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The Internet Networking IT

IPv6 Adoption Up 300 Percent Over 2 Years 425

Mark.J - ISPreview writes "The Number Resource Organization, which is made up of the five Regional Internet Registries, has revealed that the rate of new entrants into the IPv6 routing system has increased by 300% over the past two years. The news is important because IPv4 addresses (e.g. 123.23.56.98), which are assigned to your computer periodically, are running out. IPv6 addressing (e.g. 2ffe:1800:3525:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf) was invented as a longer and more secure replacement." IPv6 is still gaining ground slowly, particularly in the US.
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IPv6 Adoption Up 300 Percent Over 2 Years

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  • wow (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lord Ender ( 156273 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @11:33AM (#26003071) Homepage

    And the rate of downloads of Ubuntu 8.10 is up infinity percent in the past two years.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      In other news, every milk drinker in the past 5 centuries have died and Franco is still dead!

  • up 300%? (Score:5, Funny)

    by circletimessquare ( 444983 ) <circletimessquar ... l.com minus poet> on Friday December 05, 2008 @11:33AM (#26003073) Homepage Journal

    you mean it went from 1 person to 3 people?

  • 300%? (Score:2, Informative)

    by philippic ( 1008271 )
    Ah, the IPv6 Mess [cr.yp.to].
  • by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @11:58AM (#26003367)

    The news is important because IPv4 addresses (e.g. 123.23.56.98), which are assigned to your computer periodically, are running out. IPv6 addressing (e.g. 2ffe:1800:3525:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf) was invented as a longer and more secure replacement.

    Look! IPv4 addresses just have numbers and dots. IPv6 addresses have numbers AND letters . . . and colons (TWO stacked dots)!

    No question, which one is better, and tastes better, and lasts longer, and is less filling.

    I'd like the IPv6 prefix dead:beef, please and thank, you.

  • by Radoslaw Zielinski ( 1378711 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @12:05PM (#26003475) Homepage

    Any chance Slashdot could get IPv6 connectivity?

    Progress in this direction is "stuff that matters", after all...

  • Seriously, what percentage of internet nodes are now IPv6 compliant? Anyone have those numbers?

    • Seriously, what percentage of internet nodes are now IPv6 compliant? Anyone have those numbers?

      Not many. Certainly not enough to make even simple web browsing do-able over IPv6. Anyone with IPv6 connectivity right now is tunneling most of their traffic.

      Does Slashdot even have IPv6 connectivity?

  • by jandrese ( 485 ) <kensama@vt.edu> on Friday December 05, 2008 @12:07PM (#26003501) Homepage Journal
    First off, anybody who thinks that NAT is a long term solution to the IP address shortage is fooling themselves. NAT is a stopgap solution that has a scant handful of years left in it (some estimates say as little as 3-4 years). IPv6 is the only long term solution we have at the moment.

    The biggest thing holding me back from switching is that my ISP [verizon.com] doesn't seem to care one whiff about switching. The only way I have available to get on is to set up a tunnel, which seems to defeat the entire purpose of IPv6. I don't want to run IPv6 just for the sake of saying that I run IPv6, I want to run it so I can have an address for every device and finally get rid of the annoying NAT solutions.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )

      Expect mobile phone companies to switch first. They are already NATing most of their customers when they want IPv4, but their next generation networks are IP-only and run everything else on top of IP. Using NAT will be a colossal pain for this, because they only have 2^24 (around 16 million) IPs in the 10/8 range and most mobile phone companies have a lot more than 16 million customers. You could NAT each cell, but then you'd have massive routing issues. Running IPv6 natively is going to be a much easie

  • The one thing I don't understand about all of these IPv6 stories is who are we waiting on? Do I need to make some change to my router? My computer? Should I be calling my ISP demanding that they make the change?
    • Do I need to make some change to my router? My computer? Should I be calling my ISP demanding that they make the change?

      Yes.

      You'd need a computer capable of dealing with IPv6. For the most part, currently-available operating systems are ok. Windows XP, Vista, just about any flavor of Linux/BSD, and Mac OS X all support IPv6.

      You'll also need a router that can deal with IPv6. I have yet to see any home-grade router that supports IPv6.

      You'll also need an ISP that will give you IPv6 service. There are precious few of them out there.

      You'll also need sites that support IPv6, unless you just want to tunnel everything.

    • ATT in IL tells me that IPv6 connectivity is over a year away. If my tier 1 provider doesn't offer it (for neither DS3 or Fiber internet connections), not much purpose of doing it internally.
  • "Figures don't lie, but liars figure" [Mark Twain]

    Yes, IPv6 is up. It could hardly be otherwise from such a small base. However, I still have major concerns about privacy/anonymity/security and separately about overhead.

    I would not be at all surprised to see IPv6 as the choice of policemen and totalitarian states. Far easier user traceability.

  • Seems like we all could switch over fairly easily if there was a DNS type of system for translating between the address spaces.

    Would work like this:

    Every current IPv4 address would be assigned a concurrent IPv6 address.

    When a client node requests an IPv4 address, that request gets routed to a DNS type server somewhere close by which translates it to an IPv6 address and passes the request on to the proper end node along with the requesters IPv4 address for return responses which then get routed similarly.

    As

  • It seems like every month we see something more about IPv6, and the pressures to move to it, etc. etc. My question is, from both a corporate and home end-user perspective, what should I be doing?

    We're a small company, in a small office. We have a T1, we run a Windows domain, and host our own web and mail servers. We have NAT inside the office, and holes poked through our firewall for the external facing servers. We're all on XP workstations. What should we be doing, if anything?

    At home, I'm on a
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )
      First thing to do is contact your ISP and ask to be assigned an IPv6 subnet. They will probably reply with 'we don't support IPv6, there's no demand for it.' You then ask them to log this request. Once enough people have done this, they will start routing v6 traffic, and then you can switch.

      Next, you deploy 6to4 on your routers and start running dual-stack clients. Then call your ISP again and say 'we're currently using 6to4, but we want to disable this soon and switch to a proper v6 address, do we nee

  • How would I go about reserving an IPv6 block for myself? Is there a central agency controlling that yet? Is a reservation free, or is there a periodic payment?

  • Make it work! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Aladrin ( 926209 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @12:26PM (#26003767)

    I seriously considering setting up my internal network for IPv6 and trying to get connected to the web via IPv6, but ran into so many roadblocks that I just gave up.

    It's no wonder adoption is so slow if this is the way things are.

  • The US is lagging (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MythoBeast ( 54294 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @12:40PM (#26003939) Homepage Journal

    I'm wondering how far behind the popular adoption of IPv6, the nay-say'ers admissions that they were wrong will lag.

    Progress will never happen. Things will always be the way they are now. There's no reason to change now, and there never will be. Pshaw.

  • The main problem with IPv6's slow adoption is that no transition scenario was ever devised. The protocol was spec'd, implemented, debugged and ... that's it. Nobody ever asked the question, who's gonna switch and why?
    Currently, if you want to use the Internet, you need to be on IPv4. The only existing transition mechanisms are those which allows an IPv4 host to emulate IPv6 on top of it. And 100% of any other hosts you might be interested in talking to are on IPv4, even if they happen to also be on IPv6. So basically, in the rare cases where you can use IPv6, you can also use IPv4 to do the exact same thing.
    So there's no point.
    What's missing here (and has been missing since the beginning of IPv6) is a mechanism whereby an IPv6-only host can talk to an IPv4 host. I believe there's something called "nat64" that's being worked on, but it's in preliminary stages.
    Here's how it's going to happen: for a veeery long time (10, 20 years), most corporate networks will remain IPv4 only. They have no reason to switch. It's not just network stacks, it's networking equipment, firewall rules, inertia but also stupidity and incompetence. Consider this: right now, there are major websites still incompatible with Explicit Congestion Notification. It's not that they just don't implement it; it's that their networking equipment suffers from a 10+ year old bug that prohibits hosts with ECN enabled to access them. Non-buggy stacks just ignore the bit and let packets through, buggy ones silently drop the packets and cause the connection to hang. This used to be the case on www.cnn.com up until a few months ago, and is still happening on www.afp.com.
    Instead, it's mobile networks that will implement IPv6. There is not even enough addresses in a class A (10.0.0.0/24) to even give addresses to all mobiles phones in an European country. It's trivial to implement proxies for HTTP and other common protocols, so that those mobile devices will be able to see CNN.com. But obviously, it would be much better to have a way to NAT those devices onto IPv4.

  • It's just there a lot more to go until the end~

    Hey, I did say technically.

  • by FliesLikeABrick ( 943848 ) <ryan@u13.net> on Friday December 05, 2008 @04:18PM (#26006763)
    1) the fact that NAT exists means we ran out a long time ago

    2) NAT is not a proper solution. It crosses the Network and Transport layer boundary to provide a hack solution to a Network layer issue. Having something like NAT prevents anything besides UDP or TCP from being used behind a NAT, since NAT relies on port mapping between UDP and NAT

    3) What makes people think uPNP is a good idea? Wouldn't it be better to just have *real end-to-end connectivity* like was actually intended and used to be the case?

    4) As the world of networked devices and content providers increases as fast as it always has been or faster there will be a growing need for content providers (servers) that cannot be behind a NAT while still hoping to use well-known ports for services

    5) NAT does not scale. State tracking tens of thousands of connections? Since state needs to be tracked, load balancing something like NAT is just yet another hack on top of a hack.

    I would love to hear someone explain how using NAT is a feasible solution permanently. Reclaiming unused sub-allocations from legacy /8s and stuff is not a permanent solution, denying that IPv6 is needed due to the application of a growing list of band-aids is obnoxious to listen to.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by compro01 ( 777531 )

      6) NAT aggravates the problem of a limited port addressing space. you've got 65535 ports, and a lot of those are intended for specific protocols. Also, anyone who thinks NAT is a solution should try running 2 HTTPS servers behind it.

  • by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Saturday December 06, 2008 @09:47AM (#26012649)
    (Cruising around IPv6 land, checking out nodes...)

    "Woah, a Duke Nukem Forever server? No way. How long has this been sitting here?!?"

"Conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will." -- Virginia Woolf, "Mrs. Dalloway"

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