No IPv6 Doomsday In 2012 233
itwbennett writes "Yes, IPv4 addresses are running out, but a Y2K-style disaster/frenzy won't be coming in 2012. Instead, businesses are likely to spend the coming year preparing to upgrade to IPv6, experts say. Of course there's a chance that panic will ensue when Europe's RIPE hands out its last IPv4 addresses this summer, but 'most [businesses] understand that they can live without having to make any major investments immediately,' said IDC analyst Nav Chander. Plus, it won't be until 2013 that North America will run out of IPv4 addresses and there's no sense getting worked up before then."
Re:Cleanup the IP Space (Score:4, Interesting)
You assume everyone with an IP is using it to host a website. And what about people that have a redundant data link that only comes up when their main link goes down? "Well, we haven't had any downtime in the past year, guess we don't need any backups! Go ahead, take my IP!"
Re:Business opportunity (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is not learning IPv6. That's easy. At least to anyone with more than a little experience doing this. I was working before the Internet even came around and before Ethernet, so I don't see it as a big obstacle.
Where is all the fucking Enterprise hardware and firmware updates to support it?.
That's what needs to be solved. I could support IPv6 tomorrow if it was a simple firmware change. IPv6 will not be rolled out into Enterprise environments for at least 10-15 years completely. Reason why is simple. Not every network device supports it. I got clients that still have 5 years or more to go on lease contracts for huge printer and document systems. No IPv6 firmware updates in the pipeline that I know about.
Operating systems will be faster of course, but you need to cover all of the devices first.
My biggest issue is the routers themselves. If you are running a business or have branch offices, you are not, or should not, be doing that on any hardware you can pick up at BestBuy. Prosumer or higher routers that can set up multiple WAN ports don't have IPv6 yet. Perhaps the absolute newest ones might, but that could represent 20-30k in new equipment costs for a medium sized business with branch offices. For what? Just IPv6?
Unless the manufactures get off their asses, stop being greedy, and push out a firmware update for existing hardware to support IPv6 there will be a lot of people like me that have two choices:
1) Stay with IPv4
2) Spend tens of thousands of dollars on new hardware.
Tough situation.
P.S - Why do any of that until at least 1/3rd of all customers are using IPv6?
Way harder than a firmware update. (Score:4, Interesting)
For cheap consumer devices that do everything in software, sure a firmware update is all it would take, at least in theory (IPv6 can take more memory and CPU so on limited devices there might not be enough). However enterprise networking devices? They usually have to have parts replaced.
Reason is that to get the kind of speeds and latencies we want, you need ASICs, Application Specific Integrated Circuits. Those are just what they sound like: Devices designed to do a specific thing. That also means they aren't programmable. ASICs allow us to do stuff cheaper and faster than we could do in software.
A simple example is a gigabit switch. Crack one open and you see a very small little chip that handles all the switching. Now try it with a PC, stick in 8 gigabit cards and have it bridge between them. It'll overwhelm it, despite having a powerful CPU. Reason the switch can handle it is that little chip does nothing but switch packets. It is designed for only one task and does it well.
So enterprise stuff has this too, but some more complex ones. You get ASICs to speed up routing. Problem is if the ASIC was made for IPv4, it cannot be expanded to IPv6. You need a new one.
On the campus where I work they upgraded all the big routers to do IPv6 and it was pricey, seven figures even with our discounts. All the supervisor modules had to be replaced. Now yes, before that they could have technically turned it on, there was IPv6 for IOS on the older stuff. However it was all done in CPU, which is pretty limited on those routers. So if a couple people used it, it'd be fine. However if lots of people did, it'd crash the routers. The only way to give them the capacity to support it for everyone was to get new IPv6 hardware.
It isn't a matter of being greedy. As I said, Cisco would let you turn IPv6 on for many devices, like the 6500/7600s we use. It just couldn't accelerate it because it lacked the hardware. No magic fix for that.
Remember high end networking equipment isn't replaced often. You can leave it in place for over a decade. They aren't going to replace it all just for fun.
Bologna (Score:2, Interesting)
We're not changing to IPv6 on our internal network ever. Why would we bother with a forklift changeover of the entire internal network? It's a waste of time--nothing we need to do now requires "end to end" addressing, and frankly, if it does we don't want it. All the articles I've read seem to come down to "it's more convenient" for applications not to have to deal with NAT... Of course it is also more convenient for people who mean to do you harm, too, since we're back to connections to outside resources coming from the machine's actual IP address, a public NATing of the private one.
Once again, we're back to "convenience" vs. "can a competent admin secure it in a reasonable length of time or with a reasonable budget?"
Re:Silly (Score:4, Interesting)
The upshot is that converting an application over to IPv6 is rarely as easy as it should be.