IPv6 Traffic Volumes Are Low, But Nobody Knows How Low 231
netbuzz writes "As the June 8 World IPv6 Day experiment draws near, there is universal agreement that little IPv6 traffic is traversing the Internet at the moment. The event is designed in part to increase that volume. However, it will be difficult for Internet policymakers, engineers and the user community at large to tell how the upgrade to IPv6 is progressing because no one has accurate or comprehensive statistics about how much Internet traffic is IPv6 versus IPv4."
And in case you don't know much about IPv6 and why it matters, dave.io has kindly provided "a primer on the IPv6 transition: why it's cool, how to get started with it and what's changed."
ISP:s at fault (Score:4, Insightful)
Since the ISP:s don't want to offer IPv6 to their customers the traffic is a lot lower than it could have been.
Right now it's necessary to do tunneling to an access point for IPv6 and that's not convenient for the majority of the internet users.
Easy solution: (Score:0, Insightful)
The real reason why IPv6 traffic is low (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I know I am stating the obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Plus, ipv4 is easy to manage; your average network engineer has IPs memorized for when things break, or at least a somewhat logical addressing scheme so it's super-easy to guess the IP of a specific component when DNS breaks or is inaccessible, to be able to log into the device and fix it. the dot-quads make things really easy, four integers with a max of three digits (people memorize numbers and spelling most easily when broken down into chunks of three or less) per integer.
You can make it as hard as you want to. It does not have to be difficult. I have a substantial network at home and my scheme is:
"My /48" : "the VLAN" : "host"
My /48 is pretty easy to remember after I type it in 50 billion times. Its just one number. I have no problem memorizing multiple CCs, SS#, phone #s, so memorizing my /48 prefix isn't very challenging. I will be very pissed when/if I ever get "native" ipv6 and lose my tunnel and my ISP gives me a new /48 via DHCP every week.
Anyway, the VLAN is encoded very simply, blah:0100:blah is the /64 for vlan 100. I could do something ridiculous and convert 100 decimal into 64 hex and then encode that as blah:0064:blah but that is a complete waste of time and brain cycles.
The host is also beyond simple. Take a wild guess what my static host address is for a router? How bout blah::1? If, as usual, I have multiple routers in a vlan they number up from ::1. Luckily I have less than 24 routers... can you guess why? My DNS server lives at blah::53 and web server at blah::80. Take a wild guess what address my ntp server lives at?
I only use static addresses for stuff that matters... pure clients just get whatever radvd gives out, much as I don't care what ipv4 address my dhcp server gives pure client machines.
Also, frankly, lets be honest here, the days of having to justify buying a dedicated $15000 sparcstation with 4 megs of ram to barely handle running BINDv4 over my thinnet coaxial ethernet are kinda long since over... I have no shortage of secondary/backup DNS servers, and I can't remember the last time I completely lost DNS ...
Re:Question About Cable Routers (Score:5, Insightful)
How can the average homeowner tell if their cable modem/router is IPv6 capable? Or, is this a non-issue?
WRT to cablemodems:
You can only run, eh, "8 megs" or so over a single downstream channel... If your local cableco is selling services running faster than that, they must be doing channel bonding to do it, which requires DOCSIS 3 link layer protocol, and DOCSIS 3 certification / licensing / whatever has mandatory ipv6 support. Also no one in China has manufactured a non DOCSIS 3 hardware compatible cablemodem for I would guess a couple years now. Does not exclude the possibility of your local cableco having a warehouse full of brand new, "old" DOCSIS 2 modems.
Most people "get the cablemodem for free from their provider". Its possible you live in an area were you own and pay for the modem, much like the DSL guys do. Assuming you purchased it, look for "DOCSIS 3 support" on the shipping box, or just google for your model cablemodem and "docsis3" etc.