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."
Re:Why is this even needed? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem under discussion is a shortage of IPv4 addresses, not a shortage of domain names. A device needs an IP address to send and receive anything via TCP/IP, as on the Internet. Domain names are an optional convenience.
Finally, some sanity (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the fantastic growth in the number of Internet-enabled mobile devices, and that the infrastructure for such devices is still in rapid development, it makes sense that this is where you'd see IPv6 completely implemented first.
Waste and Bloat (Score:2, Insightful)
50 billion mobile devices? How much of this will end up as landfill? Does everybody REALLY need seven mobile devices?
Also, I'd feel a lot better about IPv6 if there weren't quite so many RFCs associated with it. The more complex a standard is, the more room there is for security holes, bugs, and non-conforming implementations... Is the second system effect going to bite us in the ass really hard?
Well, maybe we WILL need seven devices, just to load the new stack once..
Re:FreeBSD, Windows, and Android are working on IP (Score:5, Insightful)
Because Ping is almost 30 years old and changing it that substantially would break functionality in a huge number of OSes. Not to mention the fact that as long as IPv4 is in common use it's going to be damn confusing figuring out when it's safe to use ping in IPv4 versus IPv6.
You have things totally backwards. The operating system figures out whether a host should be reached via ipv6 vs ipv4 based on your systems IPv6 connectivity and DNS. You can't know it in advance.
If I browse to www.slashdot.org and it has an AAAA record and my computer has IPv6 I get to slashdot via IPv6. Having ping being the only utility left on the fricking operating system that does not work this way is more broken than any nastalga.
Traceroute is 30 years old too and it works just fine with both protocols enabled at the same time.
Total nonsense. traceroute
Re:Bingo (Score:3, Insightful)
Most mobile phones/smartphones/laptops on mobile data plans do NOT get an IPv4 address. They're NAT'ed. They may be transparently proxied too. Unless you go for the mega-expensive laptop data plans that offer a real IP (e.g., "VPN" support), then you're likely stuck behind several layers of NAT.
As for IPv6 having enough addresses for all - it's a great concept, but what I really want is just NATv6. Something that isolates the internal network numbering from my ISP. I mean, all that needs to happen is your ISP decides change your prefix and you'll spend the next day and a half trying to get everything back up on the network as they lose access, and fail to get the new address. In a company with 1,000 PCs, this could give the IT department headaches as various computers and devices fail to get the new prefix and lose access to email/internet/etc.
When this hits your parents house, it's going to be really fun rebooting routers and computers and devices.
At least with NATv6, if the ISP decides to renumber their networks, at worse you reboot your router. Inside network doing IPv6 Everything else still talks to the router since the gateway address didn't change, and everyone's happy.
Hell, people bitch and complain when their static IPv4 address changes and they have to update their DNS and IPs of all their servers. Heaven forbid you miss a config file and now some services can't start up.
NAT is a hack, but it's a nice one that isolates external world changes from the internal ones. Given most places will have firewalls that break end-to-end connectivity. Hell, mobile providers may firewall mobile devices "for their protection".
Re:FreeBSD, Windows, and Android are working on IP (Score:5, Insightful)
If I browse to www.slashdot.org and it has an AAAA record and my computer has IPv6 I get to slashdot via IPv6. Having ping being the only utility left on the fricking operating system that does not work this way is more broken than any nastalga.
Except that TCP hasn't changed. TCP still rides inside IP packets (v4 or v6), and thus apps based off TCP should work this way[0].
Ping doesn't run off TCP, it runs off ICMP, and there are two different versions of this protocol: one for IPv4 and one for IPv6. ICMPv4 and ICMPv6 are nearly identical, but not quite (different mechanisms for checksum calculation, different error message enumeration). This protocol is ICMPv6.
Now that isn't to say that the developers of the current ping tools couldn't create some uber-ping tool that can handle both ICMPv4 and ICMPv6 packets. The formats are indeed similar -- most of the difference is in how checksums are calculated based on the packet (pseudo)headers and in the error message identifiers. For whatever reason, they decided to have independent versions per protocol.
The point being, it's not correct to compare ping to a web browser. Your web browser will use the same TCP packets regardless of if they're encapsulated within IPv4 or IPv6 packets. The DNS resolving is identical as well. Ping however has to use a different protocol depending on the version of IP being used, which changes the game slightly. And for whatever reasons, the developers who maintain these tools decided by-and-large to leave ping for IPv4 alone, and release a separate version for IPv6. You can certainly question the wisdom of that decision, but it certainly isn't as easy as the case of a web browser.
Yaz
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[0] - Of course, "should" doesn't mean "will". The biggest problem often being apps that have only ever reserved 32 bits for storing resolved addresses, or who don't know how to parse IPv6 formatted addresses entered directly.
Re:FreeBSD, Windows, and Android are working on IP (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously? Ping is a "serious piece of network diagnostic toolkit"?
Please allow me to rephrase: "Ping is the most basic part of a network diagnostic toolkit. If your grandmother learns one thing about IP networking and nothing else, it will be ping."
Re:There will never be IPv6 (Re:IPv6 and Unicorns) (Score:5, Insightful)
What the IPv6-people just refuse to understand is that there is zero benefit for running IPv6 now.
What the IPv6 naysayers just refuse to understand is that we have no choice. NAT works great for you because you have at least one public IPv4 address that you control.
The problem with this thinking is there are real consequences to running out of IPv4 addresses.
When you push NAT out to the carrier and that IP address is serving hundreds of customers then what? If you think setting up DNS or using torrent software or skype that does not bounce content through strangers systems was hard just wait till you want to publish anything through said carrier NAT.
I think most IPv6 people are quite happy to move on without you. Comcast is deploying to millions. All major ISPs have active trials. Asia is going crazy you should see all the crap being pushed through softwires at the moment... IPv6 only content coming soon to a theatre near you...like it or not it is happening with or without you.
Re:Bingo (Score:2, Insightful)
NAT = BAD. The beauty of IPv6 is getting rid of NAT. It breaks many, many things.
Your scenario of the provider changing prefixes, is a moot one. If you are using stateless autoconfig (RFC 4862), then the provider will push out a new router advertisement (with a new prefix), your home router will hear this, and push out its own RA to your machines on your home network, and you won't even know. How many non-techy people even know what the IP address of their computer is?
But say you are more tech-savy (which is why you read slashdot), and you have your own servers in your house. You can use IPv6 site local addresses (RFC 4193) which would remain static, regardless of how many times your provider changed your prefix.
Remember, in IPv6, nodes can have multiple addresses per interface. at a minimum, there will be 2 (link local, and global). But there is no problem adding site local as well.
Please study IPv6 a bit more before asking for network breaking technology like NAT.