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?"
Re:Hey (Score:5, Informative)
Just disable javascript
Re:Google and FB, who would have thought ... (Score:5, Informative)
The major operating systems support IPv6 Privacy Extensions. This means they generate and use multiple temporary IPv6 addresses, making them less identifiable than most IPv4 systems.
Also, there's no requirement for IPv6 addresses to be fixed. Just as some ISPs offer dynamic IPv4 addresses now, some ISPs will offer dynamic IPv6 blocks in the future.
Re:More shit for the tip (dump). (Score:5, Informative)
Really, *really* what's IPv6 going to do for me now or even in the next 4 years that my IPv4 and 192.168.x.x home network don't do for me?
For starters it will allow you to host a bunch of services on different machines without having to put them all on weird ass ports because you only have a single ip. Peer to peer software will work as intended without nasty hacks to poke holes through the nat.
It essentially stops the internet from becoming broken into a one-way thing, which is one of the side effects of nat.
Re:Hey (Score:2, Informative)
Or, just press ESC before it forwards you to the blackout page.
Re:How will the avalanche fall? (Score:5, Informative)
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).
Re:I'm not changing to IPv6 on a specific date... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I'm not changing to IPv6 on a specific date... (Score:4, Informative)
I don't really want to get into this debate, but Virgin probably manages more devices than you give them credit for. Every single CPE has a 10.x.x.x address, as does every CMTS as well as a bunch of other stuff. 16million devices? Probably not, they only have about 4million customers, but they do manage a lot of devices.
Anyway, the reason I comment is because they are looking to roll out IPv6 by the end of the year, at least on the business side, which is where it'll matter most first.
Re:I'm not changing to IPv6 on a specific date... (Score:5, Informative)
ISPs use 10.x addresses to manage their end user devices. Comcast has already exceeded 16 million users. They already have to kludge together a solution just to manage their devices.
Sorry, but your thinking is outdated and shows a lack of understanding of the true infrastructure of the Internet as a whole. As you have already been told, there are parts of the world today who turn on their devices and don't get a public IPv4 address. Not to mention, this entire article is about key services and websites turning on IPv6 in recognition of the future.
I'm guessing you never lived in a flat Internet. I have. This bullshit we've had to suffer with for a couple decades is actually pretty horrible. When we return to a flat internet, we will be able to video conference from one PC directly to another, anywhere in the world.
It's the future, and in a sense, returning to the past.
Re:I'm not changing to IPv6 on a specific date... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:I'm not changing to IPv6 on a specific date... (Score:5, Informative)
If all your computers on the internal network have IPv6 capability then all you need to do is turn it on. They will automatically assign themselves a link local IPv6 address and will be able to talk to each other. After that it is simply a matter of having services that support IPv6. As for name resolution you can either use something like Bonjour (aka mDNS) or have an IPv6 capable router with DHCPv6.
I have been running IPv6 on my home network, using an Apple airport, for the past year and there is really not much setup to do. It would be nice if my ISP supported IPv6, but until then there is 6to4.
Re:I'm not changing to IPv6 on a specific date... (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't need to be 18 million devices - each subnet is already dropped by two to have a gateway and broadcast address. It's also unlikely that every /24 will have all 254 remaining devices on it. At work I have a /22 and only have about 700 IP addresses assigned, but the rest are unusable to anyone outside my group.
This is one of the core problems with IPv4 (which CIDR) skirted around. IPv6 has this problem as well, but having more IP addresses available than number of atoms in the sun (or something like that) means even with a ridiculous amount of waste there's still plenty of addresses to go around. Heck, Hurricane Electric assigned me a /64 IPv6 subnet (2^64 addresses available)
You're also forgetting worldwide organizations that need to do a site-to-site VPN. Each site now needs to coordinate its internal addressing so there's no overlap. Going with IPv6 completely eliminates this need.
Re:I'm not changing to IPv6 on a specific date... (Score:4, Informative)
Allow me to point out a couple of IPv6's features for you:
- IPv6 is designed to be hierarchical, so knowing the location of a segment will be easier than IPv4. Each /64 is routed under a matching /48, which is under a /32, etc..
- All subnets should be /64's
- IPv6 does not use broadcast IPs. It has various multicast addresses with the prefix ff00:/8 to address the link-local domain (~=broadcast), site-local domain, etc.
- Don't think of "wastage". By design every subnet should be a /64. The host address is intended to be globally unique, so there are 2^63 available globally-unique host addresses that by design can move to another prefix and still be unique within that prefix. If you don't want to use a globally unique ID, there are also 2^63 non-globally-unique IDs, and for example prefix::1 is one of them. By your thinking the IPv6 waste is colossal, but it's not waste, it's a design feature which allows hierarchical routing and collision-free merging of subnets.
- Routers need not take up a public IPv6 address if you're that desperate for space (which you aren't, I promise). All IPv6 hosts have a link-local address (think 169.254.0.0/16, but always there), and the router can advertise a route on the link-local address
Re:I'm not changing to IPv6 on a specific date... (Score:4, Informative)