated its consumer base, either. Comcast is now upping the ante a bit and has now said that they are seriously gearing up for IPv6 residential broadband deployment soon. 'Comcast plans to enter into broadband IPv6 technical trials later this year and into 2010,' Barry Tishgart, VP of Internet Services for Comcast said. 'Planning for general deployment is underway.'"
I hate to say it, but I agree. As bad as all the trash talking on Comcast is, I've never had a problem. Setup was easy. The 15-20 minute call to swap out my modem for a $15 one I found at a thrift store was straight forward and easy. The only 2 real problems I had was figuring out the modem will only send out DHCP for 1 device (when you put in your firewall/router, you just need to power cycle the modem so it forgets about your PC), and the fact my dam $1,000 Cisco 1760 was the bottleneck in my network conn
FWIW, I got their business-class internet and have been pretty happy with it. You pay a small premium over the consumer-oriented service (no 6 month introductory rate, and $17 / mo higher than the standard consumer rate), but they specifically told me there's no cap (and I haven't had any issues with that). Customer service is also separate from home users, which is great - short hold times, when I once had a problem, they sent someone out the next morning to fix it.
That's because the line going to your house from the Telco is unique; it only goes to one place. It's the same reason you can add a jack for POTS and plug in any old phone and expect it to work.
Yes there is a fundamental difference. In DSL you have an individual line to the the phone company owned equipment (the DSLAM). Thus any data on that line is either data from you or data intended for you. On cable, your neighborhood shares a line. That is to say, that on the cable line that comes into your house is not only your data, but the data of the people next door (if they use the same cable internet service.) To prevent you from seeing the neigbors data, and to determine who sent anything in the other direction, the data is encoded (I would not dare call it encrpyted) with a modem specific identifier.
Indeed. I am always shocked that people install any software provided by the ISP. They don't need some broken net-nanny software, a half-assed firewall that does not work as well as the Windows firewall it disables, having branding adding to internet explorer and outlook express, yet another worthless IE toolbar, or even worse, some form of stand-alone (screen edge docking) toolbar. The only feature that might be reasonable, is changing the IE homepage, and they can install software to do that.
Then again, I also find it incredibly annoying that home routers come with big warning stickers that you should install the software on the cd, since that software is in no way nessisary thanks to the web interface. Indeed, I honestly have no idea what is even on said CDs, but whatever it is, I don't miss it.
Because there's no such thing as IPv4 multicast... Oh, wait. That's exactly what cable companies have already been doing with switched digital. Multicast isn't the main reason a cable company would go with IPv6. The biggest problem Comcast (and other cable companies) has is that your cable modem gets two, and sometimes three IP addresses, let alone all those set-top boxes doing that switched digital. One to manage it, one to give you your "public" IP, and perhaps a third for your phone. 24 bits (10.0.0.0/8) only gives you 16 million addresses, and that's assuming you're utilizing them rather effectively. They're probably using the 172.16.0.0/12 for their internal network, but even so, that only gets you an extra million addresses. Look at the number of customers Comcast has, and you begin to see the problem they have just with addressing all those cable modems and set-top boxes.
Don't expect to be getting your own IPv6 address any time soon. Most likely, they're going to roll it out for managing all those devices first, and you'll still be assigned an IPv4 address for your Internet connectivity.
Are you sure these are not 6to4 addresses (2002:<your_v4_IP>::xxx)?
By default, Vista and Win7 will automatically allocate a 6to4 address for each non-private IPv4 address configured on the computer.
(since you mentioned ipconfig and not ifconfig, I assume you are using Windows)
No need to redact that. It's a link-local, non-routable address, not usable by any machine not directly connected to your LAN. You don't have IPv6 service.
Will comcast unveil a "tiered plan" whereby you only get the first 5 groups of four hexadecimal digits at the base price, with prices increasing up to 8?
Dependant Relative: Yes it IS!! It even says I'm connected with eye-pee-vee-six now. But now none of my programs work!! The man from Comcast said it was an upgrade from than eye-pee-vee-four. I thought six was better than four!? Is it because I'm using Windows 7? Do I need to get Windows 6? And my internet is explorer 8? Can I still get emails? And the computer is really slow! Can you come over?... etc. etc.
My brother in law used to call me up, frequently, to ask me for tech support help. He's a doctor, so I solved it by calling him up every single day to ask him some inane question about medicine.
"Hey, so I'm at the store and I want to buy band-aids. Which ones are best?" "Hey, it's me again - so when I called up 5 minutes ago to ask about band-aids, I didn't realize they had purple ones. Are those going to work differently than the beige ones?" "Oh, hi, me again... I was walking by the frozen food section and it was kind of cold there but it's a really hot day outside - can I catch sick from the temperature differential?" "Yeah, it's... well, this is a bit strange. But I was at work today and one of my co-workers kind of has a limp. Can you tell me what that's from? I don't wanna ask him - let me put him on with you, maybe you can fix him..." "So I was on a date last night and we went to a used bookstore and I started sneezing. Is that the swine flu? Well, yeah, it was dusty in there, but Oprah was talking about the Swine Flu, and I had bacon the other day so maybe I'm going to... hello? Helloooo?"
For people who don't have a particular profession, calling them up at odd hours to ask them for tiny favors also works. My next-door neighbor used to ask me for tech support all the time, so I started asking him to pick things up at the store for me, give me rides, loan me odd random items ("Can I borrow one of your bookends?" "Do you have a shoehorn I can use for a couple of days? Mine's in the shop.")
Heres the thing.... I'm a mac user, use linux and osx at work, and haven't touched windows in years- and even when I did it was just a company pc for email and such.
I converted a few relatives to Macs, before I realized... these people don't understand computers of any kind. They'll always hassle 24/7 no matter what. They may have fewer questions if they have a Mac, but if they stick to windows I can honestly tell them I have no idea and they should try calling Dell or MS for answers. If I'm the one that co
Fortunately, we have been conserving them and switching to NAT so the problem has lessened. The industry isn't crying wolf. Also, if you live in the US, then you have less of a problem than in a developing nation who didn't get a great big block allocated to them.
But if you want your cell phone, computer, XBOX, and refrigerator to have a unique IP address, then this is necessary. Of course, you probably DON'T want that, but well... that's another discussion.:-)
There is alot more to IPv6 then just its IP Address space. there is lots of improvements to security, configuration, and multicasting. Also, the way it is designed will take a HUGE load off the core routers, and actually make them faster... Right now the address space is so fragmented, there are huge tables in them to parse on what subnets are down which paths...
I've been hearing that IPv4 addresses are "almost gone" for maybe 10 years now.
It's an Illuminati conspiracy tied into fusion research (and holographic storage). Just watch the obituaries. You'll eventually see the pattern. By then it will be too late - another 10 years.
Why does everyone here get so excited when anything about IPv6 is mentioned? From an end-user's perspective, it appears to accomplish the same thing that IPv4 does, except addresses are longer and contain more characters. Are there any real benefits from and end-user's perspective in using IPv6? ISPs are still going to charge the same amount for public IPs and people are still going to user routers with NAT to save money on having to pay extra for additional IPs. From a sysadmin point of view, it's just going to mean more work and probably sleepless nights as we discover quirks with software and equipment that don't play nicely with IPv6. So, whats to get excited about?
Let's say you're using Skype or bittorrent. And you want to do it on more than one computer, and you want to do it relatively efficiently. You need IPV6. Creating P2P apps is a pain with all of the NAT in the world.
A lot of devices still do not support IPv6. Phones, cellphones,
A lot of people have to type in IP addresses (sysadmins, etc.) when configuring devices, DNS, web servers, and so forth, and those huge address strings are a pain in the ass. I don't want to deal with them. I like the dotted quads.
Also, one occasionally needs to access machines by IP address when DNS flakes out. What do you do when a DNS server goes down? Ideally you have a secondary DNS however not all organizations are willing to spend the mo
It's funny how all of you are complaining so much about this. IPv6 is a required evil for the internet to keep going and it will simplify things greatly and should speed up things in general too. That is if and when they get rid of the IPv4 hardware...
I've never seen a bunch of self described computer geeks whining so much about something that will simplify routing and get rid of NAT which is a truely horrid hack.
Come on guys, you know you are going to have to deal with problems no mater what happens in computer land?! Might as well deal with a problem that will make the internet routing make sense again and it's not like it will need to be done again in your life time.
But guess what, if you understand NAT, you will NEVER have to upgrade past IPv4, because you will NEVER run out of IP Addresses. NAT is just the flexible approach to the problem that alot of people don't like because they don't understand.
Meanwhile, back in reality...
In abstract, NAT treats addr+port as a 48-bit address, so you're effectively trading ports for address. That means you only get one port 80 per public IP, so forget having more than one webserver (unless you can somehow get your visitors to go to http://www.example.com:8080/ [example.com] ). Every P2P app, every Skype, every game server, every random application you want to post has to have a unique port number across your entire network.
Can you really not see why that sucks in comparison to IPv6 which lets every machine on your LAN listen on the whole 2^16 port range as your firewall allows?
People who don't understand NAT at all like IPv6. People who only barely understand it, like yourself, think IPv4+NAT is spiffy. People who actually understand NAT and what it implies think that it needs to be taken out back and shot.
The large telecoms and cable outfits have tons of unused IP space that could be CIDR blocked out, think of the class A 24.X.X.X for instance that used to be @Home and Rodgers, large portions are empty! AT&T moved @Home to 12.X.X.X and then subsequently provides managed space to cable outfits like Mediacomm etc.
Now Mediacomm has just finally got around to getting its own space, is AT&T offering to CIDR out their precious class A?
No of course not, like some of the others, they get allocations from ARIN and sit on them instead of consolidating. They have scads of CIDR blocks used by all sorts of companies out there. Heck ARIN should just re-map some of those AT&T direct to the customers, let them keep the 12.X.X.X A Space.
Back in the day, Mark Lottor did mapping of all live ping able IP's before firewalls were so common and NAT extremely rare. If he were to make a comparison with whomever does like mapping today to those legacy maps and IP allocations, it would be a fascinating graphic to show the transformations and if by carrier, show how greedily the Worldcom/UUNets Sprints and Baby Bells have asked for space, color to their identity and now look to see many time those scattered CIDR blocks are empty. Sprint, old UUNet and Baby Bell CIDR's if unused, should get back into the pool.
Where is Mark Lottor and these newer guys with the latest IPV4 utilization's mapped out for the comparison analysis.
The large telecoms and cable outfits have tons of unused IP space that could be CIDR blocked out
No, they don't. The last I heard, reclaiming all/8 netblocks would return something like 8% of available space back to the pool. When usage is growing exponentially (or would be if it wasn't constrained to a tiny fishbowl), 8% isn't worth the aggravation.
Meh, good on 'em. Gotta start some time! The longer we leave it, the worse it will get. IPv6 isn't really a big deal at a protocol level, it's just all the stuff that isn't IPv4 ready and IPv6 -> IPv4 tunnel or Dual Stack will sort that out...
Do they make enough painkillers to deal with the headaches this'll cause?
What headaches are those? Have you dealt with IPv6 at all? It's very easy to work with, and co-exists perfectly well with IPv4. I set up IPv6 in my house with a tunnel and it was amazing how smooth it was. I set up the IPv6 tunnel and addresses on my router (that was a little tricky -- but no more than any other router configuration), started up radvd, which periodically broadcasts an announcement about what the local IPv6 router is, and instantly every machine on the network -- Linux, Mac and Windows -- had an IPv6 address in addition to their private IPv4 address (10.x.x.x). Of course, the typical home user couldn't do any of that stuff, but they don't have to if the v6 service comes directly from their ISP.
What's more, I was surprised to note that as soon as all my computers had v6 adresses, they started using them! IPv6 DNS is in place, and all decent applications do an IPv6 name lookup in parallel with the IPv4, and if they get an IPv6 answer, they connect via v6. I know Firefox does because I have a Firefox add-on that shows the IP of the web server in the status bar, and sometimes I come across sites for which it shows a v6 address.
About the only part of the infrastructure that really isn't ready, as far as I can tell, is everyone's home routers. Those ubiquitous Linksys boxes mostly don't support v6 unless you put third-party firmware on them (which I did, but most people obviously wouldn't do). But I'm sure the next generation or two of home routers will come with IPv6 support enabled and it will Just Work. Oh, and they'll also be configured by default to reject externally-originated connections, so that Joe Sixpack will still have the same level of firewalling he has with NAT -- but with lower overhead and fewer limitations. Until those routers are widely available, v6 and v4 can coexist quite nicely.
I predict that this will be relatively painless for Comcast's techs, and completely transparent to their customers.
IPv6 is like the phone company saying, hey, we have a (aaa) eee-nnnn system doesn't have enough room, so let's replace it with a system that has 20 digits.
It just sucks to use for consumers, making everyone else's life more complicated just to simplify it for the service providers.
I would prefer an addressing system that simplifies life for me.
What it's supposed to mean is that every computer can have a public address. So if you sign up with one of the dynamic DNS providers (which will probably be integrated with your OS fairly soon) you should be able to share pictures and things from your own computer without having to upload them to somewhere, or be able to log in remotely to look at some file (private) you forgot to bring with you, or any number of other things (fewer firewall errors on p2p networks? true p2p voip, without needing to sign up with a service that lets you punch holes in NAT?). This would also work without the dynamic DNS provider, but the URL would look uglier.
Most likely, this would also lead to relaxing the typical rule ISPs tend to have against running servers on home connections. They can't really forbid something that gets built into the OS like these sorts of features probably will.
What it's supposed to mean is that every computer can have a public address. So if you sign up with one of the dynamic DNS providers (which will probably be integrated with your OS fairly soon) you should be able to share pictures and things from your own computer without having to upload them to somewhere, or be able to log in remotely to look at some file (private) you forgot to bring with you, or any number of other things (fewer firewall errors on p2p networks? true p2p voip, without needing to sign up with a service that lets you punch holes in NAT?). This would also work without the dynamic DNS provider, but the URL would look uglier.
Most likely, this would also lead to relaxing the typical rule ISPs tend to have against running servers on home connections. They can't really forbid something that gets built into the OS like these sorts of features probably will.
No, it'll be an excuse for an ISP to give you a/64, but firewall out all but the number of addresses you get unless you pay for more.
And servers will still be banned - there's not enough bandwidth upstream from most connections to handle everyone serving something (last mile problem).
Everyone thinks IPv6 is the magic savior - it'll enforce net neutrality, it'll prevent your PC from getting infected, it'll solve the public IP issue, it'll solve NAT issues, it'll have QoS for real, blah blah blah.
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, means the real payload per packet goes down, and more data usage results (== more $$$ - the incremental network cost for IPv6 is low to the network to support IPv6, but not you the user have to pay more for the same traffic since the amount of data you need to transfer increased).
I see IPv6 as allowing an ISP to ding people for more. "You set 20% of your packets last month to have QoS high priority, while your plan only allows 10%". While worms will have to do more work to infect hosts, they'll just be a lot smarter about checking hosts. And the home user, even if they got 1:1 IP mappings, will probably stick a nice firewall in front of their modem that blocks incoming packets. Cablemodems (not sure about ADSL) can also be blocked from recognizing more than N MAC addresses per boot, too, so you'll have to alias your NIC to have more IPs (how many home users can do THAT? And it makes routing so much more fun!).
Nothing will change, really, other than not being able to run out of IP addresses. Business as usual.
Hell, NAT has had one benefit - it's made firewalls a lot easier to configure because you don't have to open 20 ports to play a game like you used to just over a decade ago. Torrent clients seem to work fine using one port rather than one port per torrent like they used to. Online gaming seems to work just fine with 2 or 3 ports opened (or none - it was ironically easier to configure my PS3, Xbox360 and Wii to play online than my PC - and I have UPnP disabled!), and many protocols that required incoming connectivity got phased out or adapted (e.g. FTP). And the prevalence of ssh makes life a lot easier for remote access and poor-man's VPN stuff.
It's slightly worse. It's more like the phone company going "we can only handle phone numbers from (000)000-0000 to (255)255-2555" and instead of going "Hey.. let's try making go up to (999) 999-9999 and maintain the pattern everyone knows, or even say adding another set of numbers to make 255(255)255-2555 available, let's change it all up into some long string people can only half pronounce and you have to be a telephone repairman to understand... your new phone number is now ab823:fff::324223 and your nei
I would prefer an addressing system that simplifies life for me
Agreed. What I'd really like to see is some kind of naming protocol so I don't have to remember all these long strings of numbers separated by dots. It would be awesome if internet addresses were identified by an alphanumeric name, then when I use that name there is a server somewhere that figures out what IP address that name is really pointing to.
I bet if everyone here at 216.34.181.45 put their minds to it we could even come up with something here.
If it was just a matter of software updates, but alas there are mountains of sites that are literally hard-coded to store IPv4 addresses and you get a nice PHP error when you attempt to visit them.
I guess I live a sheltered life, because I've been using IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel for about 7 years and I've never had a site break like that.
That's because you are using an IPv6 address in the 6to4 address space, not a native IPv6 address.
And according to trace, your ISP doesn't have their own 6to4 router deployed, so the traffic gets sent to whoever announces the shortest route to 192.88.99.1 route via BGP.
(192.88.99.1 is a special IP which means 'any 6to4 router')
All you know from this traceroute is that the routers between 2002:185a:90f:1234::1 and ams-core-1.tengige0-0-0-0.swip.net are acting in a transparent manner. It could be because they are not decrementing the TTL on each hop.
This could be because they are transparent routers, it could be an IPv6 tunnel over IPv4 or something else, you really don't know and are making silly assumptions.
What bothers me however is that either your Windows Vista/7 PC (as noted by the C:\Users in the command prompt and your use of windows tracert instead of traceroute) is directly connected to the Internet, while it is possible that you are doing that, it would be utterly stupid and I'm going to make an assumption of my own, that you are not directly connected to the Internet. Why do I make this assumption? Well partially because its a rather quick way to get exploited, theres always SOMETHING you can exploit in an MS OS and that it means you only have one PC, being that this is slashdot I can guess that those are not the case, so you aren't directly connected to the Internet and the first hop you're talking to is a DLink or Linksys router or something.
Now this makes sense, as it simply means your router is connected to swip.net using an IPv6 over IPv4 tunnel. Since this is a free service and several consumer grade devices support it, this is more likely the case. I'm not real sure how you end up with IPv6 enabled on your router and not have any clue about it, but perhaps it was done by a roommate or something like that.
Eitherway, me thinks it might be better for you to learn wtf is going on with your own internet connection than talk about how Time Warner handlers theirs.
Finally, since you're obviously new to IPv6 and networking. SWIP sells connections, they are a backbone provider which is why you see a direct connect from them to Google. They also provide IPv6 tunnel endpoints so you can tunnel it over IPv4, which appears to be exactly whats going on in your case. This tunnels are free to anyone who signed up. With that in mind and the fact that tunnels have to generally be setup on both ends in advance its likely that if Time Warner IS involved in this, they are simply working a deal with SWIP, not robbing service from them. I would have to say that SWIP.net is fully aware of the tunnel route and has authorized it, that is after all one of their core businesses.
I suggested you learn a little more about the current state of IPv6, the existing providers with IPv6 support, and most importantly, what your little Linksys or DLink router is doing that you are completely unaware of. At least go turn off your tunnel to swip.net before claiming that TWC supports IPv6 in your area.
Err, I might be wrong. . . but while it's possible (may even be the default - if that's true, that's unfortunate) for your IPv6 address to use the Mac address as the last 48(?) or whatever bits of the IP address, I don't believe you *must* do that. I believe you can just use::1,::2,::3,::4, etc as the 'host' portion of the IPv6 address, can't you?
It's my understanding that IPv6 really doesn't care what the last 48 or 64 bits (I don't remember the exact number of bits for the host portion - just that it's a very large number of em) of the address is, so long as it's unique? I think the use of Mac addresses was just an 'easy' way to get a unique bitmask for that part of the IP address, isn't it?
Proud to be a Comcast customer? (Score:5, Funny)
I never thought I'd say this, but I'm glad that I'm a Comcast customer!
(Please excuse me while I go wash out my mouth with soap)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Proud to be a Comcast customer? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Proud to be a Comcast customer? (Score:4, Informative)
That's because the line going to your house from the Telco is unique; it only goes to one place. It's the same reason you can add a jack for POTS and plug in any old phone and expect it to work.
Parent
Re:Proud to be a Comcast customer? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes there is a fundamental difference. In DSL you have an individual line to the the phone company owned equipment (the DSLAM). Thus any data on that line is either data from you or data intended for you. On cable, your neighborhood shares a line. That is to say, that on the cable line that comes into your house is not only your data, but the data of the people next door (if they use the same cable internet service.) To prevent you from seeing the neigbors data, and to determine who sent anything in the other direction, the data is encoded (I would not dare call it encrpyted) with a modem specific identifier.
Parent
Re:Proud to be a Comcast customer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. I am always shocked that people install any software provided by the ISP. They don't need some broken net-nanny software, a half-assed firewall that does not work as well as the Windows firewall it disables, having branding adding to internet explorer and outlook express, yet another worthless IE toolbar, or even worse, some form of stand-alone (screen edge docking) toolbar. The only feature that might be reasonable, is changing the IE homepage, and they can install software to do that.
Then again, I also find it incredibly annoying that home routers come with big warning stickers that you should install the software on the cd, since that software is in no way nessisary thanks to the web interface. Indeed, I honestly have no idea what is even on said CDs, but whatever it is, I don't miss it.
Parent
Re:Proud to be a Comcast customer? (Score:4, Informative)
Because there's no such thing as IPv4 multicast... Oh, wait. That's exactly what cable companies have already been doing with switched digital. Multicast isn't the main reason a cable company would go with IPv6. The biggest problem Comcast (and other cable companies) has is that your cable modem gets two, and sometimes three IP addresses, let alone all those set-top boxes doing that switched digital. One to manage it, one to give you your "public" IP, and perhaps a third for your phone. 24 bits (10.0.0.0/8) only gives you 16 million addresses, and that's assuming you're utilizing them rather effectively. They're probably using the 172.16.0.0/12 for their internal network, but even so, that only gets you an extra million addresses. Look at the number of customers Comcast has, and you begin to see the problem they have just with addressing all those cable modems and set-top boxes.
Don't expect to be getting your own IPv6 address any time soon. Most likely, they're going to roll it out for managing all those devices first, and you'll still be assigned an IPv4 address for your Internet connectivity.
Parent
It's Comcastic (Score:3, Interesting)
I did not RTFA but it seems to me that they have already started with this in 2009.
Re:It's Comcastic (Score:5, Interesting)
By default, Vista and Win7 will automatically allocate a 6to4 address for each non-private IPv4 address configured on the computer.
(since you mentioned ipconfig and not ifconfig, I assume you are using Windows)
Parent
Re:It's Comcastic (Score:4, Informative)
That's a link-local address. It doesn't do anything for you in the wider world.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
inet6 addr: fe80::***:****:****:****/64 Scope:Link
No need to redact that. It's a link-local, non-routable address, not usable by any machine not directly connected to your LAN. You don't have IPv6 service.
Re:It's Comcastic (Score:4, Informative)
Are you directly on Comcast or are you behind a router?
I have a WRT54G running Tomato and Comcast gives it a IPv4, and Tomato assigns IPv6 to my internal network.
Parent
IPv6 on Tomato firmware? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a WRT54G running Tomato and Comcast gives it a IPv4, and Tomato assigns IPv6 to my internal network.
How did you get IPv6 working on Tomato? I was under the impression that it wasn't supported.
Does anyone have instructions?
As a user, what do I care? (Score:4, Funny)
As long as DNS works fine, and I can access all my favorite porn sites, I don't care what is going on under the covers.
For all I know, it could be hamsters squeaking in HyperCard. As a user, it really doesn't matter.
You've got the protcol (Score:5, Funny)
Now buy the T-shirt. ::1 (0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1)
There's no place like
what about caps? (Score:5, Funny)
REPENT!! (Score:5, Funny)
Bbrrrriiiing. Bbrrrriiiing.
You: Hello?
Dependant Relative: My internet isn't working!
You: Is the modem turned on?
Dependant Relative: Yes it IS!! It even says I'm connected with eye-pee-vee-six now. But now none of my programs work!! The man from Comcast said it was an upgrade from than eye-pee-vee-four. I thought six was better than four!? Is it because I'm using Windows 7? Do I need to get Windows 6? And my internet is explorer 8? Can I still get emails? And the computer is really slow! Can you come over? ... etc. etc.
You: Curse you Comcast. Curse you!!!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Wow. I read that as redundant relative both times.
Re:REPENT!! (Score:5, Interesting)
My brother in law used to call me up, frequently, to ask me for tech support help. He's a doctor, so I solved it by calling him up every single day to ask him some inane question about medicine.
"Hey, so I'm at the store and I want to buy band-aids. Which ones are best?" ... hello? Helloooo?"
"Hey, it's me again - so when I called up 5 minutes ago to ask about band-aids, I didn't realize they had purple ones. Are those going to work differently than the beige ones?"
"Oh, hi, me again... I was walking by the frozen food section and it was kind of cold there but it's a really hot day outside - can I catch sick from the temperature differential?"
"Yeah, it's... well, this is a bit strange. But I was at work today and one of my co-workers kind of has a limp. Can you tell me what that's from? I don't wanna ask him - let me put him on with you, maybe you can fix him..."
"So I was on a date last night and we went to a used bookstore and I started sneezing. Is that the swine flu? Well, yeah, it was dusty in there, but Oprah was talking about the Swine Flu, and I had bacon the other day so maybe I'm going to
For people who don't have a particular profession, calling them up at odd hours to ask them for tiny favors also works. My next-door neighbor used to ask me for tech support all the time, so I started asking him to pick things up at the store for me, give me rides, loan me odd random items ("Can I borrow one of your bookends?" "Do you have a shoehorn I can use for a couple of days? Mine's in the shop.")
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If I had the ability, I would rate this "+5 You Owe Me A Dry Keyboard"
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Heres the thing.... I'm a mac user, use linux and osx at work, and haven't touched windows in years- and even when I did it was just a company pc for email and such.
I converted a few relatives to Macs, before I realized... these people don't understand computers of any kind. They'll always hassle 24/7 no matter what. They may have fewer questions if they have a Mac, but if they stick to windows I can honestly tell them I have no idea and they should try calling Dell or MS for answers. If I'm the one that co
Are we serious this time? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Fortunately, we have been conserving them and switching to NAT so the problem has lessened. The industry isn't crying wolf. Also, if you live in the US, then you have less of a problem than in a developing nation who didn't get a great big block allocated to them.
But if you want your cell phone, computer, XBOX, and refrigerator to have a unique IP address, then this is necessary. Of course, you probably DON'T want that, but well... that's another discussion. :-)
Re:Are we serious this time? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Are we serious this time? (Score:5, Informative)
It's an Illuminati conspiracy tied into fusion research (and holographic storage). Just watch the obituaries. You'll eventually see the pattern. By then it will be too late - another 10 years.
(I'm sure I read it somewhere around here).
Parent
What? (Score:4, Informative)
Verizon has IP6.
services? (Score:3, Insightful)
Potentially these customers will have a small block of ipv6 addresses. Will they be allowed to run their own web or email services?
What's the big deal with IPv6 (Score:4, Insightful)
Additional IPs (Score:5, Informative)
There will be no paying extra for additional IPs. Everybody will get a /64. Look at this:
Addresses available in IPv4: 4,294,967,296
Addresses available PER CUSTOMER for IPv6: 18,446,744,073,709,551,616
This enables stateless autoconfiguration (usually based on MAC addresses) that simplifies everybody's lives.
Parent
Re:What's the big deal with IPv6 (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's say you're using Skype or bittorrent. And you want to do it on more than one computer, and you want to do it relatively efficiently. You need IPV6. Creating P2P apps is a pain with all of the NAT in the world.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of devices still do not support IPv6. Phones, cellphones,
A lot of people have to type in IP addresses (sysadmins, etc.) when configuring devices, DNS, web servers, and so forth, and those huge address strings are a pain in the ass. I don't want to deal with them. I like the dotted quads.
Also, one occasionally needs to access machines by IP address when DNS flakes out. What do you do when a DNS server goes down? Ideally you have a secondary DNS however not all organizations are willing to spend the mo
OMG! OMG!.IPv6 is coming for ME! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's funny how all of you are complaining so much about this. IPv6 is a required evil for the internet to keep going and it will simplify things greatly and should speed up things in general too. That is if and when they get rid of the IPv4 hardware...
I've never seen a bunch of self described computer geeks whining so much about something that will simplify routing and get rid of NAT which is a truely horrid hack.
Come on guys, you know you are going to have to deal with problems no mater what happens in computer land?! Might as well deal with a problem that will make the internet routing make sense again and it's not like it will need to be done again in your life time.
Re:OMG! OMG!.IPv6 is coming for ME! (Score:5, Insightful)
But guess what, if you understand NAT, you will NEVER have to upgrade past IPv4, because you will NEVER run out of IP Addresses. NAT is just the flexible approach to the problem that alot of people don't like because they don't understand.
Meanwhile, back in reality...
In abstract, NAT treats addr+port as a 48-bit address, so you're effectively trading ports for address. That means you only get one port 80 per public IP, so forget having more than one webserver (unless you can somehow get your visitors to go to http://www.example.com:8080/ [example.com] ). Every P2P app, every Skype, every game server, every random application you want to post has to have a unique port number across your entire network.
Can you really not see why that sucks in comparison to IPv6 which lets every machine on your LAN listen on the whole 2^16 port range as your firewall allows?
People who don't understand NAT at all like IPv6. People who only barely understand it, like yourself, think IPv4+NAT is spiffy. People who actually understand NAT and what it implies think that it needs to be taken out back and shot.
Parent
Where is Mark Lottor? IPV4 has plenty left to it! (Score:4, Interesting)
The large telecoms and cable outfits have tons of unused IP space that could be CIDR blocked out, think of the class A 24.X.X.X for instance that used to be @Home and Rodgers, large portions are empty! AT&T moved @Home to 12.X.X.X and then subsequently provides managed space to cable outfits like Mediacomm etc.
Now Mediacomm has just finally got around to getting its own space, is AT&T offering to CIDR out their precious class A?
No of course not, like some of the others, they get allocations from ARIN and sit on them instead of consolidating. They have scads of CIDR blocks used by all sorts of companies out there. Heck ARIN should just re-map some of those AT&T direct to the customers, let them keep the 12.X.X.X A Space.
Back in the day, Mark Lottor did mapping of all live ping able IP's before firewalls were so common and NAT extremely rare. If he were to make a comparison with whomever does like mapping today to those legacy maps and IP allocations, it would be a fascinating graphic to show the transformations and if by carrier, show how greedily the Worldcom/UUNets Sprints and Baby Bells have asked for space, color to their identity and now look to see many time those scattered CIDR blocks are empty. Sprint, old UUNet and Baby Bell CIDR's if unused, should get back into the pool.
Where is Mark Lottor and these newer guys with the latest IPV4 utilization's mapped out for the comparison analysis.
Enough said.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The large telecoms and cable outfits have tons of unused IP space that could be CIDR blocked out
No, they don't. The last I heard, reclaiming all /8 netblocks would return something like 8% of available space back to the pool. When usage is growing exponentially (or would be if it wasn't constrained to a tiny fishbowl), 8% isn't worth the aggravation.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Do they make enough painkillers to deal with the headaches this'll cause?
Maybe somebody told them that IPV6 makes it easier to inject fake RST packets into TCP connections ;)
Re:Asprin (Score:5, Interesting)
Do they make enough painkillers to deal with the headaches this'll cause?
What headaches are those? Have you dealt with IPv6 at all? It's very easy to work with, and co-exists perfectly well with IPv4. I set up IPv6 in my house with a tunnel and it was amazing how smooth it was. I set up the IPv6 tunnel and addresses on my router (that was a little tricky -- but no more than any other router configuration), started up radvd, which periodically broadcasts an announcement about what the local IPv6 router is, and instantly every machine on the network -- Linux, Mac and Windows -- had an IPv6 address in addition to their private IPv4 address (10.x.x.x). Of course, the typical home user couldn't do any of that stuff, but they don't have to if the v6 service comes directly from their ISP.
What's more, I was surprised to note that as soon as all my computers had v6 adresses, they started using them! IPv6 DNS is in place, and all decent applications do an IPv6 name lookup in parallel with the IPv4, and if they get an IPv6 answer, they connect via v6. I know Firefox does because I have a Firefox add-on that shows the IP of the web server in the status bar, and sometimes I come across sites for which it shows a v6 address.
About the only part of the infrastructure that really isn't ready, as far as I can tell, is everyone's home routers. Those ubiquitous Linksys boxes mostly don't support v6 unless you put third-party firmware on them (which I did, but most people obviously wouldn't do). But I'm sure the next generation or two of home routers will come with IPv6 support enabled and it will Just Work. Oh, and they'll also be configured by default to reject externally-originated connections, so that Joe Sixpack will still have the same level of firewalling he has with NAT -- but with lower overhead and fewer limitations. Until those routers are widely available, v6 and v4 can coexist quite nicely.
I predict that this will be relatively painless for Comcast's techs, and completely transparent to their customers.
Parent
Re:I still don't like IPv6 (Score:5, Interesting)
IPv6 is like the phone company saying, hey, we have a (aaa) eee-nnnn system doesn't have enough room, so let's replace it with a system that has 20 digits.
It just sucks to use for consumers, making everyone else's life more complicated just to simplify it for the service providers.
I would prefer an addressing system that simplifies life for me.
What it's supposed to mean is that every computer can have a public address. So if you sign up with one of the dynamic DNS providers (which will probably be integrated with your OS fairly soon) you should be able to share pictures and things from your own computer without having to upload them to somewhere, or be able to log in remotely to look at some file (private) you forgot to bring with you, or any number of other things (fewer firewall errors on p2p networks? true p2p voip, without needing to sign up with a service that lets you punch holes in NAT?). This would also work without the dynamic DNS provider, but the URL would look uglier.
Most likely, this would also lead to relaxing the typical rule ISPs tend to have against running servers on home connections. They can't really forbid something that gets built into the OS like these sorts of features probably will.
Parent
Re:I still don't like IPv6 (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course they can, and they will.
Parent
Re:I still don't like IPv6 (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it'll be an excuse for an ISP to give you a /64, but firewall out all but the number of addresses you get unless you pay for more.
And servers will still be banned - there's not enough bandwidth upstream from most connections to handle everyone serving something (last mile problem).
Everyone thinks IPv6 is the magic savior - it'll enforce net neutrality, it'll prevent your PC from getting infected, it'll solve the public IP issue, it'll solve NAT issues, it'll have QoS for real, blah blah blah.
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, means the real payload per packet goes down, and more data usage results (== more $$$ - the incremental network cost for IPv6 is low to the network to support IPv6, but not you the user have to pay more for the same traffic since the amount of data you need to transfer increased).
I see IPv6 as allowing an ISP to ding people for more. "You set 20% of your packets last month to have QoS high priority, while your plan only allows 10%". While worms will have to do more work to infect hosts, they'll just be a lot smarter about checking hosts. And the home user, even if they got 1:1 IP mappings, will probably stick a nice firewall in front of their modem that blocks incoming packets. Cablemodems (not sure about ADSL) can also be blocked from recognizing more than N MAC addresses per boot, too, so you'll have to alias your NIC to have more IPs (how many home users can do THAT? And it makes routing so much more fun!).
Nothing will change, really, other than not being able to run out of IP addresses. Business as usual.
Hell, NAT has had one benefit - it's made firewalls a lot easier to configure because you don't have to open 20 ports to play a game like you used to just over a decade ago. Torrent clients seem to work fine using one port rather than one port per torrent like they used to. Online gaming seems to work just fine with 2 or 3 ports opened (or none - it was ironically easier to configure my PS3, Xbox360 and Wii to play online than my PC - and I have UPnP disabled!), and many protocols that required incoming connectivity got phased out or adapted (e.g. FTP). And the prevalence of ssh makes life a lot easier for remote access and poor-man's VPN stuff.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I still don't like IPv6 (Score:5, Funny)
I would prefer an addressing system that simplifies life for me
Agreed. What I'd really like to see is some kind of naming protocol so I don't have to remember all these long strings of numbers separated by dots. It would be awesome if internet addresses were identified by an alphanumeric name, then when I use that name there is a server somewhere that figures out what IP address that name is really pointing to.
I bet if everyone here at 216.34.181.45 put their minds to it we could even come up with something here.
Parent
Re:I still don't like IPv6 (Score:4, Funny)
Feel free to whoosh! me.
Parent
Re:I still don't like IPv6 (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
[citation needed] (Score:4, Funny)
[citation needed]
Parent
Re:Good news.. (Score:5, Informative)
If it was just a matter of software updates, but alas there are mountains of sites that are literally hard-coded to store IPv4 addresses and you get a nice PHP error when you attempt to visit them.
I guess I live a sheltered life, because I've been using IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel for about 7 years and I've never had a site break like that.
Parent
Re:Time Warner is already doing this in Brooklyn/N (Score:4, Informative)
And according to trace, your ISP doesn't have their own 6to4 router deployed, so the traffic gets sent to whoever announces the shortest route to 192.88.99.1 route via BGP.
(192.88.99.1 is a special IP which means 'any 6to4 router')
Parent
Re:Time Warner is already doing this in Brooklyn/N (Score:4, Interesting)
Lets clear this up.
All you know from this traceroute is that the routers between 2002:185a:90f:1234::1 and ams-core-1.tengige0-0-0-0.swip.net are acting in a transparent manner. It could be because they are not decrementing the TTL on each hop.
This could be because they are transparent routers, it could be an IPv6 tunnel over IPv4 or something else, you really don't know and are making silly assumptions.
What bothers me however is that either your Windows Vista/7 PC (as noted by the C:\Users in the command prompt and your use of windows tracert instead of traceroute) is directly connected to the Internet, while it is possible that you are doing that, it would be utterly stupid and I'm going to make an assumption of my own, that you are not directly connected to the Internet. Why do I make this assumption? Well partially because its a rather quick way to get exploited, theres always SOMETHING you can exploit in an MS OS and that it means you only have one PC, being that this is slashdot I can guess that those are not the case, so you aren't directly connected to the Internet and the first hop you're talking to is a DLink or Linksys router or something.
Now this makes sense, as it simply means your router is connected to swip.net using an IPv6 over IPv4 tunnel. Since this is a free service and several consumer grade devices support it, this is more likely the case. I'm not real sure how you end up with IPv6 enabled on your router and not have any clue about it, but perhaps it was done by a roommate or something like that.
Eitherway, me thinks it might be better for you to learn wtf is going on with your own internet connection than talk about how Time Warner handlers theirs.
Finally, since you're obviously new to IPv6 and networking. SWIP sells connections, they are a backbone provider which is why you see a direct connect from them to Google. They also provide IPv6 tunnel endpoints so you can tunnel it over IPv4, which appears to be exactly whats going on in your case. This tunnels are free to anyone who signed up. With that in mind and the fact that tunnels have to generally be setup on both ends in advance its likely that if Time Warner IS involved in this, they are simply working a deal with SWIP, not robbing service from them. I would have to say that SWIP.net is fully aware of the tunnel route and has authorized it, that is after all one of their core businesses.
I suggested you learn a little more about the current state of IPv6, the existing providers with IPv6 support, and most importantly, what your little Linksys or DLink router is doing that you are completely unaware of. At least go turn off your tunnel to swip.net before claiming that TWC supports IPv6 in your area.
Parent
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:4, Informative)
Err, I might be wrong. . . but while it's possible (may even be the default - if that's true, that's unfortunate) for your IPv6 address to use the Mac address as the last 48(?) or whatever bits of the IP address, I don't believe you *must* do that. I believe you can just use ::1, ::2, ::3, ::4, etc as the 'host' portion of the IPv6 address, can't you?
It's my understanding that IPv6 really doesn't care what the last 48 or 64 bits (I don't remember the exact number of bits for the host portion - just that it's a very large number of em) of the address is, so long as it's unique? I think the use of Mac addresses was just an 'easy' way to get a unique bitmask for that part of the IP address, isn't it?
Parent