After IPv4, How Will the Internet Function? 320
An anonymous reader writes "36 countries in the world have over 100% per-capita usage of mobile phones, and this is driving a real crunch on IPv4 addresses as more and more of these devices are data-capable. The mobile network operators are acting fast to deploy IPv6, and T-Mobile USA has had an IPv6-only trial going on for over 9 months now using NAT64 to bridge to IPv4 Internet content. It is interesting to note that the original plan for IPv6 transition, dual-stack, has failed since IPv4 addresses are effectively already exhausted for many people who want them. Dual-stack also causes many other issues and has forced the IETF to generate workarounds for end users called happy eyeballs (implying that eyeballs are not happy with dual-stack), and a big stink around DNS white-listing. How will you ensure that your network, users, and services continue to work in the address-fractured world of the future where some users have only IPv4 (AT&T ), some users have only IPv6 (mobile and machine-to-machine as well as developing countries), and other Internet nodes have both?"
Re:Dual stack failed? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Dual stack failed? (Score:2, Informative)
IPv6 is still not nearly as "polished" as IPv4. Talk at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin: "Recent advances in IPv6 insecurities" [events.ccc.de] in about 4 hours [timeanddate.com]. The talk is in English, a live stream available. [fem-net.de]
Re:Dual stack failed? (Score:4, Informative)
That's remarkably ignorant. The possibility of reclaiming those class A addresses has been studied and put aside, as it would be too costly and, assuming we get every single class A back, would only give us about 1.5 more years. This is too much cost for too little gain, so the efforts were focused on migrating to IPv6 instead.
You might want to read the wikipedia article about it : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion [wikipedia.org]
Re:It will prety much suck for quite some time. (Score:5, Informative)
Using a hexadecimal address was pure stupidity.
Hexadecimal is used because a network is designated by an N-bit prefix, and it's *much* harder to manipulate bits in decimal, especially when each number is 16 or 32 bits long.
And using the colon for address separation is equally as stupid since that is how we designate port numbers.
Once you've gone to hexadecimal, using dots to separate the address leads to ambiguity. Is a.b.c.d.e.f.beef.de an IP address or a hostname?
it is pretty much unrememberable
With IPv6, your network will have its own 48 to 64-bit prefix. Once you remember that prefix, you can choose your suffixes to be as simple as you'd like.
you omit parts of the address ... but ONLY once!
You can only omit one run of zeros, because otherwise the length of each run would be ambiguous.
Re:It will prety much suck for quite some time. (Score:5, Informative)
It's difficult to manipulate binary digits in hexadecimal, too. I don't see any advantage to this.
Every hex digit represents exactly 4 binary digits. If you flip a bit in a hexadecimal number, then exactly one hex digit will change. To know how it will change, you only need to remember the binary values of 0-F.
With decimal, you could flip a bit and change every digit in the number.
Re:It will prety much suck for quite some time. (Score:5, Informative)
All you needed to do was turn each segment of an IP address into a word sized ( 64 bit addressing ) or a long sized ( the magic 128 bit ) value instead of a byte sized value since: 2600000.35.1254.1785 Is one hell of a lot easier to remember then 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334.
You don't know what you are talking about. Of course '2600000.35.1254.1785' is easier to remember, you aren't using all the bits. If you used the full 64 bits, it's going to be longer no matter what base you are using. Your hex example, if you converted it to decimal, would look just as bad: 536939960.2242052096.35374.57701172. It's not actually easier to remember.
::FFFF:192.168.0.1. Not particularly harder to remember than an IPv4 address now. IPv4 was designed by people who thought before talking. Unlike you, apparently. Work on that: try to figure stuff out before blathering.
There is also a shortcut built in for IPv6 addresses. For example, if you had an IPv4 LAN with addresses in the 192.168.0.1 range, you could represent them in IPv6 with