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:I'm not changing to IPv6 on a specific date... (Score:5, Interesting)
Especially at home. Who's with me?
Pretty much everyone.
Google and FB, who would have thought ... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:I'm not changing to IPv6 on a specific date... (Score:5, Interesting)
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"?
Re:I'm not changing to IPv6 on a specific date... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 cost of renumbering to 10.x internally. It will someday soon.
We're years away from ipv4 exhaustion.
a sign of the apocalypse (Score:5, Interesting)
First Duke Nukem Forever in 2011, and now this in 2012? What's up for 2013, Hurd??
Re:More shit for the tip (dump). (Score:2, Interesting)
> 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.
Did you read the message you responded to? He was talking about his ***HOME*** network. I'm sure that Slashdot has its share of "l33t h@x0r d00ds" who want to run their own servers, etc. And of course, you're *ASSUMING* static ip addresses. But what will it do for the other 99% of users?
Finally, an end to Google's daft IPv6 policy (Score:5, Interesting)
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].
Re:I'm not changing to IPv6 on a specific date... (Score:2, Interesting)
are you going to hold out forever?
Yes, I'll be "holding out" with over 99% of users out there.
People, there will never be a IPv6 transition [in-other-news.com], period.
The crazy idea of the IPv6-designers was to expect all admins to request and configure new addresses - completely utopian.
Yes, NAT is not pretty. Yes, IPv6 would allow for a much cleaner network. But, no, that is not enough to push anybody to IPv6. There are no IPv6-ONLY services, therefore no benefit of running IPv6 on a client (regardless of dualstack). There are also no IPv6-ONLY clients, therefore no benefit of running IPv6 on a server (regardless of dualstack).
The alternative to IPv6 to work around the problem with NAT. And in fact that is the only way, because setting up IPv6 is useless because less than 1% use it while setting up a NAT-based solution, no matter how ugly, will get used and will get you some return of investment. And you know what? Because such NAT-based solutions are created everyday right now, they make IPv4 even more entrenched and any IPv6-transition even more complicated than it would have been before.
Oh, and on a private network, which is behind a NAT anyway, there is even less reason for IPv6 - Yes, I do have enough 10.0.0.0 addresses for my home network.
Re:I'm not changing to IPv6 on a specific date... (Score:5, Interesting)
There are no IPv6-ONLY services
This is incorrect. There are a number of IPv6-only services, especially in the asian markets, where IPv6 has been available to clients for a goodly number of years.
The alternative to IPv6 to work around the problem with NAT.
This isn't an alternative. NAT expands tha number of clients that can use the internet, but is largely useless on the server side. APNIC has run out of addresses, RIPE is going to run out this summer, at some point its going to become impossible for datacentres to get new IPv4 addresses, and at that point anyone runing servers is going to start having problems. They will start by shoving services behind proxy servers, etc. to reduce the number of IPv4 addresses that need to be exposed, but this only goes so far. Some services can't be placed behind proxies, running services on non-standard ports is almost as problematic as running them on IPv6 (a large proportion of customers are behind restrictive firewalls). At some point, IPv4-only clients are going to become second class citizens - they will be able to access the internet, but some services will be unavailable to them. Yes, it will take many years, but it will slowly happen.
Oh, and on a private network, which is behind a NAT anyway, there is even less reason for IPv6 - Yes, I do have enough 10.0.0.0 addresses for my home network.
For a *home network* you're correct. For the generic case of a *private network* you're wrong. I'm informed that Virgin Media are actually very interested in rolling out IPv6 because there aren't enough RFC1918 addresses for device management. I'm sure that they *could* bodge their network to make it work with the restricted number of addresses, but its probably easier in the long run to just bite the bullet and roll out IPv6 (and on a truely private network this is easier because everything is under your control).
Re:Unite all Post today support protest of SOPA, P (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'm not changing to IPv6 on a specific date... (Score:3, Interesting)