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June 6 Is World IPv6 Day 2012: This Time For Keeps 463

An anonymous reader writes "On 8 June 2011 many companies (big and small) enabled IPv6 to their main web sites by published AAAA records; 24 hours later, almost all of them disabled it after the test was done. This year, on June 6th, many of those same companies (Google, Bing, Facebook) will be enabling IPv6 again, but this time there won't be any going back. In addition to content providers, several ISPs are also participating: Comcast, AT&T, XS4ALL, KDDI, and others. CDNs Akamai and Limelight are on board, as well as network equipment manufacturers Cisco and D-Link. Is the chicken-and-egg problem of IPv6 finally, slowly coming to an end?"
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June 6 Is World IPv6 Day 2012: This Time For Keeps

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  • Especially at home. Who's with me?
    • Viva la revoluzione, my friend but seriously...are you going to hold out forever?

      • by Nursie ( 632944 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @01:27AM (#38735034)

        Viva la revoluzione, my friend but seriously...are you going to hold out forever?

        Hell Yes!

        If enough of us do it, those profiteering assholes at Big Internet$ will be forced to deal with us on our terms and open up all that extra space they're holding out on.

        What extra space you say? Ever heard of a number greater than 255?

        It's a conspiracy I tell you. They're all in it! Google, Micro$oft, IBM, The Queen, the Vatican, the Getty's, the Rothchild's and Colonel Sanders before he went tits up! They're trying to keep our eyes shut to the truth!

        Wake up! We have all the IPv4 addresses we need! Why at home all my machiens in the 478.921.357.* range!

    • by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @12:14AM (#38734686) Journal

      Especially at home. Who's with me?

      Pretty much everyone.

    • Nobody asked you to switch your home ADSL/cable to ipv6, but to have a dual stack and support both. I'd like the "IPv6 is useless" argument to simply stop. There's no reason for saying that. IPv6 is just another cyber space, there's nothing fancy, new, with it, it should be commonly accepted as something we MUST have, right now.

      Frankly, in these days and ages, if you're an ISP and don't have v6 support, you're just a ... (replace the dots with your favorite insult). I'd understand that you might have a ve
      • by smash ( 1351 )

        TO be fair, the ISP world runs on very low margins, and until the available IPv4 address space the ISP already owns becomes short (i.e., cost to obtain more IPs exceeds cost to implement IPv6) then there is simply zero business case to be amongst the early adopters who will be first to run into issues.

        My home ISP (internode) runs IPv6 native on their ADSL2 service, but they're an exception rather than the rule.

        I'm as keen as anyone to run IPv6 everywhere (LAN/WAN design and implementation is my day job

        • by GPLHost-Thomas ( 1330431 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @12:36AM (#38734814)

          there is simply zero business case to be amongst the early adopters

          That sentence is simply wrong. Maybe not a lot, but you can't say zero. Some customers might choose an ISP because of the v6 support, or rather, some might not use an ISP because he doesn't support v6 (and if you want it another way: IPv6 dual stack is a very valid selling point).

          See companies like Hurricane Electric, a large part of their current success has been IPv6 support. That story alone shows that it really is possible to make more money because you do support v6 while others don't. Now soon, customers will soon start to run away if you don't have v6. That day might well be the next 6th of June!

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by afabbro ( 33948 )

        There's no reason for saying that. IPv6 is just another cyber space, there's nothing fancy, new, with it, it should be commonly accepted as something we MUST have, right now.

        Except that it's not. There are billions of addresses - entire A blocks - locked up in early-adopter organizations that could be made available. For example, the US Post Office doesn't really need it's own A block. Nor do most organizations who own them. And B blocks? Thousands are unneeded. My old university has a B block and it's ridiculous...it's all behind a firewall except for a few numbers anyway. For most orgs, it's just that the money that these big blocks could be sold for doesn't exceed the

        • by lactose99 ( 71132 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @01:21AM (#38735004)

          It would be more constructive to use whatever energy needed to pressure legacy IPv4 holders to give-up their space to start planning a move to v6 or at least a dual-stack architecture. This is like people complaining there's still momentum left in the cassette tape when CDs have been around for years. Postponing the inevitable doesn't stop the inevitable from happening.

        • There are billions of addresses - entire A blocks - locked up in early-adopter organizations that could be made available.

          Given that 2^32=4.3 billion, you're wrong. There are a few million addresses locked up in old class A networks. If you bother to look at the consumption rate you'd realise that even if all of these addresses were returned to the pool they would buy a few weeks and then we'd be right back where we started. In short, recovering those addresses is going to be a lot of effort, will not solve the problem and will only postpone it for a very short length of time.

          We're years away from ipv4 exhaustion.

          IANA ran out of addresses at the start of last year. APNIC also ran out of addresses in the first half of last year. RIPE is going to run out of addresses this summer. We are *not* a significant number of years away from exhaustion. We've got maybe 3 years until there are no more IPv4 addresses left to allocate by any RIR. Reclaiming the legacy blocks to buy a few more weeks doesn't make sense.

        • by HuguesT ( 84078 )

          From memory early IP adopters like many Ivy League universities have a A domain. E.g MIT owns the 18.x.x.x domain. I doubt MIT requires 16 millions of IP addresses.

          On the other hand, they probably would have to reengineer their network architecture if they had to free a good chunk of their 18.x subnets. Which would be cheaper? Converting to ipv6 or hang on to part of their old A domain ?

          Also there is work to do in the DNS servers code so that A block can be cut up. This is not a simple as it seems.

        • by u38cg ( 607297 )
          Dude, A-class networks are gettng swallowed up in *months*. You're proposing to bail out the Titanic with a bucket.
      • I'd understand that you might have a very old home router at home that wouldn't support it though,

        That is blandly false. Even many brand new routers have zero IPv6 support. Lack of IPv6 support in home routers is essentially one of the biggest issue of an IPv6 transition, right next to ISPs not providing IPv6 to their customers in the first place.

        • I tend to not agree with that. I'm the boss of GPLHost, and we have 10 points of presence. We have asked absolutely all of the data centers if they had IPv6 connectivity, and could announce some /38 for us, as we have a /32 delegation from APNIC (yes, that's 4 billions x 4 billions x 4 billions IPs, and that's the smallest block you can get for IPv6 with APNIC !!!). Then guess what ? Only ONE of them provided a full dual stack support, and they are doing very funny RADVd announces (eg: not announcing a /64,
    • I had dual stack on for a while, I haven't set the tunnel back up since I moved, but I will before that date. And maybe Comcast will let me get native IPv6 at that time.

    • by slimjim8094 ( 941042 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @12:52AM (#38734892)

      Me too! Instead, I did it on a random day where I was bored, about 4 years ago. Took about 2 hours and I haven't thought about it since.

      Oh, did you mean "I'm not going to use IPv6"?

      • by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @02:28AM (#38735312) Journal

        Sure, it *sounds* easy, but it's not.

        My wireless router does not support IPV6, and it wasn't created in the stone age, a Linksys WRT54G2. (3ish years old) Sure, it was cheap, but it's also hard to justify spending more to replace reliably working equipment. A "nice" router that supports IPV6 with grace will probably cost $50 or more.

        My Comcast modem is my own. I bought it for $20 because I didn't want to pay $7/month for the DOCSIS 3.0 modem. But because it's a DOCSIS 2.0 Modem, IPV6 support is limited. A DOCSIS 3.0 modem that supports IPV6 better costs around $100.

        So the real cost for me of IPV6 is already floating somewhere between $150 to $200, about what I pay for 2 YEARS of Netflix. That is only for getting the ability to have an IPV6 address to my home. That's without setting up the Xbox, Wii, or PS3 with IPV6. (Can you do it?) Let alone the Mac, the several PC laptops, my Linux workstation, or the MagicJack Plus that I use for my home phone "land line".

        What about our smart phones? Will Android 2.3.x use IPV6? 'what about Android 2.2 on my wife's phone, or 2.1? What about the $90 android tablet my wife bought at Rite aid? For all of these, I have no idea, which means likely not.

        What about the (awesome!) SIP app I use on my smartphone to call into the corporate phone server from my home network? Will it work with low latency over IPV6 to my corporate SIP server running IPV4, with traffic shaping that works as well as it does now with my cheap IPV4 modem? Somehow, I have my doubts...

        Switching to IPV6 is easy, as long as you don't actually do it for real. As soon as you start trying to live it, use it everyday, make it part of your everyday life, well, things get complicated quickly. This is going to take a while to sort out, you know?

        • So the real cost for me of IPV6 is already floating somewhere between $150 to $200

          But in 10 years' time, after the magic smoke has escaped from all that hardware, you'll have upgraded to kit that supports IPv6.

          People saying "I'm never going to upgrade to IPv6" come across the same as people saying "I'm never going to upgrade from IE6" - in short, idiots. And in a few years time, like IE6 users now, they will probably be idiots who can't use some big services.

          Let alone the Mac, the several PC laptops, my Linux workstation

          IPv6 in OS X, Linux and any Windows newer than XP pretty much Just Works with no configuration needed. You'd have to go out of your way to disable it.

          MagicJack Plus that I use for my home phone "land line".

          There will be legacy hardware that doesn't supprt IPv6 for some time, but in this restricted case is it a problem? I presume the MagicJack is basically an FXSSIP gateway, so whether you need IPv6 here depends on whether the SIP gateway it is connecting to has a v4 address. No one is saying you need to remove IPv4 from your network entirely.

          What about our smart phones? Will Android 2.3.x use IPV6? 'what about Android 2.2 on my wife's phone, or 2.1? What about the $90 android tablet my wife bought at Rite aid? For all of these, I have no idea, which means likely not.

          Android has supported IPv6 since Android 2.0.

          What about the (awesome!) SIP app I use on my smartphone to call into the corporate phone server from my home network? Will it work with low latency over IPV6 to my corporate SIP server running IPV4

          No, an IPv6-only device isn't going to be able to talk to an IPv4-only server (unless it uses a NAT64 gateway to do so). IPv4 is not going to suddenly disappear, dual-stacked clients are the norm, and as IPv4 addresses become harder to get hold of, ISPs will use carrier grade NAT to provision IPv4 to their clients. Talking to IPv4-only servers will still happen over IPv4.

          Address exhaustion is largely a problem for servers, where NAT isn't really feasible. For many years to come, clients will have (NATted) IPv4 and (unNATted) IPv6 concurrently. Which is why it makes no sense when ISPs say "we don't need IPv6 because *we* have plenty of spare IPv4 addresses" - it doesn't matter if you have a big stack of spare IPv4 addresses if the people who operate the servers that your customers connect to don't.

          What *should* have happened, is the telecoms regulators should have mandated that ISPs implement IPv6 support and sell IPv6 capable routers a good number of years ago since it was clear they were going to wait until crunch-time before bothering to do so without regulatory pressure. If that had happened, most end users would already have IPv6 capable internet connections and hardware.

    • already done my friend

  • IPv6 Info (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @12:07AM (#38734636)

    For those of you who don't know anything about IPv6, here's the Wikipedia page for it:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6/

    Happy reading!

    • Re:IPv6 Info (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MickyTheIdiot ( 1032226 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @12:18AM (#38734710) Homepage Journal

      Why isn't Slashdot participating? Didn't they care about an open internet at one point??

      • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @12:24AM (#38734740)

        Seeing how they can barely handle HTML, CSS and Javascript, IPv6 might be asking too much of them.

      • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

        by DesScorp ( 410532 )

        Why isn't Slashdot participating? Didn't they care about an open internet at one point??

        Maybe they're smart enough to realize that the "blackout" won't accomplish a damn thing? Other than pissing off their own users?

        You know what one of the biggest Google searches is right now? "Wikipedia alternative". That means that Wikipedia's competitors now have the kind of audience that they couldn't even pay for if they wanted to. Know what happens if Coke stops selling soda in protest? People look for the nearest Pepsi.

        • Yeah the only option is Wikipedia style protest, slashdot can never protest like google.com, in a manner which brings attention to the issue, but does not disrupt normal operations. I am not which google trends you have been looking at, but in USA trends, I see "wikipedia blackout", "pipa", "sopa" and a bunch of unrelated things. "Wikipedia alternative"is not one of them.

          • in a manner which brings attention to the issue, but does not disrupt normal operations.

            They put a really low bar to get around their block, just disable javascript reload and keep reading! At least that was my first thought when I viewed it and with konqueror it's an easy menu option to disable javascript for the current window. Now it looks like they disabled editing for every english wikipedia article, and that you can't get around.

            • I used NoScript to block the JS too, but only a few can use these workarounds. Some opt to use mirrors like thefreedictionary. For the masses though, they cannot use wikipedia for 24 hours, and they cannot work around it. It is a major disruption of operations, as far as they are concerned.

        • Comparing a drink made from a trade-secret formula, to all that creative commons content.
          If Wikipedia goes down, your look for a mirror.

        • by Nursie ( 632944 )

          There are wikipedia mirrors and rip-off sites that will profit from this for a day, and pretty much only a day.

          In the mean time, every one of those people looking for an alternative has at least been made aware that there's a problem.

        • Yes, because there are so many competitors to Wikipedia.
      • by CRC'99 ( 96526 )

        Its interesting how TFA says most disabled IPv6 support after the day - however:

        host www.v6.facebook.com
        www.v6.facebook.com has IPv6 address 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3

        # host ipv6.google.com
        ipv6.google.com is an alias for ipv6.l.google.com.
        ipv6.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2404:6800:4006:800::1011

        Looks like of the 3 listed, only 1 backed out - Bing.

        • IPv6 day never was about the separate v6 domains - those existed and worked
          before IPv6 day, and of course keep on working.

          However, IPv6 day added AAAA records to the generic domains,
          www.google.com, www.facebook.com etc.

          And those records are gone again.

          Exception: google whitelists some known-working networks and includes the
          AAAA records in DNS replies to machines in those.
      • by Ksevio ( 865461 )
        Slashdot users are probably already informed on the subject
  • Cisco (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mikkelm ( 1000451 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @12:08AM (#38734644)

    Perhaps this would be a good time for Cisco to release software with even the most rudimentary of IPv6 security features.

    • by smash ( 1351 )
      You mean like my ASA?
      • I mean like the elementary and obvious knobs and switches for protecting your infrastructure against v6-related resource exhaustion, rouge RAs, and every other issue that has long-recognised IPv4 analogues, and somehow were not thought important enough for initial releases.

        • If you're relying on RAs or DHCPv6 for server networks then you have bigger problems, not unlike rogue DHCP servers in IPv4.

  • by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @12:10AM (#38734656) Journal
    ISPs are going to have to pay a lot of money for new hardware, whether they switch to IPv6 or to widespread NAT. Might as well buy the IPv6 stuff once and get it over with.
    • ISPs are going to have to pay a lot of money for new hardware

      Not really, it should have been part of the normal upgrade cycle of hardware. With a five year replacement cycle they could have started in 2007 and have had their entire organization ipv6 ready hardware wise by now. The problem has been known for long before that, it is simply preparing for the future.

      • by Splab ( 574204 )

        Yes, because there hasn't been a recession and customers aren't cheap bastards that want everything for free...

        Upgrade cycles are a thing of the past, things get upgraded when they die or more bandwith is needed.

  • Yes! (Score:5, Funny)

    by sakdoctor ( 1087155 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @12:14AM (#38734688) Homepage

    I've been waiting a long time for this.

    http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1487194&cid=30529330 [slashdot.org]

  • As much as I hate to nit pick one specific company, but Amazon Web Services is used by a LOT of people and groups, are they going IPv6? I know their Elastic Load Balancer is, but what about everything else? Is Route 53 v6 glued? v6 accessible?

    More importantly what about CloudFront? Try going v6 only now and you'll have a lot of "functional" websites which look like hell because they use Akamai or CloudFront which aren't v6 enabled (Though Akamai has commited)

  • Or are they going to make the customer pay for the new ones?

    Do I have to call them and ask for a free one?

    D-link what about comeing out with the IPv6 update for the DIR-655 RevA

  • by Qubit ( 100461 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @12:58AM (#38734910) Homepage Journal

    I hope that some of the network/systems analysis companies out there are taking accurate notes about the state of what's accessible via IPv6 and IPv4. I think we'll see an interesting sort of "avalanche" graph when we reach the tipping point. Or not -- perhaps there will be enough dual-stack that we'll just have a slow deathmarch of sites available by IPv4, with a few less year after year?

    But to step back and wax lyrical about the whole problem, the reason that IPv6 hasn't taken hold yet is because it just hasn't gotten enough of an IPv6-only install base clamouring for support on their popular websites.

    Having major websites and hardware manufacturers on board is an important piece of the puzzle, but it's nothing compared to money. Get enough people inconvenienced that they will take their eyes and their money elsewere (directly, or through advertising revenue on sites, etc...), and every site that cares about their viewership will hop on the IPv6 train. Of course, this means that Bob's website that features his personal Banana Sticker Collection might not get IPv6 support until his ISP drags him to an IPv6 address, kicking and screaming all the way.

    That whole idea a year or two ago about putting out a big zip file of porn, but only available on IPv6, was kind of a hoot. AFAIK it never came to fruition, but I liked the creative thinking there. Has anyone else had any crazy good (or just crazy) suggestions about how to spur IPv6 adoption?

    • by dbIII ( 701233 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @02:28AM (#38735316)
      One obvious one to me is workplace desktops accessable from your iPad or whatever of choice from anywhere. People will understand why all us *nix guys got excited about shells, X and VNC so long ago. If it wasn't for NAT we'd have seen a lot more of it already, but NAT changes it from being trivial to implement to a pain in the arse for more than a handful of people per site. Having unique numbers adressable from anywhere for everybody's desktop machines make it trivial again.
      For those that think NAT is some kind of security feature I suggest learning what it actually is instead of throwing three letters around as some sort of incantation. The features actually come from the firewall that just happens to be on the same physical device that gives you NAT and you still need something like that device anyway to get the net into the office with IPv6. The firewall isn't going to go away, just NAT (network address translation).
      • by grumbel ( 592662 )

        For those that think NAT is some kind of security feature I suggest learning what it actually is instead of throwing three letters around as some sort of incantation. The features actually come from the firewall that just happens to be on the same physical device that gives you NAT and you still need something like that device anyway to get the net into the office with IPv6.

        While it is true that NAT itself isn't a security feature, being limited to only a single IPv4 address and being forced to hide all devices behind a single IP address actually is. With a typical single-IPv4 address NAT network you simply can't expose all your devices to the Internet, it's impossible. It's secure by default and there is not even a way to missconfigure it. At worst you can expose a few selected services to the Internet or a single machine, but not much more.

        With IPv6 and Firewalls that will c

  • by commodoresloat ( 172735 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @01:58AM (#38735176)

    First Duke Nukem Forever in 2011, and now this in 2012? What's up for 2013, Hurd??

  • by Lincolnshire Poacher ( 1205798 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @02:17AM (#38735258)

    Did you know that for the past three year Google has actually published AAAA RRs for its online properties? However, the catch is that they won't serve you those as a response unless your /32 is on the list of vetted ISPs.

    Even if you query one of their public IPv6 resolvers ( e.g. 2001:4860:4860::8888 ) you'll not see a AAAA for YouTube or Google+ unless you're on the list.

    To pass the vetting an ISP has to demonstrate various technical aspects such as redundant, othogonally-routed global routes to Google's servers. For small ISPs such as mine, who have worked to implement native IPv6 connectivity, this is simply a step too far. So a proportion of the IPv6-connected world has to fall-back to v4 to talk to Google.

    Read more about the frustrating policy here: Google over IPv6 [google.com].

    • by grumbel ( 592662 ) <grumbel+slashdot@gmail.com> on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @06:26AM (#38736340) Homepage

      There is nothing daft about that policy, it simply makes sure that their services work and are responsive, as there used to be a lot of broken IPv6 setups in the wild.

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