IPv6-Only Is Becoming Viable 209
An anonymous reader writes "With the success of world
IPv6 day in 2011, there is a lot of speculation
about IPv6 in 2012. But simply turning on IPv6 does not
make the problems of IPv4
exhaustion go away. It is only when services are usable
with IPv6-only that the internet can clip the ties to the IPv4 boat
anchor. That said, FreeBSD, Windows,
and Android
are working on IPv6-only capabilities. There are multiple
accounts of IPv6-only
network
deployments. From those, we we now know that
IPv6-only is viable in mobile, where over 80% (of
a sampling of the top 200 apps) work well with
IPv6-only. Mobile especially needs IPv6, since their are only
4 billion IPv4 address and approaching 50
billion mobile devices in the next 8 years. Ironically,
the Android test data shows that the apps most likely to fail are
peer-to-peer, like Skype.
Traversing NAT and relying on broken IPv4 is built into their method
of operating. P2P communications was supposed to be one of the
key improvements in IPv6."
Not sure if serious (Score:4, Informative)
Are you trolling, or horribly confused between domain names and IP addresses?
Re:FreeBSD, Windows, and Android are working on IP (Score:5, Informative)
Is it dual stack? FreeBSD developers have actually set it up in recent releases so you can compile with ONLY IPV6 (INET6), IPV4 (INET), or SCTP only. Then they came up with a bunch of tests to see how IPV6 only would work on the Internet and then they checked for compliance. It's rather amazing what they've accomplished so far and most of it within days of last year's world IPV6 day.
I expect a recent linux kernel to do well with IPV6. I'm not questioning that. Just wondered if it's still dual stack dependent and how much testing has happened with userland bits. Since it's a distro problem more than just the kernel. In FreeBSD, they have to make sure all the userland parts work too. The biggest missing piece is DHCPv6 in FreeBSD that I know of.
Re:FreeBSD, Windows, and Android are working on IP (Score:2, Informative)
The point here is that FreeBSD functions completely without IPv4, and not just over the internet, but internally as well. It's actually a much tougher task with Linux as Linus only controls the kernel, he has to convince other projects to go IPv6 only as well.
IPv6 working != Internet IPv6 ready (Score:5, Informative)
I get to test software on the Internet. In the grand scheme of things there are few servers out there talking IPv6 at the moment. There are relatively few Web servers talking IPv6, and there are relatively few DNS servers talking IPv6. If I configure a caching DNS server to be IPv6 only I can only talk to a few things today. Even if the DNS server is configured to talk IPv4 but I query for names on IPv6 (AAAA records) there are few to find. Many DNS servers don't even handle AAAA requests properly. A lot of infrastructure is yet to be deployed to make IPv6-only a viable way to access the Internet.
Those millions of mobile devices talking IPv6 today can only do that going through NAT64 gateways (read that as NAT 6 - 4, as in allowing IPv6 to access IPv4). Yes, having the devices that can talk IPv6 is part of the solution. Now the servers need to be there.
I suppose you could call the large number of IPv6 devices the "chicken". Now the chicken needs to lay the egg.
Re:FreeBSD, Windows, and Android are working on IP (Score:5, Informative)
Is it now? How hard is it to remove the IPv4 assignments from your network interfaces and lo? Oh, that was pretty easy. Took seconds.
I'm happy for all the BSD guys who are doing the IPv6-only dance of joy but it's a political move rather than a useful one to remove the IPv4 stack from the kernel on anything but extremely limited devices. You don't actually gain anything by removing it on a desktop, laptop, server, or most consumer embedded devices.
At this point, it's a lot like buying an electric car when your power comes from a coal plant. It may make you feel better about yourself but nobody actually gains anything.
Re:FreeBSD, Windows, and Android are working on IP (Score:2, Informative)
====
ifconfig lo down
ifconfig eth0 del YOUR_IP
killall dhclient
====
Hey, that was easy!
Re:IPv6 and Unicorns (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Still work to be done (Score:3, Informative)
For example, with IPv6, there isn't really provider independent address space.
Uh.
Yes there is. See for example this [arin.net] and this [ripe.net]/this [ripe.net].
Re:Still work to be done (Score:4, Informative)
Otoh, it's IPv4 that would be incapable of providing provider independent addresses, since everybody is scouring for them.