Last Days For Central IPv4 Address Pool 376
jibjibjib writes "According to projections by APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston, IANA's central IPv4 address pool is expected to run out any day now, leaving the internet with a very limited remaining supply of addresses. APNIC will probably request two /8s (33 million addresses) within the next few weeks. This will leave five /8s available, which will be immediately distributed to the five Regional Internet Registries in accordance with IANA policy. It's expected that APNIC's own address pool will run low during 2011, making ISPs and businesses in the Asia-Pacific region the first to feel the effects of IPv4 exhaustion. The long-term solution to IP address exhaustion is provided by IPv6, the next version of the Internet Protocol. IPv6 has been an internet standard for over a decade, but is still unsupported on many networks and makes up an almost negligible fraction of Internet traffic. Unless ISPs dramatically accelerate the pace of IPv6 deployment, users in some regions will be stuck on IPv4-only connections while ISPs in other regions run out of public IPv4 addresses, leading to a fragmented Internet without the universal connectivity we've previously taken for granted."
Time to look at your own desk... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm running IPv6 via tunnels since 2001. I'm running native IPv6 since my ISP [on.net] did their first try-out via ADSL.
Come on guys, it is not that difficult. Why is slashdot.org still not accessible via IPv6?
Re:Time to look at your own desk... (Score:4, Insightful)
I tried tunneling IPv6 for a while but no free tunnel delivers acceptable performance. Must be lonely out there on dialup. When my ISP offers me IPv6 I will use it. Until then it would be stupid. My WISP router is a Mikrotik routerboard so it ought to be easy enough for them to do it if and when THEIR provider, an AT&T reseller, provides them with IPv6.
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You do not need to sign up for Internode's IPv6 trial.
All you have to do is change the domain in your username from "internode.on.net" to "ipv6.internode.on.net". Then, make sure IPv6 is enabled in your pppd config (e.g. check the "IPv6" box on your router, or on Debian, just add a line "ipv6 ," to /etc/ppp/peers/dsl-provider) and you should be away.
You'll also need to run a DHCPv6-PD client if you want the static /60 subnet, which if you bought one of the IPv6-ready routers from Internode wiil already
Risk aversion (Score:5, Insightful)
Business organizations, like politicians, are usually extraordinarily risk-averse. This touches both in many ways, across many countries. As a result, there won't be any serious pushes into IPv6 until organizations can clearly quantify the damages that will be done from dragging their feet further. Only a small percentage of organizations will fully commit to IPv6 until the guaranteed costs of waiting exceeds the projected costs of moving forward.
Nobody should have expected anything different once the internet became controlled predominantly by public political and private business interests.
Re: (Score:2)
To expand on your idea, our business has 5 IPs that aren't likely to be taken from us (We had 32 at one time, voluntarily dropped to only what we really need). The shortage of IP addresses isn't going to affect the business directly, we won't need more, and everyone that can connect, can connect to us using those IPs. It doesn't make sense to try to switch to IPv6 until we HAVE to. As a matter of fact, there is MORE risk in switching than in not switching, since what we have works and is a known quantity
Steve Jobs will save us... (Score:2)
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You can't just make sure it has IPv6 support "built in" (what is this, a house?) because many devices sold as being IPv6 ready take multiples as long to route a packet, not least because they have 32-bit processors and they cannot accomodate a calculation on an IPv6 address in a single cycle. You have to actually be sure the hardware can handle your IPv4 traffic if you converted it to IPv6.
We always knew that ipv6 adoption would be messy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We always knew that ipv6 adoption would be mess (Score:5, Informative)
The cost to switch to IPv6 is not flipping a switch. It will cost trillions upon trillions of dollars globally to migrate. Selling investments like that in the middle of a global recession is not small potatoes
People on slahsdot talk about IPv6 migration like it is simple - it is NOT. There are a lot more devices than your local router, and a lot more pieces of software then your desktop OS, that have to support IPv6 before it can be migrated. Companies have decades worth of software with hundreds upon hundreds of millions of lines of code, all assuming an IP is 4 bytes.
The IPv6 switchover makes the Y2k thing look like small potatoes, namely because the IP stack is a much more integral piece of functionality in a lot of software than the absolute date ever was - that and you have a lot more to switch over today than you did in 1999.
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The cost to switch to IPv6 is not flipping a switch. It will cost trillions upon trillions of dollars globally to migrate. Selling investments like that in the middle of a global recession is not small potatoes
Wait.. when would you prefer doing it? Wait until the labor market is tight again? If it's going to take the efforts of thousands of people to make it happen, wouldn't it be best to do it when labor is cheap?
How many isp's do ip6? (Score:4, Informative)
Most isp's don't give out ip6 addresses
Most home routers don't handle ip6 (apple is a notable exception here)
This is going to be a bit ugly for a while.
Re: (Score:2)
Routers (Score:4, Informative)
There is a list here of IPv6 capable routers:
http://www.sixxs.net/wiki/Routers [sixxs.net]
The list is by no means complete, so if you are aware of others then be sure to add it the list (you will need to register for a Sixxs account).
BTW At this point, if your ISP does not provide IPv6 support then you can try out 6to4 or Teredo. Myself I am currently using 6to4, since this is support by the Apple Airport Extreme, and all the devices on my network have an IPv6 address this way.
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Most new home routers do actually support IPv6 now, and older ones are getting the capability added via firmware updates. My several-year-old router didn't have IPv6 initially but it does now (firmware update sometime last year added it).
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There's no such things as shortages... (Score:2, Troll)
I keep seeing this fear of the IPv4 address pool disappearing, but I thought there was no such things as shortages in a free market? So then what's going on here? Clearly the IANA is refusing to allow the prices (and therefore costs) of IPv4 addresses to rise to reflect the true scarcity of them. I think the ANIPC goes as far to say you don't own your IP address to sell. Prices aren't just arbitrary things, they reflect information about scarcity, and if IPv6 addresses were cheaper to adopt than IPv4 addres
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Except it's not so simple. If you have network hardware and software that don't support IPv6, you have a lot of cost involved to upgrade. Gateway devices, DSL and cable modems, routers... all need to support the protocol. Not to mention OS's and the software running on top of the network infrastructure.
You make it sound like we can all switch overnight to IPv6 based purely on the cost of the addresses, when there are a LOT more things to consider than simply addressing.
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So... what's your point? No one is claiming the switch would be made overnight, but the fact there is no profit and loss mechanism to drive us in the direction of adoption cannot be helpful at all, and people who most urgently demand IPv4 addresses (the people who are willing to pay lots of money because not having an IPv4 address is a massive cost) would be excluded from getting them, while companies like Apple and such have /8 blocks they have no chance of selling off portions of.
Re:There's no such things as shortages... (Score:4, Insightful)
If so, then people could have been upgrading to IPv6 over the last 10 years as opportunities arose (ie as old equipment needed replacing they'd have replaced with the IPv6 option) and still have been able to see the IPv4 world. As more w/s moved to IPv6 only there would be a compelling reason for more people to follow suit
Once all traffic was using IPv6 there could be an update to free up those first 'n' address for use in IPv6, though there's so many addresses that might not be required for quite some time, so the natural upgrading of equipment would see them made available over the next 5 or 10 years without needing any big splash upgrades.
Or am I completely missing something that would have made this impossible?
Re:There's no such things as shortages... (Score:5, Informative)
You're overlooking that an IPv4 only host can't RESPOND to an IPv6 address. Instead you get IP6to4 NAT, which has to be a service provided by someone, that connects the IPv6 network to the IPv4 network, so the IPv4 destination sees the request originating from an IPv4 address.
Re:There's no such things as shortages... (Score:5, Informative)
What I don't get is why the people who came up with IPv6 didn't make the upgrade path easier? Obviously I'm missing something, but what if (for the sake of argument) they had decided that the first 'n' IPv6 addresses would correspond to the complete set of IPv4 addresses, and all IPv6 routers, etc, would understand that one of the first IPv6 addresses meant 'route the traffic to the corresponding IPv4 address'. Could that have been done?
This is the way it is. The first 4 billion IPv6 addresses maps to the entire IPv4 address space.
If so, then people could have been upgrading to IPv6 over the last 10 years as opportunities arose (ie as old equipment needed replacing they'd have replaced with the IPv6 option) and still have been able to see the IPv4 world. As more w/s moved to IPv6 only there would be a compelling reason for more people to follow suit ...
People could have been doing that but they didn't. So here we are.
Or am I completely missing something that would have made this impossible?
Yes, just mapping between IPv4 and IPv6 using this mechanism does not make it possible for your old IPv4 host to communicate with a IPv6 host using an address outside the 4 billion address space supported by IPv4. So what you describe is not actually backwards compability.
The real compability is called "dual stack" meaning all IPv6 hosts also have IPv4. As we are running out of IPv4 this might be using NAT to conserve addresses. People have been doing dual stack for a decade now, but just not enough. It is said about 0.5% of the traffic is on IPv6.
Your ISP was supposed to give you an IPv6 address along with your IPv4 address 10 years ago. But they didn't.
Your OS provider was supposed to make your OS support dual stack 10 years ago. They actually did.
Your router provider was supposed to make your router dual stack capable 10 years ago. They didn't.
Your software provider was supposed to implement dual stack support 10 years ago. To a large extend they did, but some programs are still lacking here.
Re:There's no such things as shortages... (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem was it greated more work without benefit.
Of course it did! It's a major infrastructure change! It's not like we were "upgrading the internet" to make it run faster. The entire issue was that our current addressing infrastructure was inadequate. It's like saying, "this road doesn't go to the housing development that they're building up the road - we should make it longer", then complaining that the existing drivers didn't see any benefit. Everyone on the internet right now is fine - it's everyone who's not that this will benefit. So of course it's work without benefit for those of us here now!
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
What I don't get is why the people who came up with IPv6 didn't make the upgrade path easier?
Because it was a hard problem to shoehorn more addresses into 32 bits. Instead of doing that they choose a 10+ year transition strategy where IPv6 could run along side IPv4. For over the last 10 years they have been saying this day is coming. Microsoft listened (XP supports IPv6), Apple listened, the Linux and *BSD developers listened as did Sun, HP, SGI. Just about any end user general purpose computer shipped in the last 10 years has supported IPv6. The big router vendors support IPv6 though it took a
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Yes, you're missing that even if everything else in an IP header between versions 4 and 6 were identical (they're not), IPv6 has 128 bit source and destination addresses. Which means that the router would calculate the offset for the payload within the packet incorrectly.
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Don't be ridiculous. There have been shortages in free markets for as long as there have been free markets in places suffering drought. When something is sufficiently necessary and scarce, prices are irrelevant because people will take it by force.
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Crack open an Econ textbook, scarcity is not the same as a shortage. Scarcity means there isn't enough of the good for the cost of acquisition to be free (pretty much everything except air). Shortage means there isn't enough for anyone to acquire even if you wanted to pay for it, and in a market only happens with a bad prediction of anticipated prices, and only in the short term -- Or in the case of IPv4 addresses, when there's no way of trading blocks of addresses.
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I thought there was no such things as shortages in a free market
You need to stop using the source from which you got that definition. Nobody, pro- or anti- free market, also having two or more brain cells to rub together, would ever state a free market is supposed (or is claimed) to be free of shortages. There are various claims about how free markets affect short supplies vis-à-vis allocation and price, but not the they can turn a supply from limited to limitless. Any such claim is absurd.
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In fact it is a commonly claimed feature of a market, there's even a term for it: the market clearing mechanism [wikipedia.org]. There is no reason that an entrepreneur would want to sell a good at a lower price than would cause a shortage, if they could instead sell to the highest bidders, so they do not occur in a free market, at least not in the short run (before mistakes are corrected). That is to say, selling at a price that causes a shortage has an opportunity cost for both the buyers and the seller.
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but I thought there was no such things as shortages in a free market?
Where do you see a free market? There is no free market, everything is regulated, certain corporations are protected by law, and One Big Agency is assigned the duty of handing out IP addresses. That's not a free market. And by the way, it answers your question: since it's not a free market this is why there are problems.
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Sigh, a market is not a physical thing it is a set of (in)formal regulations governing transactions. A market without regulations makes as much sense as a game without rules, it's an oxymoronic definition. No matter what Glenn Beck says, the "free" in free market does not mean free of regulations, it means anybody is free to participate provided they abide by the rules.
"since it's not a free market this is why there are problems."
Free markets are a
Re: (Score:2)
Rationing IPv4 would be like rationing currency. Since you're schooled in economics, consider what would happen if a country's Mint decided that only 2 billion units of currency would ever be minted (say because they ran out of serial numbers). The country could function, but with a pointlessly crippled economy.
I'm surprised anyone who is clearly schooled in economics (but perhaps not of IT) would not see this obvious correlation and basically identical consequences of rationing what is ultimately just a te
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Next thing you tell me you can't own domain names or email addresses either? Of course you can't own numbers, but you can own IPv4 addresses, and there's a big difference, owning an IPv4 address means it's routed to where the you the owner want it to go, therefore yes, it does correspond with a physical good and/or product. Newsflash: Shares of a company, FM radio frequencies in a geographical area, and most US dollars are not physical at all, either, but people still own them, and rightfully so.
I mean seri
Re:There's no such things as shortages... (Score:5, Informative)
Next thing you tell me you can't own domain names or email addresses either? Of course you can't own numbers, but you can own IPv4 addresses
You can't own an IPv4 address. That's been the policy for over a decade.
And no, you can't own a domain name either. If you don't pay the renewal fee, and anyone can register it after it lapses - so you're just licensing or leasing it.
And since email addresses are connected to domain names, you don't own them either.
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I don't use "can" to mean "may" I use it as "it would not be impossible."
Ownership of domain names is good enough to call it that for economic purposes... You have full control over what happens to it, what DNS records are kept with it, who to trade it with, for all intents/purposes you own it.
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I don't use "can" to mean "may" I use it as "it would not be impossible."
Ownership of domain names is good enough to call it that for economic purposes... You have full control over what happens to it, what DNS records are kept with it, who to trade it with, for all intents/purposes you own it.
Again, you're factually wrong. As I pointed out, you cannot, contrary to your original assertion, own an IP address. Ditto with a domain name. You only lease/license them.
If you stop paying your car license plates, you still own your car - you just can't drive it on public roads. You stop paying your domain registration, you lose it. Same thing with "ownership" or an IP address or domain.
ARIN reserves the right to revoke IP address allocations at any time and without prior notice. So much for your
Real Estate (Score:2)
>>Again, you're factually wrong. As I pointed out, you cannot, contrary to your original assertion, own an IP address. Ditto with a domain name. You only lease/license them.
By that argument, you don't actually own your house, because if you stop paying property taxes, the government will take it away from you.
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Again, you're factually wrong. As I pointed out, you cannot, contrary to your original assertion, own an IP address. Ditto with a domain name. You only lease/license them.
By that argument, you don't actually own your house, because if you stop paying property taxes, the government will take it away from you.
Congratulations - someone finally figured it out!
Stop paying the license plates on your car, you still own it. Stop paying the taxes on "your" property, or the registration fees for "your" domain, and you lose it. Your "ownership" lapses.
That's the difference between ownership and non-ownership.
Re:Real Estate (Score:4, Informative)
It should be sort of obvious, but "ownership" is an institution that only holds practical meaning in the presence of government to define what is ownable, the limits if ownability, and to protect the rights of owners with police force.
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Then you have the problem with "owning" a TLD that you create. Even that is subject to annual costs. Don't pay the costs, and you drop off the Internet. Your TLD ceases to exist.
Re:talking without thinking is not communication (Score:4, Informative)
You can't own an IPv4 address. That's been the policy for over a decade.
The policy of the organization that OWNS them.
The problem is that the central orgs that assign IP address spaces reserve the right to revoke them at any time, for any reason (or no reason). So unless you're IANA or APNIC or RIPE or one of the other regional authorities, forget it.
Also, even they don't "own" the numbers - they just administer them. Nobody "owns" them. You can't "own" a number.
There's nothing to stop you from creating your own network, and using the same set of 4 billion numbers.
There's nothing to stop me from setting up a lilypad of wireless networked machines using the same set of numbers, running my own DNS server, and serving up my own domain system to whoever adds those servers to their /etc/resolv.conf file. Since it wouldn't be "The" Internet, just an "internet", it would be a good way for municipalities to neatly sidestep the incumbents attacks on municipal free access. Let individuals provide the gateways to the "real" internet.
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I mean seriously, we do all of this with domain names already, why not IPs?
Because domain names aren't routable.
If there is a shortage in China, you can't just get together a bunch of non-contiguous /24's from Africa, Oceania, and South America and sell them to those who need them in Asia -- routing table sizes would explode, and the Internet would pretty much fall apart. Subnets are aggregated into supernets to aggregate routes, and you can't start busting up the supernets without negatively impacting routability.
So even if you could buy and sell any sized block of IPs, you'd o
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Rules for buying/selling of IPv4-addresses has already been put in place at the regional internet registries (RIPE, ARIN, APNIC, etc.) as far as I know.
Not that that is really all that important, if people just deploy IPv6 already.
It just helps to make IPv4 more expensive to run, which will just be one of many reasons to deploy IPv6.
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Let me correct that, for the spelling nazis and why ever else wants to complain:
A transfer fee agreed between 2 providers for something they do not own
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IPs don't correspond with any physical good or product and have an inherent value of zero dollars. You can't own numbers. Therefore you are crazy and have been sipping Enron's cool-aid.
The above is what happens when people are allowed to escape out of school without ever having to take any course in basic economics.
Re: (Score:2)
Huh? Price elasticity in a free market is defined exclusively as a function of availability. The free market is defined by shortages!
That's scarcity. Shortage means completely unavailable goods/services even to willing buyers.
That's a very narrow definition. And they are still arbitrary: any manufacturer can choose any price as long as they can reach break-even at that price-point.
No, breaking even still has an opportunity cost, the cost of what you could have made maximizing your profits. If prices don't reflect market prices they reflect how much the producer values their good themselves, so it's nor arbitrary.
Except that they already are. Massively so. For the price of a single IPv4 address, you can buy 2^64 IPv6 addresses with most providers.
Many people wouldn't take an IPv6 address if you paid them... I haven't seen the prices, but in any case it's still true that if a shortage is really imminent then they are too low.
Heh. Stocks have only one function: trade. IP addresses are not used for trade, they are used for communication. And the reason for non-tradeability has nothing to do with ownership, it has to do with routing: if you allow individuals to trade addresses among themselves, who is going to pay for the administration that makes those addresses reachable af the new owner's location?
S
We know (Score:3)
We know already. Just about everyone on slashdot has setup IPv6 at home, and most likely given up on it later as there is little to access on it.
Until we pressure the ISP's to give everyone native IPv6 this thing isn't going to go anywhere. If the ISP's lead the big retailers will follow, other sites will follow them. The very last thing anyone wants is ISP level NAT but that is exactly what we are going to see if we don't fix the current mess.
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I think the ISPs may want ISP level NAT. It would mean an end to the p2p software that has been placing such a high demand upon their networks, a barrier
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That works until one ISP sees that there is a demand for non NATed access.
They provide that and gets piles of customers.
In norway all owners of copper need to let other companies rent said copper at a reasonable price. So on the copper pair entering my apartment I have an option of at least 20 different DSL providers. Works wonders for competition ;)
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In the UK, ISPs rarely run phone (or even TV) services, so this problem doesn't exist here.
Actually most of the major ISPs do run phone and media services. BT, Virgin, Talk Talk (who own more ISPs than you think and are quietly changing the names to Talk Talk) to name a few.
Try one of these (Score:2)
http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/vigor120.html [draytek.co.uk]
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The answer will be: whatever is cheaper. ISP's don't give a shit about the user or they would be constantly upgrading and improving their networks instead of running software to screw up people's access by throttling or shaping (Yeah we'll sell you x MB/s bandwidth but you're not allowed to use it).
They give a shit about profits though - so they won't let the whole network collapse - but only when they really really really have to. Ahh, monopolies. By the way, weren't we supposed to run out of IP's last yea
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I tried it last year, but I noticed some problems in getting my web and mail server to work properly, so I went back to IPv4. The problem with IPv6 is that there's no benefit to switching, only more trouble, so what's the point ? This isn't going to change anytime soon.
They will have to anyway. The IPv6-only customers still want access to IPV4-only servers. This means there's no benefit to upgrade those servers to IPv6.
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Re: (Score:2)
What's the benefit to them ? As long as 99.9% of the customers can still access their site by IPv4, there's no incentive.
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And ISPs giving IPv6 addresses mean little if customers have no equipment that handles it.
Why don't most CPE support it? Most makers don't write the full software suite. They tweak what the chipset providers write. Complain to Broadcom and others.
If I complain to Broadcom they will ignore me. We need to get their customers, the ISPs, to complain to Broadcom.
You are right though. I was amazed that my super-cool do-everything fritz!box doesn't seem to do IPv6.
Re: (Score:2)
Considering my cable modem is part of the contract with my ISP, that's still their problem.
Apocalypse! (Score:2)
Renting IP Addresses (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a very simple solution to this. We should be renting IP addresses, not handing them out. Make publicly routable IP addresses cost $1 a month. Many class A owners would be dying to give back address space that they aren't using. Isn't that the answer to a limited supply of anything? Set a value to them so they aren't wasted.
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This is what I see happening - IPv4 addresses will start being traded "privately".
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The very interesting question is whether the agreement between the legacy /8 holders and ARIN *allows* RIRs like ARIN to charge regular fees for IP space. In the good old days there were no formal agreements like that for allocations, so the RIRs don't have the legal authority to change anything, and mostly have to rely on the goodwill of the orgs with these allocations.
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Maybe that's what the current class A owners should do.
The guide to IPv6 conversion (Score:2)
Is there such a thing? (there must be) Where can one look to plan a conversion at home? At work?
Like just about everyone else, I have been pushing this off hoping for a "just push this button" solution to emerge. I haven't seen one yet.
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If you're running a modern OS, it's fairly easy to set up a tunnel.
Register on either http://tunnelbroker.net/ [tunnelbroker.net] or http://www.sixxs.net/main/ [sixxs.net] and create a new tunnel for yourself. There are instructions on how to start the tunnel which will put that single machine on the IPv6 network.
From there, you can look into setting up RAdvD (if *nix) to act as an endpoint on your network, supplying IPv6 IPs to everything on it automatically.
The next step would be to have an ISP which supplies an IPv6 address to your ro
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At home you can basically twiddle your thumbs and wait till your provider gives you IPv6, if that happens go buy a new IPv6 capable router and everything will be fine without extra work (at least in theory).
If you want to toy with IPv6 right now, you can install a tunnel. In Ubuntu that basically means:
sudo apt-get install miredo
and you are done for a single client. When using UFW you have to enable IPv6 in /etc/default/ufw also or it will be blocked. If you want multiple clients you have to install radvd a
The Internet is Full (Score:4, Insightful)
OK. We run out of IPv4 addresses. So what? It's not like the 4 billion existing addresses are going to suddenly evaporate. Everything will continue to work just fine, and if you're late to the party, well, it sucks to be you.
Just put up a sign "The Internet is full, go home."
Simple way to increase IPv6 adoption by websites (Score:5, Interesting)
An easy way to promote IPv6 would be if it were know or assumed that Google assigns higher pagerank to sites using IPv6 addresses. Then it would be something that customers of hosting companies would insist on, at least.
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They seem to index some IPv6 sites. I Google searched for "site:ipv6.beijing2008.cn" which you can verify to be an IPv6 only site. The result seems very sparse though.
This is going to make us look like imbecils (Score:2)
People thought CS people looked stupid when they found out dates were represented using two digits in computer programs. But those same people did not have to personally do anything; they just had to cross their fingers and hope that the programs got rewritten in time. This is going to effect a LOT of people directly. They are going to have to struggle with technological issues related to updating their equipment. Stuff that they barely got working the first time they set it up (TVs, wireless route
Re:This is going to make us look like imbecils (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How about... (Score:5, Informative)
It's called "tunneling." If you're playing those on a modern system capable of IPv6, the system can make the game see an IPv4 connection. It doesn't have to know the IPv4 connection is wrapped inside a v6 connection.
Re: (Score:2, Redundant)
Re:How about... (Score:5, Informative)
*points above*
That was the entire point of my post. You can give the game its own little network world. It sees IPv4, and the host does the translation to and from. When configured correctly, as with any app that no longer conforms to current technology standards, the app has its own little bubble where everything works as expected even though the rest of the world has moved on.
Re:How about... (Score:4, Informative)
it won't see an IPv6 address 'string'. That's the whole point.
NAT has been a solved problem for over a decade. an IPv4 network NATted behind an IPv6 network is not hard.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How about... (Score:5, Insightful)
At least a good amount of them can be refitted for IPv6 due to installing OpenWRT or DD-WRT or any of the other distributions out there. Maybe it's a business opportunity, flashing home routers to use one of those and reconfigure them to the initial settings afterwards?
You know something, kid? (Score:4, Informative)
....simply because the guys you have left are old, don't have the skills, haven't kept up, and have based their troubleshooting steps on tools and techniques that simply don't work anymore....
You know something, kid? I look forward to the time when you're 'old.'
Oh, and by the way? I don't care if you're smart enough to give Robert Metcalfe a run for his money and young enough to still be sucking on your thumb: With an attitude like yours, don't come around here looking for a job.
Re: (Score:3)
OK supergenius, just exactly what is your cunning plan for a backward compatible protocol that both expands the address space and is backward compatible?
Other than dual stack that is. I'm running dual stack right now. I have perfectly good access to v4 only services through v4 and I have access to v6 only services through v6. Where's the problem? We've had over a decade to switch gracefully and a zillion piss on fires managers are all busy waiting for it to become an emergency before they allow anyone to ev
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
While IPv6 has been known about for over a decade, the problem is that in order for an ISP to get a block of IPv6 addresses, they would need to give up their block of IPv4 addresses. Now, back in 2000, what ISP would be willing to give up their static block of IP addresses for something virtually no one else was using, and which would cause customer outages for MONTHS while the IPv6 stuff was tested and people figured out how to work with it?
This was the reason for not going to IPv6 early on, and it was
Re: (Score:3)
Please back that statement up with some sort of evidence. I have worked for ISPs and have never heard of any such policy.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Evidence....I worked for Netcom in their operations group, and that was one of the reasons for not getting an IPv6 block from what I heard at the time.
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ISPs won't have to give up any IPv4 addresses, they simply won't be able to get any new ones. Going forward only IPv6 address blocks will be available for assignment.
ISPs should be upgrading their networks already to support IPv6, but the problem is them dragging their feet and network equipment providers also dragging their feet. No matter how much feet dragging may be happening, their is cleat evidence that there are solution to getting IPv6 in place. For that we just need to look to Europe, so ISPs such
Re:Their fault (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact, the opposite will become true soon (once a RIR gets close to exhaustion, i.e. only one /8 block left) in a number of regions: You only get IPv4 addresses if you also take IPv6 addresses.
Re: (Score:2)
So, when everything's on IPv6, and you want to play an IPv4-only game, you'll first have to establish an IPv4 VPN between the players? I suppose that sounds feasible, but someone will have to write the software to make it easy.
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Are they still using the block within 5/8? They better get off it.. before actual hosts get addresses from it within the next few months.
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I imagine a future version of Hamachi could be reworked to use a block within 10.200.x.x network, or something of the sorts. Sure it would mean that you aren't already using that for your own local subnet, but it is workable. Then again, if you get yourself a router with VPN support, then your friends could simply connect to your network.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:The problem (Score:5, Interesting)
IPv6 is great, but they could have solved the problem far more elegantly 10 years ago.
Add two octets to the front of v4. Solved after a firmware flash.
Any existing IP becomes 1.0.x.x.x.x
If a router encounters a x.x.x.x address, it just appends 1.0 to the front.
The old internet and the new internet would have run side by side - for the most part working fine until everyone had updated their firmware.
Sure, it's not the engineering solution v6 is, but it would have been in use long ago.
They did this. Except they added 12 octets in front of v4 and mapped existing v4 addresses to 0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.x.x.x.x.
And the old and new internet runs side by side currently and we are just waiting for everyone to update their firmware.
Re:The problem (Score:4, Informative)
It is actually mapped to both ::/96 and ::ffff:0/96 with the first option being depricated now, se historical notes on the ipv6 address page on wikipedia.
In practice neither is very useful except in a program that wants to use one data structure to store both v4 and v6 addresses.
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You do realize that the ISPs would be the ones doing the prioritizing, right?
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i c,... nap
Re:Running out! The End! erm, again... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think NAT and DHCP solve the myriad problems associated with IPv4, you're not qualified to be speaking on the subject.
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Periodically they announce "Oh Noes! We are about to run out of IPv4 space any minute now!
No they don't. What has been said over and over again is that we will run out of IPv4 address space and the "when" hasn't really moved much, it's just that every time the warning come up the "32 bits is just fine besides I don't understand this new-fangled eye-pee-vee-SIX thing and new things scare me, also, we locked ourselves into IPv4-only network gear because we're idiots who don't really know what we're doing"-crowd start screaming that those trying to get IPv6 adoption going are just alarmists.
Unless
Re: (Score:2)
It's true that home users would not have to replace routers for IPv4+NAT. As a lot of these run Linux, though, these should be flash-upgradable to IPv6 too with little effort. I doubt any manufacturers will provide the updates for this, though, and DD-WRT etc. just aren't easy or reliable enough for general users in my experience.
On the ISP side, I can't see much difference either way, since they'll have to buy new IPv6-capable routers (with IPv4 NAT?) or carrier-grade NAT routers if they want to add a
Re: (Score:2)
NAT per household is definitively not enough. There are billions of families that will want to be connected in the future.
Carrier level NAT is evil, and for someone who says 'Governments should be afraid of their people', it's quite against it. Carrier level NAT destroys censorship protecting services like Tor and Freenet, any possible hope for P2P DNS, and makes the 'net much more controlled by government/big business.
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Thing is, people (usually those with a vested interest in IPv6) have been saying this for at least the past 10 years.
And they were right. We have been running out of IPv4 addresses since basically the Internet got into consumer hands. Guess why you never, not even 10 years ago, got multiple IPs from your ISP without paying extra. There simply weren't enough of them, it always was a strictly limited resource and thus NAT and other crude workarounds had to be invented. The difference now is that we are no longer in a phase where IPv4 are a limited resource, but in a phase where IPv4 addresses simply have run out.
IPv4 plus NAT (and DHCP) is a perfectly good solution,
There are m
Re: (Score:2)
I note that at no stage did you offer any counter-argument to any of my points, instead you just mouthed off anonymously - that tells everyone all they need to know about your position...
While I am not him, it speaks nothing of his position and moreso just a general "*sigh* not another misguided one" and lazyness of explanation.
First of all, carrier grade nat causes it's own problems and does _not_ scale, you can still only put so many active devices behind a nat before things start getting nasty (they kind of already are if you have to resort to it anyway though).
The primary problem though is in effect NAT turns the internet into a one-way affair, it destroys any service where you would wa
Re: (Score:2)
There's a number of protocols that don't sit terribly well with NAT - SIP is a good example, but there are others. FTP, for example, and IPSec.
Generally speaking, there have been solutions to these problems - proxies which overcome the issue, firewall and router software that can understand the underlying protocol and deal with NAT or additions to the protocol to make usage over NAT practical. But every single one of these solutions is fundamentally a bodge to a problem that wouldn't exist in the first pl
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Yeah. Angelica Huston's career isn't doing too well.
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.. that didn't planned ipv6 to be backward compatible?
The one that did not think of making v4 extensible to make that a possibility.
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Put a squid proxy on a host with both 6 and 4 connectivity.