No Business Case For IPv6, Survey Finds 340
alphadogg writes "Business incentives are completely lacking today for upgrading to IPv6, the next generation Internet protocol, according to a survey of network operators conducted by the Internet Society (ISOC). In a new report, ISOC says that ISPs, enterprises and network equipment vendors report that there are 'no concrete business drivers for IPv6.' However, survey respondents said customer demand for IPv6 is on the rise and that they are planning or deploying IPv6 because they feel it is the next major development in the evolution of the Internet."
Ever? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm beginning to find it hard to believe that IPv6 will ever be implemented. It seems to have been on the verge of it for close to a decade now.
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Derrr... I mean universally implemented. I know it's partially implemented.
Re:Ever? (Score:5, Funny)
The problem is that the guys that were working on the big IPv6 transition quit there jobs to work on the Duke Nukem Forever project.
Re:Ever? (Score:5, Informative)
As a person who's involved in an implementation of IPv6, let me say that it's difficult to see it implemented without ubiquitous gigabit networks all around, as well as network equipment (routers) that run on the kind of CPUs we don't nowadays expect such hardware to run on. On the one hand, they've made stuff easier (no more checksums on IP level, addresses that tell you something about themselves); on the other they've made it more difficult (potentially quite a lot of headers before you get to ICMP for example, as well as up to seven addresses that any device must listen to, address sizes that don't fit a natural integer), but the network is also busier: network meta-messages fly around all the time - much more so than with IPv4, its ICMP, IGMP and ARP (ARP times out in 20 minutes; link-layer address mapping in IPv6 expires in less than a minute), and don't forget multicast: it's obligatory and used a lot on IPv6, meaning that routers will be so much more busy synchronizing.
Then again; the time that hardware and linespeed catches up, *will* come. It's just not now, and nobody is in a hurry either. But running IPv6 over lines that do 1 Mbps in practice, however doable; it wouldn't make anyone happy.
Re:Ever? (Score:5, Informative)
Um, what the heck are you talking about? The ARP timeout is two minutes, not twenty. Speaking as someone who's also implemented IPv6 and used it pretty extensively, it sounds like you really don't know what you're talking about.
There is a known failure mode with ICMPv6 if you have a 127-bit prefix, but this is well-known, there's a fix for it in the standards, and the workaround is that you just don't ever use 127-bit prefixes. There's no particular benefit to using 127-bit prefixes, so this is kind of a no-brainer.
As for CPU consumption, again, what are you talking about? On the backbone, the proliferation of micro-routes for IPv4 is a *huge* problem. IPv6 route aggregation makes things *faster*, not slower, and consumes less CPU time as well.
If you are working over low bandwidth links, you might want to take a look at 6lowpan, which allows you to statelessly compress headers down to under twelve bytes.
Bottom line, the conclusions you've drawn are, as far as I am aware, complete nonsense. I'm sure you believe what you've said, and it's the result of real things that you saw, but without a bit more back story, I don't think it contributes any useful knowledge to the discussion.
Self-defeat. (Score:5, Interesting)
I tell this story all the time, and I'll tell it again.
I *tried* to build up a new fiber network in downtown St. Louis using IPv6. I couldn't get the address space!
It's insane - I could get 3x/24 blocks (non-sequential) assigned to my ASN, but in order to get an IPv6 allotment, I had to show proof that I *already* had utilized a full /24 of IPv6 addresses (which is NOT 256. It's 256*256*256!) They said to get it from my upstream provider - they said they don't do that, get it from ARIN. I go back to ARIN, ARIN says "They're full of it, get it from your upstream provider."
Even more insane? IPv6 allotments are FREE! I had to pay per year for an IPv4 allotment, but the free stuff? Pfft...we have it, we'll never run out of it within your lifetime, but you can't have it.
WTF?
Re:Self-defeat. (Score:5, Informative)
Instead of getting upset, get smart. ARIN is correct - you're supposed to get your allotment from your upstream provider, unless you're peering on the backbone (which it seems you aren't, since you have a provider). Your provider is probably used to the IPv4 way of doing things; the problem with that is that it produces fragmentation, which produces huge routing tables. In order to keep the routing tables small, the IPv6 allocation policy is to allocate hierarchically, so that you would get your addresses out of your provider's space.
When your provider runs out of space, you either renumber or fragment; renumbering is obviously preferred, and in v6 it's also easy, because you can do a soft transition - deprecate the old addresses, but keep using them for a month; by that time, all existing connections will be using the new addresses, and in the meantime all the connections that used the old addresses have faded away.
This is sufficiently different than the way things are done in IPv6 that it's not surprising that your provider doesn't understand it yet. So you need to help educate them - this isn't a situation where people are deliberately fingerpointing, but rather an opportunity for some education.
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I said it wrong is all. :\ I meant a /32. Oi. You guys don't skip a beat, do ya?
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Also - wasn't thinking clearly. We had two upstream providers, and WERE peering. That's why this was so infuriating. :(
You have to tell ARIN you're multihoming (Score:3, Informative)
The official philosophy behind IPv6 addressing was that they wanted to keep everything hierarchical, to avoid the IPv4 problem that makes everybody's routing table have to keep track of (currently) ~300,000 separate routes plus whatever their own users and customers need. So they want to hand out fat blocks to ISPs, and have those ISPs hand out whatever-sized blocks to their users, and if you change ISPs, IPv6 is supposed to be easier to renumber than IPv4.
In practice, of course, this doesn't help the prob
Minor nit - ARP cache timeout (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a minor nit - ARP cache timeouts are normally on the order of 300 seconds, not two minutes.
A less minor nit is this: IPv6 does not help decrease the size of routing tables as seen by major providers. Nor does IPv6 reduce the burden of sending routing updates so that routing updates are propagated faster than the underlying rate of change of usable net paths. (Enterprise subnets, whether IPv4 or IPv6, don't generally propagate into the routing announcements as seen by the big carriers.)
The compelling argument, for me at least, is that IPv6 is really a new internet that runs along side of the existing IPv4 net - there is no direct interoperability. This means that pretty much any new expansion of the net is going to require IPv4 connectivity, and IPv4 addresses, to reach the legacy net. And that makes IPv6 redundant from the user's point of view. That sort of drains the oil out of the IPv6 crankcase.
Of course the biggest argument of all is that IPv6 does not solve the hard issues of propagating routing information and finding usable paths across the net, particularly as the demands of human-conversational traffic and the political acts of nations are (unfortunately) driving routing to become increasingly aware of the types of traffic being routed.
I'm waiting to be shown that I'm wrong - I helped do the very first calculation of IPv4 address consumption back in the mid 1980's. And I was in the group at Sun back in the very early 1990's where IPv6 took form. I spent time at Cisco wrestling with questions like how to efficiently mechanize 128-bit longest-prefix matching on 32 and 64 bit hardware. And my company currently has IPv6 testing products. So I've been watching IPv6 for what will soon be two decades.
To me one of the tilt-points of IPv6 will be when I can go into Frys Electronics and find IPv6 capable print servers and other widgets of that ilk on the shelves.
I saw ISO/OSI come and go (I was rather a fan of TUBA - which included the use of ISO/OSI CLNP for the new IP layer - when the various IPv4 alternatives were being considered in the early 1990's.) It would not surprise me to see IPv6 go the way of ISO/OSI.
Re:Minor nit - ARP cache timeout (Score:4, Informative)
To me one of the tilt-points of IPv6 will be when I can go into Frys Electronics and find IPv6 capable print servers and other widgets of that ilk on the shelves.
We're starting to see this already. The Apple Airport Express/Base Station products are IPv6 capable and do 6to4 tunnelling when used as gateway devices, out of the box.
The HP CPxxxx series network printers are also IPv6 capable.
Now we just need the other tilt-point of broadband providers handing out IPv6 allotments, and we'd be set.
Re:Ever? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sounds too familiar.... Kinda like the damn analog tv to digital switchover which been planned, discussed and advertised for YEARS!! Then it got delayed....AGAIN!! Cuz those 6 million viewers think analog tv works just fine and don't want to switch to digital and they don't comprehend that fact digital is better using a $50 converter box.
Sheesh. Ah well.. good luck with IPv6. I know it'll be the holy grail for the Internet but right now they don't see the immediate benefit and won't upgrade unless they are forced to.
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And how is digital better if on the fringe? Analog decays gracefully, some snow but still watchable. Digital means having a miserable wife as she likes TV when you can watch it, not when there is a blank screen.
IPv6 is the same, great when you don't mind spending a bunch of money to downgrade to the newest thing but crappy if you have old software.
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You can use IPv6 _now_ with 6to4 or Teredo.
It's quite simple, actually. You can start IPv6 on your network in about 1 hour (including stateless autoconfiguration setup).
First, follow this tutorial: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+IPv6-HOWTO/conf-ipv6-in-ipv4-point-to-point-tunnels.html [tldp.org] (I suggest the 'deprecated' method, because it actually works fine :) ).
Then install radvd ( http://www.litech.org/radvd/ [litech.org] ), don't forget to turn on IPv6 routing and you're set!
Being able to SSH directly into every machine on my
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I work for a software company. We are seeing IPv6 labs popping up around our global offices because customers are starting to ask for it in our products. It's showing up on RFPs. It's coming.
And having worked with it for a while, I must say it's a dream compared to v4.
Re:Ever? (Score:5, Insightful)
Me, I would have preferred to extend the dotted-quad notation over using the colon-separated hex format usually used for IPv6. Dotted quads look more familiar for network administrators, software developers, and so on. As you noted, IPv6 addresses look strange and scare people. This fear of the unknown is a barrier to adoption. Any unnecessary break with IPv4 hurts IPv6 adoption, and we can't afford that; IPv6 with dotted quads is better than IPv4.
Re:Ever? (Score:5, Interesting)
Your post demonstrates my point perfectly: the colon-separated hex notion screws up URL parsing, requiring algorithm changes for everyone, and as you see, lots of people still haven't gotten it right. Dotted-quad notation wouldn't have required nearly as much effort. The new notation was an unnecessary barrier to adoption.
We're talking about Joe Sysop and Joe Programmer, whose opinions regarding IPv6 are far more important than Joe Plumber's. These people see IPv6 as something exotic and frightening, and try to avoid it as long as they can. IPv6 should have been made as similar to IPv4 as possible; instead, the IETF tried to do too much too fast, and now we're paying the price.
Re:Ever? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ohforgod'ssake. You're going to *type in* raw IPv6 addresses in a URL? I don't *think* so. I do it for debugging, but there's no way I'd ever ask an end user to type one in, and if I did there's no way the end user would do it. Which makes it a non-problem.
Decimal dotted quads are too big, and they wouldn't look like IPv4 dotted quads anyway. For instance, my IP address as a dotted quad is:
32.1.31.56.2.6.0.0.2.23.191.255.254.133.196.90
In hex, it's:
2001:1938:206: :223:dfff:fe85:c45a
You really prefer hex? You really think that's going to look familiar and comfy to a person who can't handle the hex format? Naw, dude - this is really a great way to weed out people who shouldn't be on staff - if they can't handle the hex, there are a lot of other much more important things they also can't handle, in IPv4-land as well as IPv6.
Admittedly, there's always resistance to new stuff by a certain number of people, and that's perfectly understandable and not grounds for firing. But those people will get over it after a bit of hands-on.
Joe Sysop doesn't give a flying fuck about IPv6 (Score:4, Insightful)
He and the entire 100,000 person corporation he works for are sitting behind half a dozen routable IPv4 addresses on their own private 10net. He is already overworked supporting the infrastructure which is in place already and when an IPv6 rollout is suggested the first thought which comes to mind is "Just how retarded are you?".
IPv6 is neither exotic nor frightening. Admins and programmers have been dealing with differing networking protocols for decades, including IPX, IP, OSI etc. IPv6 is nothing new. It's simply a fuck of a lot of work for little or no gain.
The question is. What is the "killer application"? If you want IPv6 adoption to proceed at faster than a crawl, you're going to have to come up with something as compelling as the WWW but which simply cannot be realistically achieved over IPv4. Maybe some sort of peer to peer mobile phone application might do it, otherwise, go away and come back when you have something worth talking about.
How about governments? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Well, (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess you don't care about end-to-end connectivity. P2P, VoIP, skype, stuff like that? Obviously not something you want.
As we run out of IP addresses, we will have more NATting of IPv4 networks. This will mean that instead of having a single global IP address with your ISP, you will have an RFC1918 address. The people who have global addresses will be fewer, and so Skype's nat traversal will depend more heavily on them, which they will notice and which will decrease Skype's popularity. Same with p2p.
Consequently, at some point it will be the case that the only applications that are well-supported on the Internet are walled-garden apps run by commercial sites. Innovation will drop off.
It's not a pretty scenario. To me, the main selling point of IPv6 is *not* that we are running out of IP addresses and need more. It's that end-to-end is getting less and less available as the internet grows. Deploy IPv6, and end-to-end comes back. That's why we need IPv6.
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Digital survivalists? Oy weh, has it really come to this, that planning for the near future is considered "survivalism?" Personally, I call it "pragmatism," but I guess I'm out of step with the mainstream.
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I know the IETF guys aren't very big on NAT, but it does have one (albeit collateral) advantage - security. I'm not saying that people should run services from behind NAT, nor that they should be connected to by Skype through NAT (or ftp, whose problem is more original and older); but there are solutions for this: services can still run on borders - there aren't going to be 4 billion service machines for quite a while yet, while the other problems (inbound connectivity to end-user machines) can be solved b
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It has psychological benefits. It gives network administrators (especially incompetent ones) a sense of security and safety.
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Suit yourself, but I think it's important to get everyone on IPv6 now, and to wean them off NAT later.
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NAT exists entirely because of the need to provide point to point routing with a shortage of IP addresses. Remove the shortage and you remove the point of NAT.
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Users in the first category only need NAT because their ISP gives them one IP address. If they got a ipv6
It will happen (Score:5, Insightful)
With the rate IPv4 adressess are running out it is only a matter of time before we will switch to ipv6. It might be 3 years from now or perhaps even more but when ipv4 becomes scarce(and it will), people and (internet)companies will try and make the switch to ipv6.
Don't get started about the turd that is called NAT, that's a problem posing as a solution.
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"Don't get started about the turd that is called NAT, that's a problem posing as a solution."
True, but it will always come down to the cheapest solution. Not the most technologically superior.
As for consumer ISPs, I think the day might come when ISPs start to NAT all of their clients, and charge a fee to get a static, external IP.
Some businesses might implement IPV6, especially when Windows fully supports it (if Vista or 7 don't already, I'm honestly ignorant), but as long as finding ways to remain on IPv4
Re:It will happen (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows has supported IPv6 since XP.
As for ISPs NATing all their customers, I'm not sure if that'd be most cost effective than simply using IPv6. Isn't it the case with NAT that you're limited to a maximum of 65535 concurrent TCP or UDP connections? Someone would have to invent some sort of NAT load balancing system which could break all sorts of stuff.
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XP is missing DHCPv6, which means you can't get an IP address for your DNS servers. Other than that, though, you're right, it does work. However, it definitely works better in Vista. If you are running Vista, there's a decent chance that you're using it without being aware of it.
Re:It will happen (Score:4, Informative)
No. You can do a lot more connections than that. First of all a TCP connection is identified by two endpoints. If you connect to two different remote addresses, the connections can actually come from the same local port number. That trick only works for TCP. For UDP there could be more than two parties involved, and such tricks would break. Also, you are not limited to a single external IP. An ISP could setup a separate NAT box for every n customers. But customers are going to get a worse internet experience, even if ISPs do spend more money on it. So before ISPs start doing such tricks, they will probably start offering IPv6 addresses in the hope that some users will no longer use IPv4 addresses. But I don't think many systems will refrain from requesting an IPv4 address over DHCP just because they were able to get an IPv6 address. However if ISPs do start deploying NAT boxes on a large scale, they'd better start offering native IPv6 at the same time, because that certainly can offload some of the connections from the NAT boxes. Even though a system may get both an IPv4 and IPv6 address, it isn't necessarily going to use them. Some systems will try IPv6 first, as long as the name resolves.
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I think you nailed it on the head.
IPv4 addresses are going to be today what water supplies were in the wild wild west.
Companies that have hoarded their 16 million class A's from the stone age stand to make a windfall from their IPv4 holdings.
The only reason v4 is doomed is because of a false sense of abundance back when they were dished out, and now that they are scarce the companies who are in a position to help out will instead have every incentive to hog it all and milk it for all it's worth. NAT is no
Re:It will happen (Score:5, Insightful)
NAT is the only reason we still have ipv4 - if we hadn't had that nasty hack, we'd have had to move to ipv6 out of necessity some time ago. I'm really looking forward to going back to having every PC with a globally routable IP address, it will make application communication work so much easier, and firewalls can stick to being allow/deny/drop firewalls instead of all this stateful masquerade hack-job stuff on top.
The main sticking point for me is all UK ISPs are IPv4 only. There's not much point running IPv6 internally if you're only going to have to tunnel it or 6to4 it once it leaves your network, though I'm thinking of converting a VLAN or two internally to IPv6 for a systems and applications trial.
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You're aware that any decent firewall can filter packets without NATing them, right? The big problem with public IPs for everyone isn't access control, but network renumbering.
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You're aware that any decent firewall can filter packets without NATing them, right? The big problem with public IPs for everyone isn't access control, but network renumbering.
Yes but you and I aren't making the decisions here. The people who do make the decisions know that the people they hire are unable to reliably configure a firewall. NAT is more fail safe because it is more like to fail to a not working (ie closed) state. I an not saying it is smart. Just the way things seem to be done where I work.
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It's perfectly reasonable to configure a firewall to block everything by default and open small holes, just as you do with NAT. If you're relying on NAT to keep your network safe from incompetent network administrators, you have far bigger problems.
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NAT != firewall.
You'll still have a firewall/router at your network edges, deciding what connections are allowed to come in and out of your network as currently.
The difference is, instead of your routers pretending to the rest of the world that they're the one that wants to say, connect to a video conference or a website, and then munges the packet headers in and out so they end up at the right box internally, while fooling everybody else, your pcs will send packets out and get them back using a real addres
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You know this. I know this. But plenty of people don't, and the fact that we're even having an argument about this fact highlights the IETF's profound lack of pragmatism. People want their safety blankets, and ff the IETF hadn't opposed NAT and private networks in IPv6, we'd see much better adoption by now.
We could have tackled the NAT issue at a later time. One of the universal and timeless principles of change is to pick your battles. The IETF decided to fight for adopting IPv6 and eliminat
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A nice pipe dream.
People are used to having 1 or 2 IP addresses handed to them. Most probably
Re:It will happen (Score:5, Interesting)
You've hit the nail on the head. NAT dovetails very nicely with the "castle mentality" many network administrators have: this is mine, and you can't touch it. It's about control, and there are fewer more tangible symbols of control than your own network numbering scheme. Nobody wants to give up that sense of control by moving to IPv6.
But since 2005, you don't have to: IPv6 now has private address ranges [ietf.org] just like IPv4's. Also, NAT has always worked with IPv6.
Since 2005, all four combinations of address spaces can work in principle: IPv4 inside, IPv4 outside, IPv6 outside; IPv4 inside; IPv6 outside, IPv4 inside (with DNS proxying), and obviously, IPv6 inside with IPv6 outside.
Whether this "castle mentality" is appropriate is a different debate. Moving to IPv6 for the public internet is too important to get bogged down in talking about NAT.
Re:It will happen (Score:4, Interesting)
No company wants their inner network visible to the outside world (which IPv6 requires unless one uses kludges.)
This very much depends on what you consider to be "visible". You can (and should) firewall incoming traffic, which means someone can't actively scan you. Once you've done that, someone can only gain information about your internal network by looking at the traffic generated by your network. If you think NAT protects you from this then you're sorely mistaken - NAT will only hide the source IP address, you can still gain a lot of information by traffic fingerprinting and other methods.
No company wants to use a protocol with zero real world support for encryption unless you go to a higher layer, or tunnel over IPv4.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Under IPv4, most encryption is done using SSL - IPv6 doesn't change this, SSL still works and is still used. IPv6 also adds IPSEC support (which has since been backported to IPv4, but it originated on IPv6 and works very well there). So in what way does IPv6 have "zero real world support for encryption"? If anything, it has better support than IPv4 because encryption was written into the spec from the start.
No company wants to change their entire IP address range because they change ISPs.
This really shouldn't be a major problem - if you're using autoconfiguration and DNS then the amount of work required to renumber a network is minimal. You can also do a soft migration, so you can keep your old IP addresses in service for a while after your new IP addresses are put into service.
Some boxes have an infinite DHCP lease?
If that's your setup, you need to get a network manager who has a clue.
Businesses know that IPv6 is broken, untested, and unstable in production environments, with hastily written standards that factor little in the way of security.
You post indicates that people *think* they know that IPv6 is broken, untested, unstable and insecure. In reality, these people are grossly misinformed.
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Don't get started about the turd that is called NAT, that's a problem posing as a solution.
The odd thing is that those who use NAT and especially proxies today won't have much trouble switching to IPv6 tomorrow. You just have to make your gateway IPv6-capable, and off you go. IPv6 is a non-issue for many (most?) businesses.
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Then it's doing an amazing impersonation, as there doesn't seem to be any movement by the people using it to get IPv6 instead.
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IMO there is no question that when IPV4 addresses become scarce ISPs WILL push home users behind nat (with maybe an option to get a public IP address at a price high enough that only geeks pay it) to free up IP addresses for more lucrative customers.
I don't particularlly like NAT either but that doesn't mean it won't win out as the "soloution" to the IPV4 address shortage.
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It might be 3 years from now or perhaps even more but when ipv4 becomes scarce(and it will),
IPv4 addresses have been scare for a decade or so, the answer so far was to cripple the net with NAT or simply to raise prices when you want a real static IPv4 address instead of a dynamic one. I don't see that changing anytime soon. The problem is simply that IPv6 doesn't really provide any instant advantage, since hardly anything is available on IPv6 that isn't on IPv4. And the whole 'it will make networking simpler' isn't something the average user will grasp anytime soon, even worse, addding an IPv6 rec
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There are VAST numbers of IP's that are unused in IPv4. And what exactly is wrong with NAT? 10's of millions use it without issue.
I say IPv6 is a solution looking for a problem.
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And what exactly is wrong with NAT? 10's of millions use it without issue.
NAT does present a problem, for example in VoIP telecommunications. You can't generally just plug a SIP phone into your office network and call someone overseas who has a similar phone plugged into his office network if at least one of those offices uses NAT. There are workarounds, but they are quite bad [wikipedia.org]. Most video and audio streams are UDP, sent unsolicited from and to weird ports of phones (weird unless you also spy on SIP...)
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Is that really a NAT problem or is it a SIP (VOIP) problem?
It is a general peer-to-peer problem. NAT breaks peer-to-peer communications - there are workarounds (such as STUN) but they are not, and cannot be, reliable. The only solution is to remove NAT from the equation.
SIP certainly could have been designed better IMO. Wonder who first conceived of embedding the IP address, normally only a part of the IP header, in the application data, as a security measure no less!
It's actually a pretty sensible idea: Your phone registers with a SIP registration server so that other users can find it - lets say your ISP runs the registration server, so people know to place calls to r7@yourisp.com if they want to phone you (very similar to email). So I phone r7@yourisp.com
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With the rate IPv4 adressess are running out
I used to hear this a lot (not so often nowadays), but what is this rate, actually? Do you know? Do you have an idea at least of the order of magnitude of this rate? I'll admit, I don't know the answer, but I don't spout bullshit I know fuck-all about, publicly.
Just sayin'
Fastest dup ever? (Score:4, Funny)
I'm seeing two copies of this story posted on the front page, both posted in the same minute. That has to be some kind of Slashdot record. Even normal user comments can't be duped by the same person less than two minutes apart....
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Yes it did and I got first post on that one! ;-)
Post in one thread, mod in another SWEET (Score:3, Funny)
Oh yes, finally. It has occurred! A story duped right next to each itself. Timothy FTW!
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You do realise that anyone who gets modded down in the other thread is gonna blame you now, right?
Whoa... Deja Vu, man! (Score:2)
"Was it the same article? Or a different one? THINK!"
Aside from the obvious "business driver." (Score:5, Funny)
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I really do want my car to be able to talk to my electric razor.
The parlor trick of 2025 will be to hack a car so when someone revs it, its signal will be rerouted to a neighbor's razor to suck their face off.
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You jest, but I'd love more integration. Why shouldn't I be able to connect to my cold, frozen car with a web browser and adjust the climate controls?
Why shouldn't I be able to wirelessly check how much milk I have in the refrigerator and pick some more up on the way home? (Or more likely to me, the refrigerator could tell me "you let your milk expire again, you idiot").
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Why shouldn't I be able to connect to my neighbor's car with a web browser and turn off the alarm siren when I get sick of it going off in the night?
There, fixed that for ya.
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I demand it. (Score:3, Insightful)
I demand it because I'm tired of NAT. As I have more devices at home that I might want to access remotely, or that need full inbound and outbound access for full functionality (as jump-in, jump-out games often do), I get more and more tired of dealing with NAT.
And it's not just me. When I'm trying to help my dad with his machine, I can't connect to it remotely to access it.
Even my DirectTV satellite receiver uses IP access now, and due to NAT, they can't count on being able to contact your receiver from their end. So, any centralized service like remote booking has to take special measures to work.
IPv6 makes all this a lot easier, for example if you "request assistance" on Windows Vista/7, the first thing it does is create a Teredo tunnel so that your machine can be accessed remotely to diagnose and fix it.
DirectTV does not need IP access for remote bookin (Score:2)
DirectTV does not need IP access for remote booking that is done over the sat link and VOD works under NAT as well as DIRECTV2PC(TM) and MRV (still in beta test)
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Yes, I know. That's what I said it had to take special measures to work as opposed to saying it doesn't work.
There are inward-bound services that are precluded by the lack of incoming access. No, none of these are on the PVRs right now, because there is no such incoming access.
As an example, when you remote book, why don't you get any confirmation? Why does it just make you select "record if possible" (instead of priority record) and then you just go home and hope it recorded? Why can't it contact your box
Customer demand should be the business case. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't mean customers should want IPv6. I mean that that's what should drive IPv6 deployment. Address depletion is a problem, but it's a problem that has workarounds, and to the extent that customers aren't bothered by the workarounds, there will be no IPv6 deployment.
The main impact of the workarounds is twofold. First, your outward-facing global IPv4 address will go away. Right now, your ISP has probably assigned you a real IPv4 address, not an RFC1918 address. So people can get packets to your gateway directly. That will go away.
The second impact is that we will have more and more layering of NATs. This will make peer-to-peer applications harder and harder. Also, as more users are piled up on single IP addresses, we will start to see port starvation. What this looks like is that iTunes will start acting funny - displaying some things, showing error messages for others. DNS lookups will fail, and you'll have to retry. Google maps tiles won't show up, so you'll see a partial map, and have to reload (possibly to see different tiles not show up).
So yeah, things will keep chugging along. But it will work less and less well as time goes on.
And I think that is what can, and should, be driving demand. If you don't want that, you might want to start fantasizing about how to get IPv6 into your own home. I have it in mine, it works a treat. I think it's too hard for the average person to do right now if their ISP doesn't support it, but that's a problem that we ought to try to solve if we want the internet to keep being a place where peer-to-peer is possible, and where innovation is possible.
Running out of address won't kill the internet. But it will suck the life out of it.
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Considering probably considerably less than 1% of internet users have ever even heard of IPv6, i wouldn't hold your breath waiting for them to start demanding it.
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They will never ask for it by name. What they will ask for is for Google Maps to work, for Skype to work, for Bittorrent to work. Right now, if you live in the U.S., you aren't seeing problems with these services yet. Yes, if you have a global IPv4 address, you are passing a lot of traffic for other people without realizing it, but aside from that it's not a problem. Yet.
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People are always willing to put up with a certain level of mediocrity as long as they don't have to think. We see it all the time with people using computers chock-full of spyware. Google Maps reloading won't be a problem for people until it actually takes less time to look up a route on paper.
Changing to IPv6 is hard. If there's any amount of incompatibility, we'll see something like the Digital TV debacle --- just think about the hoopla around that one and consider:
Automobile, airplane (Score:2)
There wasn't a business case for the automobile when it first came out, either. Nor for the airplane. But how many businesses today could operate without the overnight delivery offered by air freight and delivery vans? Not many.
Except that there is a business case for IPv6, mentioned right in the summary. customer demand. If customers want it, there's your business case right there: if we don't offer it, our customers will leave us for competitors who do offer it. "If we don't do it we'll lose more customer
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There wasn't a business case for the automobile when it first came out, either. Nor for the airplane.
There was a business case for the automobile - to haul heavier loads faster, without horses being tired. A very real example of that need is in railroads and steam locomotives, so people already knew what they want, just without rails. There was a business case for the airplane - to fly people and cargo faster than in a dirigible (which predates the airplane by about 50 years.)
Compared to all that, IPv6
Cell phones (Score:5, Insightful)
If cell phones turn into real computers, which has probably already happened, then we will need IPv6 if all those phone users want to surf.
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and the basic low cost data planes are nat'ed (Score:4, Informative)
and the basic low cost data planes are nat'ed
Let's flip the question.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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The only answer that might actually exist to this is that it arguably costs less to implement. So in reality, it's not that there's no business case of IPv6, it's really the case that these businesses are just cheap.
I think that from the perspective of most business owners you have just defined 'business case'. Ie 'cheap'.
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To be fair, you can use a reverse proxy for this.
You can, but people were told for ages they couldn't. That's actually a big factor opposing IPv6's adoption.
Lots of
Re:Let's flip the question.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Want a private net? Unplug the uplink and number your machines any way you want! If you prefer a protected LAN, make your firewall default to DROP, then tell it what you do want. The IETF probably proposed local IPv6 addresses because they were tired of the few holdouts drooling on their shoes when they explained that for the nth time.
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Re:Let's flip the question.... (Score:4, Insightful)
There is more than one protocol than http. Try ftp, imap, smtp, irc and https on for size.
2009 (Score:2, Funny)
2009 will the Year of IPv6 to the Desktop.
But of course... (Score:2)
Will a big Business really want to have there 1000 (Score:2)
Will a big Business really want to have all of there 1000's of pc to each have there own public ip address?
Will people still us nat to get of having to pay for each IP? IPS like comcast will love to make you pay per pc like how then want to per tv with there digital cable outlet fees.
How stuff used on the Local network only that you works with ipv4?
Chicken and egg (Score:3, Interesting)
Part of the problem at the moment is that because network companies are failing to provide IPv6 ready equipment, it is only the dedicated few that are moving to IPv6. Linksys, D-Link I am talking about guys like you. The there are the ISPs like Bell and Telus here in Canada who have to plans, or even anything beta.
Now look in Africa, Asia and Europe and you will see some serious movement in that direction.
Don't get me wrong, I have my computer enabled with Tiredo, providing me IPv6 access, but companies are going to want the easy route to IPv6 and until they are provided the support, or like my experience two days to immenent failure they aren't likey to do sod.
I have a Linksys WRT54G v8 and there isn't even the possibility of installing a version of DD-WRT that supports IPv6 :(
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Linksys, D-Link I am talking about guys like you.
I meant that they are amongst the guys dragging their feet. Linksys has made it clear that they have no IPv6 plans, and my best bet is to go with corporate solutions from Cisco -- idiots.
The switch from DC to AC (Score:2, Interesting)
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With 64 bit addresses that people can still scribble on a scrap of paper.
Get a name for your machine. If it is public try dyndns.org. You don't address you envelopes with grid coordinates, so why should the logic here be any different?
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I'm going to sacrifice 5 of my mod points to comment here, just because I have to in order to refute your preposterous point.
"Climate change" and "fossil fuel supply" sure sound like big FUD points. We have little of the former, and much of the latter at this time. Thus, at this time, any radical and painful "cure" is not indicated any more than it would be for giving an ultra-aggressive course of chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgury to a person who has a potentially pre-cancerous cell.
Could it be