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, Insightful)
Right now, today, everything has an IPv4 address that needs one. Junk technology line NAT will keep IPv4 limping along for a while until IPv6 finds its momentum. But beyond that, the root problem comes down to networks not transitioning quickly enough. If they won't rapidly adopt something as relatively simple as dual stack, what makes you think they'll willingly and quickly roll out a wholesale change that actually breaks stuff?
Re:Dual stack failed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dual stack works but is has failed in the sense that it can't be the singular solution during the transition from IPv4 to IPv6.
It will prety much suck for quite some time. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is the asshats that came up with IPV6. It should be scrapped here and now. IPV6 is just plain and simple flat out stupid.
Using a hexadecimal address was pure stupidity. 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.
And using the colon for address separation is equally as stupid since that is how we designate port numbers. Ohh wait I know don't forget to surround the unrememberable POS with square brackets!
To make IPV6 useful it requires anything and everything to have a DNS entry since it is pretty much unrememberable and quite frankly I have devices that I never want in the DNS system yet I will be pretyy much forced to since trying to remember an IPV6 address will give me a fucking stroke.
And lets not forget you omit parts of the address eg: 2001:0db8:85a3::0000:8a2e:0370:7334 but ONLY once! I mean why did they even bother with this crap, is that supposed to make it easier?
IPV6 was written by a bunch of head up their ass academics, and even if the members of the committee were not academics their head was still firmly planted in their ass.
The guys who came up with IPV4 new they would have to work with it and made it pretty damn simple in most respects, but these clowns have turned something that should have just made the address space bigger into to something that will require massive kludges to transition since it will pretty much cause a mandatory replacement of pretty much 90% of the hardware out there.
Never ever let an academic design anything. They will fuck it up every time.
Re:Dual stack failed? (Score:4, Insightful)
in reality, if someone does anything even remotely competent, it should be a 1 day process, maximum - after all, using NAT or IPv6 internally should make it even less of an issue.
I think if you were to estimate the time it takes to change the company fleet of cars from summer to winter tires, you'd budget about ten seconds per car - that's how long it takes in Formula One, right? Companies don't plan to redo their network structure, ever. They do as little as possible as rarely as possible because it's pure cost. What you're looking at is an endless amount of cruft with IPs hard coded all over PCs, routers, configuration files, scripts, scheduled jobs, firewall configurations, stored server information or URLs, documentation, the works. Sure you could blow away millions of dollars on optimizing "network reoganization" process, making the company a world leader in that until someone with the money asks "Why the f*ck are we spending all this money on THIS? What in heaven's name do we get for it?" and you'd better have a better answer "So we can give some IP addresses back to ICANN for free." Otherwise cleaning up all that cruft will be on your project time and project cost, and if you still think you can do it in a day you're a monkey on crack.